Spoiler

Nice boat.

Ship Spotting - Choose the navy. Choose a big ass ship. Choose a zone.

The wargame version of the DM going "roll a perception check"

"These are actually the boats you are looking for"

"Remember men, the enemy battlefleet is more afraid of you than you are of them"

"I see you have spotted a ship. I am a bit of a ship spotter myself" Rejected Titles:

Happy wednesday! Today is going to be the first of a few diaries covering changes to naval combat and naval gameplay. The idea of this diary is to give an overview of the different changes, and then future diaries will dig into more details. We are effectively redoing most of the naval aspects of the game which is a herculean task. This means a lot of stuff might still end up seeing changes and are work in progress. My hope is that this will give you a good picture of what we are trying to accomplish. Expect that each of these sections below is probably gonna get its own diary.First up let's talk about how we are changing the management of fleets. Fleets are now made up of task forces. The fleet, like before, is led by an Admiral. The fleet has one area of responsibility and each task force can have individual missions. Some of those missions are designed to cooperate as well between them. Each task force can have various settings to control its behavior (like if you want them to split off ships to repair, or their risk vs aggression stance etc). Fleets, like Army Groups on land are visible and organized into theaters. In this case naval theaters.These also has a separate section for reserves at the bottom so you have an easier time managing where newly built ships go, and which replacement ships go to where.Your navy is likely to be the most fuel thirsty thing you have so it's important to manage things in an economic way. Putting all your battleships to patrol the Iberian Coast is not something that will make fuel-economic-sense anymore (hey I invented a word!). To deal with this kind of thing we have removed the old Search and Destroy mission and have a new one called Strike Force.A strike force flagged task force job is to sit and wait in port where it won’t consume fuel, and to go and assist trouble your more nimble and cheap patrols locate. Search and Destroy also would not make sense to keep around anymore, as in most case the concept of the fleet spreading out is gone. We wanted your carefully assembled task forces to join as one unit and to be in one location always, rather than spread over the map in an abstract way. More details on this in a dedicated diary, but let's get back to how patrol missions can work together with strike forces when we get to the next topic: spotting!Before Man the Guns the way ships would engage would essentially be based on a dice roll, meaning as long as you were in a zone, no matter how hard to find you were, combat would always ensue. We also struggled with every combat essentially sucking in every ship into a giant doomstack battle. This was also made worse because combats in HOI take a lot longer than in reality, yet movement on the map is similar, making reinforcement much too easy.To deal with this we have split up combat into essentially 2 parts. Spotting, and actual combat. For a combat to happen you must first spot the enemy fully. Below is a picture showing a patrol force of destroyers closing in on fully spotting a German cruiser group, with a strike force assigned to support. It goes pretty fast because I have built a decent radar net to support my ships.When you get a target to 100% spotting, which is the bar you can see on the left of the red task force, combat can start. I say can, because it depends on your task force settings for how aggressive you want them to be. In this case because it has a strike force to help out the British ships will wait a bit for their strike force to get there (the Germans could engage if they were aggressive and the patrol force weak enough to be taken out fast). Once it’s there the battle will start.If the battle would have been a pushover for the patrol group (say a lone destroyer) they would have just dealt with it without calling in the strike force and burned all that fuel.As for piling in more stuff into a battle to escalate it into the doomstacks of old, the solution is that task forces given the order to join will be slowed based on org level and distance (manual orders also reduce this), meaning there will be a significant delay as they get there and can actually get on with firing. Sort of like a coordination penalty. With battles shorter this means you could clear the field and get away before things escalate.When it comes to combat we are aiming for less decisive battles, where composition matters more, and that are easier to understand, and where its easier to disengage when stuff goes badly. A tall order! Currently this is a bit too pink and coder-arty for a sneak peek, so you are going to have to be patient (something I know you guys are amazing at, so this should be no biggieDifferent parts of the oceans will favor different kinds of task force compositions, combined with admiral traits etc this will allow for some home advantage and variation in “best fleet”. Check out last weeks diary for more details. The changes outlined in repair and production is an important part of making this all feel ok. If we want less decisive battles where the enemy is pushed back at sea, then repairing needed to cost something other than simply time. Repair now takes up dockyards and production of individual big capital ships is slower (although the speed to produce several in parallel is unchanged). Read more details in the previous diary here if you missed it. We will also allow you to design and refit ships allowing you more options for adapting to changing circumstances and to get the most out of your navy and technological advancement.Hopefully all this gave you an overview on what we are trying to achieve in Man the Guns and 1.6 Ironclad when it comes to the naval game. Look forward to more detail in future diaries (although we are likely to sprinkle in some other topics in between as well, like our unannounced final focus tree). See you all next week!