The aim of The War at Sea (TWAS) is to provide an enjoyable game of HoI4, fleshing out and adding historical depth to the naval side of things in particular. The general philosophy is to add as much gameplay detail and historical depth as long as it works in a gameplay context. For example, the mod won't add MTB or corvette units unless the AI will use them reasonably, but if the core game grows in ways that make it possible in the future, expect these kind of vessels to make the cut.

TWAS is very much in an alpha stage. The core 'first element', historical ship statistics and starting ships, is in place (as best as can be managed - the AI doesn't play very well with variable production costs), but there are many more things planned. The next stage will be (assuming I can get it to work) changing the technological progression model, with an eye to enabling many more techs without research and the UI becoming unwieldy. After that, it'll be a reworked naval doctrine tab. There's a bunch of other things I want to do (more flavour events, admirals, tech, ship types, buildings, economy rework, etc;) but these are a good deal further down the track.

TWAS will also try and provide choices about what it includes, where these choices are feasible. At the moment, these choices are limited to how the player wants their ships, and flavour events, but if something is easy to make toggleable, then this will be given a choice as well.

Q: Is this mod compatible with Road to 56 (or Black ICE, Kaiserreich, the Great War, etc;).
A: Sadly, no. TWAS changes a number of files used by these mods. Generally, TWAS' compatibility will be poor, but there should be no (or very limited) issues with sound or loading screen mods. Please don't raise any issues with the mod if you are playing with other mods as well, as these could well be due to compatibility issues.

Q: Does this mod allow for the rebuilding of ships?
A: Currently, there's no way to mod refits/rebuilds that I'm happy with. It's worth noting that the AA, ASW and radar technologies available in the naval technology tab are a basic proxy for the upgrades that ships had in these areas over the war (although I'm hoping the games' developers add a way to do this with a bit more depth in the future).

The key choice in the mod at the moment revolves around whether to use historic ship designs or design your own. The introduction at the start of the mod gives you this choice in two places - firstly in this screen:



The first option means you will get events giving you new variants, based on the historic classes developed by that nation. You will also get flavour events (although there are only a very small number at this stage - but they will be expanded upon!). These variant events look like:



The timing of the events is based on the timing of the development of the classes historically. So, for example, after you've research the 1940 destroyer for the US (Sims class), the Fletcher class will follow around the amount of time that it took historically between the first Sims and the first Fletcher to be laid down.

The second option, on the other hand, gives you events like the first that give a bit of information on the class and its history, but you won't get a variant. Instead, you'll get a national spirit that provides a stream of naval experience that can be used to design your own ships, which is done in the production view by pressing the create variant button. There are a wider range of upgrade options than in the vanilla game, many of which interrelate - read the tooltips and experiment and find the combinations that suit you best.



The third option, on the other hand, takes you to another selection screen, shown below. The first two options on this screen are as per the first two options on the preceding screen. The last one, however, provides the stream of XP without the variant events (so if you're a player that prefers fewer to more events, you can still enjoy the mod without looking at all those ships - but really, who wouldn't want to look at those ships? :P )

There is a new technology tab in TWAS, as well as a few new technologies in the naval tab. Unless you're playing a minor nation, you're unlikely to need to research any of the legacy ships:



In the naval tab, however, underneath the various ship types, there are new technologies for anti-aircraft artillery, seaborne radar, anti-submarine warfare and torpedoes. These technologies are currently 'early drafts' - I'm hoping to expand on the technological arms race that took place in the period (and improve the mods' treatment of radar and electronics) in the future, but wanted something, however rough, in place early on.



Keep in mind that ships' stats are balanced against these technologies - so if you want your ships to pack a punch with AA, these technologies are important (moreso than the variant upgrades).

One other thing to keep in mind when looking at the technology tab is the name of the technologies. If a ship type has "(base)" behind it, this means the nation either built or developed a detailed design for this vessel, and if you're playing with historic ships, there will be a variant event for at least one variant for this ship tech. However, if a ship does not have a "(base)" behind it, then there is no historical design, and you'll be playing with the base model (which you can still modify a little with whatever experience you've got from battles). For example, in the Soviet naval tech tree, there is a variant in the mod for the 1940 light cruiser (the Chapayev class) but not for the 1944 light cruiser (while the Soviets did build Sverdlov class cruisers, these ships integrated technology that falls outside the HoI4 timeframe).

Courtesy of the good Graf Radetzky, TWAS contains a number of new admirals. Most of these admirals have not had their appropriate stats and traits applied, but at the very least there is now art and admirals to cover every fleet in the British and French starting fleets, as well as a few other admirals added elsewhere (including to one landlocked South American country ;)). In the distant future, the plan is to add numerous more admirals, as well as systems for the introduction of new (and retirement of old) leaders, but this will come after work on tech progression and fleshing out the flavour events, at the very least.

Submarines and commerce warfare are one of the weaker areas of the vanilla game at the moment. I'm sure the developers will improve these over time, but in the interim, there have been some changes to submarine statistics to enable them to stand a better chance of doing damage to enemy fleets (I've sadly been unable to have much luck convincing the AI to build them in large numbers, or to use them as well as I'd like, so we're a ways off a 'Battle of the Atlantic', but I'll be keeping a close eye on updates to the base game with this in mind).

The key change, beyond some tweaks to the defines, is to increase the speed of submarines substantially. While this is far from perfect, it means that submarines can and will sometimes reach even escorted convoys and sink some before escorts can close. Overall, the changes give submarines a more historically plausible strategic impact, although only changes to the base game will be able to remedy the situation appropriately. The changes in the mod are an attempt to make the best of what's available now, but the hope is to be able to do far better in the future as the base game is improved.

The aim is to include substantial numbers of flavour events in the future. However, at the moment there are just seven, as the emphasis for this stage of the mod has been the historic ship stats. A big thanks to Khevenhuller for the events in the mod so far.


You'll also notice that the event pictures are larger. The smaller vanilla event pics have been replaced by larger ones for the nations (working alphabetically) up to but not including China. As time goes by, all the event pictures will be replaced by larger versions.

The mod's main author is Axe99, and they're the person to blame for anything that goes wrong with the mod. However, it has benefited substantially from the input of a number of modders and gamers, including:

Content (in no particular order):
Balesir – Defines changes from WM and much thought and advice
CPack - The vast majority of those wonderful ship profile pics
Khevenhuller - Flavour event content, research and advice (all sorts of stuff)
Graf Radetzky - Leader portraits, research and advice (all sorts of stuff)
Schwabenland and Gamer1745 - country event template

Research and modding ideas (in no particular order):
Obren - a range of research
Telematic - the Italian OOBs
Solfall - Norwegian OOBs
von_Lipstig - Soviet OOBs

Modding ideas and inspiration (again, in no particular order):
Tom_jones, Invader_canuck, Sleight of Hand, Zarathustra_the, Panzeroo, Chondrite, Elouda, Louella,

A big thanks to everyone named above - and if I've left someone out, please let me know - I can be absent-minded, and I'm sure it won't be anything personal.