Hunting in sh4 help!

[graywolf]

I need help finding ships in sh4. I used to play sh3 and GWX but I am having trouble finding anything to sink in sh4 short of hitting major ports as both the Germans and the Americans.
Any help as to finding hunting grounds and locations to patrols is appreciated thanks :Kaleun_Periskop:

[grislyatoms]

Are you running vanilla game or with mods?

TMO for one has a nice little pull-down map showing Japanese shipping routes. Park off one of those, and you'll have targets a' plenty.

If just vanilla patrol between Formosa and Luzon, or Rabaul-Truk area.

The RSRDC mod will put you on some pretty good spots if you follow SubPac's orders.

A bit different from GWX, in that regard. In GWX I would hunt the North Sea out to the Western Approaches and back and come back with more fuel than torpedoes. This is the Pacific, you'll come back with more torpedoes than fuel. At least in the early war period.

[Azgrim]

This is the Pacific, you'll come back with more torpedoes than fuel. At least in the early war period.
Truly Indeed.

Also, try to sneak to enemy ports. I do like this, when there's nothing happening on my patrol. Sometimes there's good tonnage waiting. But consider, that ports are oftenly guarded by 1 or 2 warships.

[in_vino_vomitus]

You didn't say if you're running the stock game or a mod - To tell you the truth I can't remember much about the stock game now :), but I think you can access the large area chart from it - it's attached to the shortwave radio, which you can get to either via the radio room or the menu bar.

Anyway, the map has the traffic lanes on it. find the ones that cross your patrol area and plot a course that cuts them. either zigzag along them or plot a box pattern that give you a lane about 10 miles wide. If there are no obvious traffic lanes then plot lines between nearby ports, the bigger the better, then plot a search pattern along those lines in a similar way. The vanilla game gives you lots of sighting reports. Supermods less so. When you get one within a couple of hundred miles, plot its course, note its speed and stick a compass circle on it and update it every hour with the distance travelled. before I started using mobo to plot intercepts I'd just make for the course track at my best speed and then zigzag down it until I made contact.

The game will lag when it's generating a contact and it's very noticeable in time compression. I think of it not so much as a cheat, as my crew paying attention all of the time and alerting me when they spot something. Anyway, when the game suddenly seems to stutter, drop out of time compression and check your sonar. Chances are that if you haven't been informed of a contact, and there's one close, that's where it will show up. Your sonar operator won't report a contact until it gets within the effective range of the gear that's currently installed, but using it manually, you can hear contacts much further away. There are lots of resources on here for plotting course and speed using only sonar. If you have radar, then you can just head towards the sound at best speed until you pick him up that way. likewise, you can just do the same thing until you pick him up visually and take it from there.

Anyway you should get some results from one of these methods. they're all quick and dirty, and capable of much refinement. Learning that, is lots of fun too. Good hunting :)

[BigWalleye]

One of the primary differences between the PTO and the ATO was that the combination of vast distances and lower total traffic meant that US submariners spent more of their time hunting for targets and less time attacking them. By way of compensation, the density of ASW forces was also much lower, both because of the smaller size of the IJN and those great distances. Playing SH3 and SH4 accurately reflects this, particularly if you play RFB and one of the SH3 supermods. It's not everyone's cuppa and it requires a different mindset. But it does portray the situation as described in the first-person accounts of both sides.

A typical patrol area in SH3, a single grid "square" (sic) is less than 20,000 square km, A patrol area of 100 nm around a center point (typical in SH4) is over 100,000 square km. And the densest traffic lanes in the Atlantic - the Western Approaches, are a few hundred kilometers from German bases, while the dense traffic lanes around the Japanese Home Islands are more than 5000 km from Midway, the US forward base for much of the war. So the problems posed by the two games are quite different.

IIRC, TMO tries to create a situation nearer to the ATO for SH4. TMO increases the traffic density significantly, while making the Japanese ASW much more deadly. It's a way to make the transition to SH4 feel more familiar.

You might also read some of the US first-person accounts. Most of the hunting techniques they used R/L will work in SH4.