Hi Vecko,
thank you for your detailed answers!
I agree with you on the importance of a well balanced campaign. It is: a campaign making the player to plan wisely his patrols, with the final aim of making it through to the end of the conflict, preferably (but not necessarily!) with a decent war booty and one or two medals, as opposed to inducing him to chase tonnage like a mad, in order to proceed to the next campaign/objective. In that sense, I think OHII has been going in the right direction, by making tonnage requirements hidden, and by introducing the "patrol xx area for yy hours" concept as our main task of virtual skippers. Though a bit tedious, after all this was the reality of the war for most U-boat captains. Moreover, historical objectives with special orders involved, like "Breaking the Fortress", "Operation Weserübung", "Breakthrough Gibraltar", "The Triumph of the Wolfpack" etc. (not to mention the special spy, recon, escort, etc. side missions, also based on real U-boat orders, that we can be assigned every now and then during OH's campaign), should be enough to break the monotony of our daily patrol routines.
I also agree with you that, within the boundaries of historical likelihood, the timeframe of most objectives should be widened. Increasing the overlapping of campaign objectives would minimize the chance of being left to freely roam the oceans in wait for the next objective to become available. With a bit of fantasy, we could take those long silences by B.d.U. as extended leaves, but other than that they always leave the average player a bit disconcerted, and above all they make little sense: the U-boat warfare was an highly organized one and, to the best of my knowledge, in no case an U-boat crew would have been allowed to leave the home port without precise orders.
I have just one perplexity though. Though we can make a virtue out of necessity, (taking this ill-fated tonnage bar bug as an opportunity to introduce in campaign some improvements that were needed anyway while we still hope the bug to be ironed out one good day), we shouldn't lapse in the error of Aesop's fox, saying that grapes are sour just because we can't reach them. I make myself clear: as brutal as it sounds, sinking as much merchant tonnage as possible was the central scope of nazi campaign in the Atlantic. A SH campaign built to totally ignore that simple concept would be missing the point. Similar to what would have happened in reality, I expect our virtual flotilla commander to send us on patrol without a precise tonnage figure to be sunk. The typical order was to "go here or there (i.e. a quadrant in the world map) and patrol for x days, or until the next order is issued". Unless explicitly forbidden for any special reason, the implicit continuation of the former order was "...sink as much tonnage as possible and take your crew back home for the greater glory of our beloved Nation". Indeed, "as much as possible" is not 50,000 or 100,000 tons, but rather: "the more, the better". What does this phrase imply? Well, in my opinion, two things:
- Due to the chronic lack of well trained officers, even mediocre WWII Ubootwaffe commanders were retained on the front line. If you check the commander's section of uboat.net, you will find many examples of u-boat captains who stayed in command on the front line for several years, having scored few or no success at all; typically, u-boat skippers -heroes or not- stayed on command until they retired themselves.... on the sea bottom together with their boat. Likewise, SH5 campaign should continue to the end even though we didn't sink a single tugboat during our whole career. As far as we follow explicit orders issued to us (in war times, missing to do it without a valid reason would have been considered treason, i.e. court martial, and even in game we should be harshly sanctioned for our insubordination), we should still be able to select campaigns, objectives, etc. Despite the fact that stock campaigns are tonnage-focused I am glad to learn from your and Trevally's words (on OH's forum), that there are workarounds to trigger them by date, thus making the tonnage thing accessory as far as campaign continuity is concerned.
- On the other hand, and this is what I am worried about, I would expect effective commanders, with many sunk ships/tons in their captain's log, to be awarded with better u-boat commands earlier in the war, with reward and morale points to be spent on improving their boat's equipment and crew's skills, with the option to choose what flotilla they will be assigned for their next campaign (as opposed to having only one selectable campaign when the previous one is ended; short digression: as a rule of thumbs campaigns far from the Atlantic, the scenario favored by Doenitz, should be the one option for virtual commanders performing "not so well", the option of choosing one of the campaigns taking place in the Atlantic being given only to the players achieving a "total victory" at the end of the previous campaign), and -why not- a medal when they just deserved it! Since, realistically, tonnage wouldn't be required anymore for progressing in campaign, retaining at least those aspects of the "tonnage/ship sinking system" would give a sense of scope to the game. So my question to you and Trevally is: are the aforementioned features bogged down somehow by the current tonnage bar bug? and, more importantly, will the proposed changes to OHII retain or even improve them, or rather they will be definitely discarded, together with the whole tonnage thing?
