[CDR DPH]

Your thinking may be 1 dimensional.

The ocean is a 3D work space. To kill a contact, you do not need to be directly in front of it and probably shouldn't be there anyways. As distance between you and the enemy gets smaller, their potential to detect you goes up.

It is a misconception that being deep offers you any more stealthiness than being at 50 feet when it comes to sonar detection if there is no strong layer and/or strong duct involved. It can be a complicated discussion but CW vastly simplifies this in the game. It's all about numbers.

Your sub is given noise coefficient in its settings file. The various sonar detection rigs are given a signal recognition coefficient. When you make too much noise, or are too close or are improperly positioned in the water column or when you are broadside to an approaching warship or..., you get seen. Once you are seen you can't be unseen until you do something that reduces the enemy's sonar reading to a negative number as displayed on the signature screen. Even if you reduce the towed array signature to -10, if the active sonar from an Udaloy is still at a positive number, you are still being seen. The Udaloy is a terrific sub killer and one of the bad boys that you need to watch out for. Kill them fast if you can do so safely.

Think of the game of detection as being similar to Star Trek's 3D chess. You may be golden on two levels, but a misstep on the third level still leaves you vulnerable.

As above, in front of a group of targets is not really a great place to be. They are closing distance on you at a steady rate. They are pointing their most powerful acoustic detection equipment right at you. Aircraft are out in force in advance of a convoy along the intended path of travel. You are a sitting duck.

Experienced players can make an attack from this position work and it is easier if you have lots of tubes to send torps at a bunch of weaponized targets simultaneously. Even the best skippers know they can't fire and remain at the launch point for very long. Your torps are noisy, they are easily detected and the game always sends return fire down the bearing of your approaching weapons. You cannot be there when the return fire arrives which means, you should have gone somewhere else or better yet, not be in a location to be on the receiving end of the inevitable return fire in the first place. Hint: Dog legged torpedo attacks.

Now this is a game so KFG has taken some liberties. The idea of the game is to shoot and kill. If you don't shoot first, at some point the enemy will. No matter how good your positioning, if you just sit there long enough the game decides, "peek-a-boo I see you" and the battle is on.

It's like juggling 3 or 4 balls at the same time, You can't sit still forever, so you have to move, but you can't move too fast or in any old direction. You have to kill the enemy before they kill you but each weapon makes noise, or smoke and more than one weapon at a time makes more noise or more smoke. Against surface ships, you can expect return fire just about every time. From subs, the same thing, even the perfect shot from 10,000 yards in a sub's baffle will produce return fire eventually - the game does not reliably allow otherwise. Sometimes you can take out a ship or a sub and for some reason they do not fire back but I have yet to figure out any way to create this scenario. So I just chalk it up to random luck.

Your position in the water, your depth, above or below the layer, using the shadow zone, speed, direction of travel, good luck as well as bad luck and the characteristics of your own sub all determine how well you are managing the variables to limit the ease with which the enemy sees you. Adjusting depth has an influence, as does speed, as does the type of sub you are in, as does the capabilities of any single enemy. There is no perfect solution that will allow you to do nothing but fire and kill everything. That is not the how the game is intended to work. This drives the SimHeads crazy. Being perfectionists, they do everything right just like they were taught in Dangerous Waters and they get pummeled for it.

You can mange to a large degree how much of a potential pummeling is coming your way but you cannot take out everything with one hand and get away scot-free. You are going to have to run away and set up elsewhere, you are going to need a moss or two get get the majority of a torpedo swarm to go in another direction. You are going to have to cavitate at times and once and awhile you may even need to breach the surface at flank speed while dodging some dogged USET-80 torps.

Your sub and its capabilities determine how long you can outrun something or at what point the odds are just so stacked against you that you should abandon ship before everyone dies.

On the other hand, as you get better at juggling and weighing the costs of one course of action over another, recognizing the in game reality you are being presented with, if you can make a bunch of good compromises in a row, you can win. The best of us still take hits now and then. Being alive at the end of the mission and completing the primary objective is the goal. Killing everything all the time is nice but doing that and surviving all the time just is not possible in this game on the highest settings.

Dealing with 6 airdropped torpedoes, closing escorts and aircraft is not an easy thing to do but like riding a bike, with practice and experience you will develop your own sense of what works best for you, most of the time.

Eg. Playing a free roam campaign within a mod two nights ago - I had to replay a particular mission 6 times before I finally lived to the end. Each play thru was a little different but the "oh sh!t" moment was always the same no matter how I set it up - too many inbound torps, too many efficient warships, too many unseen hostile subs and 3 aircraft that never seemed to cut me a break. Lots of running and dodging. Some quick stops mid-escape to launch a torp at a ship that was just too close, not enough water to move in and a long time to lose the aircraft and get clean so that I could set up another attempt to take out the targets.

Lots and lots going on all the time. It slowly got better as I reduced the threats one by one. It was really fun, its was really infuriating around try number 4. I was forced to try different things in a different order and eventually just take some offered luck and get through it.

You will always experience the same thing in Cold Waters. If the missions become too easy, up the realism factor. When you are comfortable, force yourself to get better, to juggle more at once, to make the better decision when you need to so you don't always have to spend 20 minutes fixing the mess you created. However, you will always have to move, you will always have to prioritize which threat to hit next and all the while try not to crash into the rising seabed at flank speed while trying to avoid a swarm of killer fish.

Don't give up. Don't be afraid to replay a mission you found particularly hard using the save/autosave functions. Try different things in a different order, run away in the opposite direction and get lots of distance between you and the approaching ships etc. Let me know when you someday stumble across the single mission that begins with a helicopter with its dipping sonar in the water 100 yards off your bow... Fun times right from the get-go.