[torpedobait]

Originally Posted by propbeanie

Hopefully, it's a ship, and not our sub with an electrical fire...


Ship upgrades are a problem, and not just from a "date" perspective. We've been finding all of the February 29th and June 31st kind of dates, and may well have most of them banished from existence in the mod. However, we have just begun to research some issues that actually date back to March of 2007 and beyond - issues that were "fixed" with the "updates". There is a little setting in the subs' UPC files for "UpgradeClass=", and the old boats are "0" zero, then there are the "1" one boats, "2" two boats, of which, the Gar and Gato are, the "3" boats Balao and Tench. We are going to at least re-arrange them, because the Tambor and Gar are the same, not the Gar and the Gato. As it stands now torpedobait, you'll probably have to wait on the Balao availability at Midway in March of 1943, before you get a new boat. (If you happen to get a Gato, can you please, please, please let us know as soon as it happens?) You will probably be offered a new conning tower before long though... sorry... but that's the way the game is currently set-up. We'll do some experimenting here in a few weeks, and see if / how we can remedy this - hopefully without an "early retirement" issue, like the game used to do you after an "upgrade" to a new boat. In the meantime, there is a "formula" that is used to calculate your patrols and tonnage sunk for your "Captain's Rating". One average patrol can set you back a good bit. A single poor patrol can hammer your career to where you get next to nothing for upgrades ever, in spite of having other stellar patrols. That is hard-coded. I had a couple of links to old Ducimus posts concerning all of the above, and I managed to crash the browser on my tablet and lost them... I'll have to try and find them again for you, but for now, nightie-night!

OK, I'm fine with the boat upgrade timings. I was just used to getting an offer after three good patrols. I think having to wait for four, five or six patrols is more than reasonable.

To clarify, following that sixth patrol in the GAR, I went direct from that boat to the Balao, bypassing the GATO entirely. Another small surprise was that usually when offered a Balao class you have to pick it up at Mare Island/Treasure Island. Not so this time. It was delivered to me at Midway!