A few new ideas

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Fidd

That's a lot more detailed, but it's broadly in agreement with what I stated, namely that DC attacks went on for much longer than is typical in game, and often cause involuntary surfacing, either because of non-lethal cumulative damage, or because of loss of depth control due same.

Hi, note there was no involuntary surfacing, in the 3 examples above, the skipper ordered the boat to surface.

Again, based on the data, most DC attacks were dangerous, in the 11 examples I cited above 8 U-Boats were sunk or heavily damaged.

Another way to look at this is U-47 under Prien was depth charged 4 times in 39-41 and was sunk the 4th time. The U-99 under Kretschmer and U-100 under Schepke were each depth charged 3 times and sunk the 3rd time. U-567 under Endrass was sunk the 1st time it was depth charged. These were all U-Boat aces who knew how to handle their boats.

The reality is that escorts with well trained crews and working as a team generally had no problem holding a sub on sonar under good sound conditions and could generally inflict serious damage to the sub. When you see an attack stretching out for hours, it is usually because the escort is having trouble finding the U-boat because of poor sound conditions, poorly trained crews, escorts working alone, etc which would have been the case during the "Happy Times" in last six months of 1940.

When you look at the careers of most successful U-Boat aces, you see they managed to survive a long time by sinking unescorted ships and staying well away from the escorts when they attacked convoys.

Now in game, yes, there should be a good chance that an escort can heavily damage/sink the boat if it finds you and attacks you. That is realistic and makes the game more interesting. Note that current behaviour is still early access since revisiting U-boat damage is on the development roadmap.