Whats up with the escort AI?

[Seadogs]

Has anyone been threatend by AI escorts if not on the surface? I just blew threw a large task force of 4 fleet carriers, 2 escort carriers, and so many heavy crusiers and DD's the framerate on my 8800GTX tanked. But I had no problem with bieng detected despite my scope bieng up the entire time with DD's within 1000 yards of me and manuvering all I wanted to.

In fact the only thing scary about the whole ordeal is that the combat air patrol coming to and from the task force was absolute murder, they got that spot on.

Seems funky.

Edit: I guess what I expect from situations like that is maybe getting off a few shots and praying I make it out alive.

[Linavitch]

I got hounded, and I mean hounded, after taking down 1 of 3 air carriers in a TF.

3 DD's came after me straight away which I evaded. Then for about 24 hrs I was harrasssed by aircraft and the DD's who seemed to be following me. I finally gave them the slip but the USS Skipjack was in no condition to continue patrol and had to return to base.

[Seadogs]

Well now thats what I'm talking about :arrgh!:

I've never had that yet in this game. I wonder if somethings borked for me.

To be totally fair though.. watching that carrier go down was much more satisfying than any merchant.

[fidget]

I've found them pretty aggressive when trying to attacking convoys (in fact, the recommendation of going to 150 ft (~ 50m) in the convoy attack training mission @1/3 speed doesn't fool them at all. I've found that I have to go to at least 200+ feet to shake them. I did notice, however, during one patrol that once I got into the middle of the convoy, I could blast away at will and they never tried to find me. May be an AI bug that shows up during certain conditions.

[Sgian Dubh]

I have had a mixed bag of responses.

Once I set up on a CC, and two CVs. Sank the CC and damaged 1 CV with bow tubes, swung around and sank the other CV with stern tubes. During this I had 2 DD close, and one made multiple passes near me with DCs. Not a scratch on my boat.

Then I retreated at PD and despite a number of DC attacks, I didn't take damage.


BUT

Last night I tried an attack on a merchant and 2 DDs pounced on me and I went deep to evade and they sank me.

I'm wondering if I should have stayed at PD?

[Seadogs]

Quick stupid question then :yep: ...

I chose easy at the start of the campaign thinking it only affected the realism settings since I would customise them after any way. Does this go beyond the realism settings?

[tater]

I know nothing about how they coded the AI with respect to different ship classes, but most IJN escorts had no surface search radar at all until late in the war (late '44), and it is my understanding their SONAR, at least as it interacted with their poor ASW doctrine, was not all that great (ie: they'd go too fast for it to be useful much of the time).

One thing the IJN did very well was visual sighting, however. They did a lot of training for night operations, so I'd expect IJN escorts (whose primary function was never ASW, but night time torpedo attacks) to be particularly good at visual spotting, particularly awful at radar spotting (since they should have no radar in the first place), and so so at sonar.

tater