[REQ] Default Zig Zagging for japanese ships? Possible?

[AntEater]

In SH4 (as well as SH3) enemy contacts only start zigzagging when they spot the player.
Is it possible to make them zigzag by default, as it was in reality?

[Egan]

Funny, I thought I'd seen a post claiming that some convoys zig zag automatically. If this isn't the case I'm quite suprised that something so important was overlooked again.

[tater]

Might be interesting to test. Make a straight line convoy down a line of longitude, and see what happens with the ships set to different AI levels.

It is possible to script zig zags though. Make the waypoints zig zag. Then select a few and loop them to the next waypoint after the zig with a % chance.

Ie: waypoints 0 to 1 goes due north, W2 45 degrees of that base heading to the east. W3 is 90 off the W1-W2 path (45 degress of base N heading West), but aligned due N of W1. Tell W1 to loop to W3 50% of the time. Now the convoy will go due north from W1 to W3 half the time I think. A major PITA to do for hundreds of merchant ships, but possible I guess. If the .mis files are text like Il-2, I guess you could copy a group of those waypoints in open water in a shipping lane, and offset all the waypoints by some number of nm with a little program and paste it into the next convoy/merchant instance and create a cloud of such paths...

tater

[Spytrx]

I have noticed a number of times that the ships don't take standard evasive actions (the first time it took me off guard because I anticipated some reaction instead of none)... in one case I was chasing two fast moving passenger ships - when I hit the first one with a torpedo both came to a crawl. Easy kill on the one hand, but totally illogical on the other...

[tater]

Having looked at the troop, merchant, and convoy random layers, I've found that virtually no AKs or APs have crew levels above "novice." It would be interesting to see if the lame evasive action is tied to this.

[Jams79]

In Ducimus' new mod he increased the AI levels and they do react with more intelligence, changing speeds and zig-zagging.

[nematode]

There's 2 different things being described in this thread.

One thing is the simultaneous turning that enemy ships do in SH4 when your sub is spotted. It lasts from the split second of detection to 20-30 minutes after the moment of last contact. It's AI controlled behavior that is the same in SH4 as it was in SH3, altho in SH4 it appears to be somewhat bugged. Having followed mod developments very closely for SH3, I've never seen anything about this AI routine that can be player modded, although in SH3 some of its more frustrating side effects (like ships bunching up and stopping) could be lessened a little bit by increasing the column distance in Random Groups.

The other thing that's being discussed in this thread is what the original poster asked about: zigzagging, as it is known in naval doctrine, in which ships make somewhat minor course changes every so often (like, every half hour) while remaining on a base course toward their destination, staying in in column formation. This was SOP for pretty much every WWII navy.

There is no provision in the SH3 AI for zigzagging, as it's defined in the preceding paragraph. I've seen nothing in SH4 to make me think it's in there either, since under the hood they're 99% the same.

However...you can script zigzagging with waypoints. Lots and lots and lots of waypoints. It would work fine for creating a single mission, but for creating a campaign, it would make your brain explode. But don't let that stop anyone from trying :lol: