Taking back my home port ...

[Snuffy]

Well now after having lost two home ports so far, (Manila & the one on Jawa), with my current mission ... destroy enemy shipping in the Phillipines, I've decided to try something "special".

Last night I saved my game with my Porpoise sitting outside of Manila bay. To night, I'm going to slip into the bay and see what kind of havoc I can create!

It'd be nice to have Manila back as a base, since the Phillipines seem to be the focus of all my recent missions, and now I have to sail to Austrailia to get armed and fueled, cuz as far as I know, every port north of Austrailia is in the hands of the Japs.

[AVGWarhawk]

Probably not find anything in the bay of Manila. I went into Borneo after the Japanese took it. There was no ships to be found. I think the messages are just for immersion. Onc would hope Manila would be hopping with ships but I doubt it very seriously if you find even a fishing skiff. But hey, give it shot and see what happens.

[Chock]

You better hope the Japs aren't monitoring the subsim forums, or you'll find them waiting for you. :o

[VonBlade]

It's quite sad that, in this respect, the "Dynamic Campaign" is anything but dynamic. I've sunk so many Destroyers that even if the IJN Shipyards were at their fullest output the IJN Commanders would be worried about how few are still at sea.

And taking back your port just doesn't work at all. Although I guess a lack of ships in the harbour doesn't mean that there aren't Japs in the mess tent. Still...
VB

[Strikor]

Watch out for mines. Found that out the hard way.

[jerryt]

I slipped into Manila and found three frieghters, one destroyer, and a gun boat. Sank a large frieghter and the destroyer on the way out. :arrgh!:

[Chock]

I managed to torpedo a carrier anchored in Hiroshima harbour (which i noticed with delight did have the aircraft sliding off the deck as it rolled over, which is something I didn't see in the 1.1 patched version (does anyone know if this was a patch change, or was it because they slide off the decks of fleet carriers and not off escort carriers?).

The mission only called for me to photograph the thing, but I took a snap of it first before sinking it, and hey, that photo would be worth more since it would be the last one ever taken of the thing in one piece. One for the album you might say :D

To top that off I then sunk an old battleship on the way out and a destroyer too. None of them were moving, and it did make me think that the difficulty was not actually that difficult given that I have the sim on supposedly hardcore settings. That place is damn shallow for the most part, so detecting me should have been possible from the air even when I was submerged. But on the minus side of easy pickings, the small harbour patrol craft were equipped with ASDIC and I think that's a little unlikely in 1942. They missed me anyway. :up:

I realise of course that starting up a battleship is not like starting your car, and even if its crew was aware that an attack might be coming, it could not necessarily get under weigh in just a few minutes. But if I recall correctly, there was an aircraft production facility at Hiroshima and it's not too much of a stretch to suppose that some aircraft could have been vectored over the harbour to locate me, even if they were unarmed ones on an air test they could have pinpointed my location to the patrol craft by circling over me. They certainly seem to have no problem vectoring to my location in the loneliness of the vast Pacific!

Despite all these things that make SH4 seem less realistic than many hardcore players would prefer, I do have to say that I'm enjoying playing SH4 very much. The pros outweigh the cons for me, as harbour penetrations and the vast distances involved to your patrol area make for some very interesting differences from the U-Boat War.

So yeah, go for it. Mess up that harbour, but watch for shore batteries, I found that one out the hard way too, they screwed up my deck gun.