No contacts in a long time! Why?

[letterboy1]

I've been on this patrol for quite some time. I started out normal with contact reports and actual contacts (and some kills). I just went to Midway for my second refit and for the past several weeks there are no contact reports and no contacts except planes. It's as if the ocean is suddenly devoid of all shipping. Is there a big holiday I don't know about? Has anybody run into something similar?

[Packerton]

The Japenese are playing the new Dragon quest game. :lol:

[tater]

It is empty.

Real submarines patrolled for maybe 60 days.

The game breaks the war into segments. The first is from dec 41 til February 42. The next is march to august, and so forth.

The game ONLY LOADS TRAFFIC BASED ON YOUR PATROL START DATE.

So if you start in january 42, when the dec-feb traffic puts into port, that's it, no more traffic, not ever. There is a little slop set, so that if you start at some point in jan/feb, you will also see the spring traffic at the same time.

Go home, dock, start a new patrol.

This "refit" and go get more tonnage nonsense is what causes this.

tater

[GT182]

Tater is right. Plus the fact that the Japanese ships are hiding just out of your sonar/radar range. The crews are sitting there laughing at you running in circles looking for them while they eat their fish and rice. ;) :rotfl: Stop and let the crew fish or swim for ahwile. Change your patrol plans to some place else and you you might get the surprise of you life. :D

Same happened in 1.4 SHIII. You could go for days out in the Atlantic and not see a single ship. Very frustrating to say the least but you had to change you way of planning your patrol.

But then again, Sh4 is not the same as SHIII in many ways.

[tater]

It's not really frustrating. What would be frustrating is for the crew whose skipper keeps taking the boat out for double, triple, quadruple patrols without letting them chase some tail in Honalulu or Perth. THAT would be frustrating.

tater

[Frederf]

It is empty.

Real submarines patrolled for maybe 60 days.

The game breaks the war into segments. The first is from dec 41 til February 42. The next is march to august, and so forth.

The game ONLY LOADS TRAFFIC BASED ON YOUR PATROL START DATE.

So if you start in january 42, when the dec-feb traffic puts into port, that's it, no more traffic, not ever. There is a little slop set, so that if you start at some point in jan/feb, you will also see the spring traffic at the same time.

Go home, dock, start a new patrol.

This "refit" and go get more tonnage nonsense is what causes this.

tater

This is new to me. I generally go for 2-3 month patrols with 1-2 refits. I'll be going in early after getting extensive damage during a harbor photo recon. Perhaps I'll have to start making my patrols shorter rather than longer.

[Snuffy]

It's not really frustrating. What would be frustrating is for the crew whose skipper keeps taking the boat out for double, triple, quadruple patrols without letting them chase some tail in Honalulu or Perth. THAT would be frustrating.

tater

Always a good thing to keep an ey ... er ... keep the men in mind. :hmm:

I just started a new career with 1.3 and TM 1.5 ... I see I need to update when I get home as 1.6 is now out. First mission on the new career .... take a porpoise to Honshu and photo a port. We've been 10 days now getting there, and not a sighting of anything.
(tonight we make the run up the bay to the port though.)

[tater]

This is new to me. I generally go for 2-3 month patrols with 1-2 refits. I'll be going in early after getting extensive damage during a harbor photo recon. Perhaps I'll have to start making my patrols shorter rather than longer.

It's very dependant on exactly when the patrol starts. The layers load from a little before a change, to a little after. If you load right at an interface, you get two layers running for a bit, say 42a and 42b.

The traffic also has to move around. So a convoy can spawn August 31st, and be on the map for 1 month as it drives around.

[letterboy1]

Thanks guys, going back to Pearl then for some tail. And to upgrade T Maru.:lol:

[Packerton]

I guess noone got my Dragon quest joke :arrgh!:

[GT182]

Transfer to the Asiatic Fleet and you'll see more targets. All around Luzon is good, just check the map for the enemy's shipping lanes. You might not see as many convoys as SHIII, but they are there along with single and double targets. And when you run into a Task Force, be very very careful. ;)

[letterboy1]

Thanks GT182, but what gets me is that suddenly there were simply no more contacts or contact reports . . . as if the ship spawning stopped happening. I even got a fax traffic mesage that there was a heavy naval engagement in the Midway area. I was right by Midway getting a refit when I got that message and yet I got no contact reports. I took my boat all around Midway and saw nothing.

Oh well, I'm about to start a patrol out of Australia . . . we'll see how it goes.

[tater]

Did you not read my post?

. . . as if the ship spawning stopped happening.

The ship spawning DID STOP HAPPENING!

You start a patrol, and the game loads all the background stuff (ports, airbases, etc) because it always does. They persist the entire war.

Then the game loads the mission layers as defined in campaign.cfg based upon the dtate you start your patrol. So it might load all the 42a_ layers. 42a_Jap_TaskForces.mis, 42a_US_taskforces.mis, etc, ad nauseum. Those mission iles each contatin traffic that spawns between 1 March, 1942, and 31 August, 1942. If you remain on patrol til 31 March, there is still traffic all over the map. As you get into September, all that traffic that might have spawned as late as 11:59 on the 31st starts going back into port. When it does, thats it. No more traffic.

The FOX traffic stuff is scripted, it gets broadcast all the time, the contact reports are generated by the game---no ships, no contact reports.

tater

[-Pv-]

Lots of good reasons to use the refit bases for what they were intended for- to top off your fuel on the way to-from your patrol.

By returning to base between emptying your weapons loadout, you benefit from crew upgrades (get rid of those dead beats) and boat upgrades (keep up with the enemy's advancing technology) and keep up the crew moral. Treking through those storms at high compression also takes it's toll on the boat making it less responsive and restricting depth.

Add to that what Tater says and you also benefit from more interesting and challenging contacts created specifically to emulate typical traffic of the period (including some battle events) rather than chasing the last dregs of storm-depleated convoys trying to pull into their destination.

The Midway spawning can be very frustrating because again as Tater said, it happens or not depending on when you leave base but the battle message from HQ gets sent regardless.

By continually refitting through the entire war, you miss out on some of the richness of the game making it more tiresome and repetitious. It also causes what some people lable as "bugs" when they are completely avoidable when the game is played as intended (repeat missions, early retirement, contact voids, sub becomes more vulnerable, crew tires quickly and often, poor visual contact sightings, reduced patrol range, etc.)

-Pv-

[tater]

True. The bottom line is that the game loads the war in layers to minimize overhead, and frankly, it's a great system for being able to work on the campaign in small bites instead of a single impossible to look at monster file.

So if you "refit" (very very poor word choice on the part of the devs, it's really "refuel/rearm") enough times, that's it, no traffic.

tater

[-Pv-]

There are also areas that do not have much traffic and what little there may be, you could miss because not close enough to sense them. Another good reason to RTB so HQ can send you to a more productive area. South Japan is always a rich environment.
-Pv-

[Crosseye76]

There are also areas that do not have much traffic and what little there may be, you could miss because not close enough to sense them. Another good reason to RTB so HQ can send you to a more productive area. South Japan is always a rich environment.
-Pv-

Yeah, you got to love patrols to Empire waters ! :up:

[switch.dota]

Here's my story - first patrol, starting 8 dec 41 from Pearl in a brand new Gar class. Set a course for one of those stupid "insert agent in Japan" missions. Set speed 10 knots. Sail away!

Upon arrivial I had yet to make contact of any kind with the enemy. Shortly after deploying the agent I got a contact report of a small convoy from the other side of Japan. Nothing I could do, so I set sail for East China Sea. After patrolling E China Sea for nearly all of my fuel, I was left with a sink merchants mission that I couldn't complete. My ONLY contacts were 2 airplanes and a convoy which I never cought up to (not havign radar + fast convoy + zz-ing = :( ). I resorted to raiding Saipan on my way back to Pearl to fufill my sink objective. The DD, sampans and 2 merchants there were the only visual ship contacts the entire patrol.

I docked at PH on the 1st of Feb 1942. 2 months and no ships spooted at sea. Dissapointing.

[-Pv-]

As you already know by now, a contact appearing on your map is not a directive to go sink it. These are just intelligence reports. After dropping off your agent and the icon goes grey, that is the time to call in and wait. HQ will calculate how much fuel you have and "try" to send you on a mission you "should" be able to complete. It's up to you to keep track of how much fuel you need to get home and turn back when you reach that point no matter how interesting or imparitive your patrol area.

It's really quite easy. I look at how much fuel
I used to get where I am and reserve the same amount of fuel to get back from the same location. I add a 5% fudge factor for contacts on the way and really bad weather. If I move to a new patrol area, I have to add the additional fuel used to my initial reserve. This sometimes requires me to "sit" in a lucrative area with engines at very low speed if I'm getting low on fuel and have too many torps left. If I don't get contacts, I start home when I reach the reserve no matter what.

The key is to think of yourself as if you are flying a plane instead of driving a car. You HAVE to land before the fuel gives out no matter what. Even more, you cannot land in any one of thousands of airports along the way. You only have a few landing strips thousands of miles apart so you cannot just go exploring without paying a price.
-Pv

[Ducimus]

So if you "refit" (very very poor word choice on the part of the devs, it's really "refuel/rearm") enough times, that's it, no traffic.



I think i changed the wording for "refits" to just that. "ReArm/Refuel" or something like that. I have to give Ubisoft dev's props for figuring out a system that didnt break the patrol, but i think it should have been a more limited system. In reality, subs didnt fuel up from near empty to full, they just topped off their tanks, or took on just enough fuel to get home.

That oversight in place, it opens the door for some serious abuse. But really, doing so is working against yourself. The longer you stay out at sea, the longer your load times will become, as well as causing traffic issues (or rather lack thereof) as explained by Tater. The game really does load traffic in chunks based on date, but i never thought to push a patrol long enough to where it would cause issues other then loading times.


I usually refuel once, and thats come back from patrol at a midway stopover while enroute to pearl.

[-Pv-]

Like Ducimus, I use the refit as a way to give me the time to unload all the initial torps then it's back to base. Staying out longer to dump successive torp loads ruins the game for me.
-Pv-

[tater]

Double barreled partols seem relatively common (not absurdly rare, but not SOP, either) for the australian based boats later (mid war) in the war. But the total duration was not massively increased. Go out, shoot all the fish, grab gas and fish, patrol the home.

If you are out past ~75 days, it's too long, period.

tater