In a Quandry

[Vonsteel]

Well im in a bit of a pickle atm. Really NOT sure on who to use or use bits and bobs of single mods in SH4.

I was a total user with Beerys mod RFB. But it appears to be slightly falling on the way side. I tried Tiggers Maru, and was good as it refaced everything basically but a few annoyances, map contact updating etc i like to be able to see where ships etc are on the map.

So im stuck.. Either stick with Tiggers, go with RFB but add other bits or just go through the list on what i like and add what is needed..

Anyway id like to hear what other people might have to say on this subject etc thxs :)

[switch.dota]

TM all the way. Even for river counters and realism extremists. The combination of NSM and low torp damage make for quite realistic damage models. I'm not really sure HOW RFB is better right now.

[Vonsteel]

Well ok thxs for the reply and as you say TM all the way.... But as i said i dont like the contact map update business off it i like to have the option wether to see task forces spotted or not way off.. With TM atm i have no option to turn it on or off.

[switch.dota]

Yes you do!

With map contacts on, you basically have auto-plotting, with the exception that it doesn't give you GPS-accurate reading on composition and heading while you are still 20 miles out. Every contact, friend or foe, merchant or warship, uses the same square (zoomed out) or dot (zoomed in) symbol. However clicking that dot on the nav map reveals if it's a warship or merchant.

Yes, it's not the instant contact update you're used to but it's actually more exciting this way. You'll quickly learn not to pursue medium speed contacts of two ships (the usual ASW patrol) ;) At first I was tempted to turn off the map contact stuff in TM (you can - just read the documentation - and it only involves deleting a file from TM before installing), but after a few patrols I started to like it. It fixed the major annoyance related to no contact updates - TCing straight into a taskforce because the TC wouldn't drop back automatically on visual contact.

[NefariousKoel]

Well im in a bit of a pickle atm. Really NOT sure on who to use or use bits and bobs of single mods in SH4.

I was a total user with Beerys mod RFB. But it appears to be slightly falling on the way side. I tried Tiggers Maru, and was good as it refaced everything basically but a few annoyances, map contact updating etc i like to be able to see where ships etc are on the map.

So im stuck.. Either stick with Tiggers, go with RFB but add other bits or just go through the list on what i like and add what is needed..

Anyway id like to hear what other people might have to say on this subject etc thxs :)

I'm going to put a new update for TM Lite up probably early next week.

I removed much of the no friend or foe stuff from TM and replaced them with plain black contacts. You won't have a dashed bearing line on sonar (but they'll all be black - no black & blue stuff) and you can see the ships on the map (and their silhouettes when zoomed in). They still won't have "tails" showing their heading, at least while zoomed out, so you won't be able to check AoB and heading easily on the nav map unless you're close.

I still gotta tinker with a few other things I wanted to change and test a bit.;)

[Bill Nichols]

Personally, I'm running RFB with a handful of other mods on top. I do plan to give TM a try, though, as soon as my current career is over.

[Rockin Robbins]

Is it the ship silhouettes and course barbs you want back? In the readme that nobody reads, Ducimus tells you how to make that happen. Actually that is the strength of Trigger Maru. Just like Beery, Ducimus tells you how to customize it to your liking.

But do me a favor. Live with TM's way of plotting for just one cruise. At the end, I bet you say it's WAY better than the old way. I believe it is the closest thing to a real plotting team, leaving plenty of room for careless mistakes but still giving you some check on your plot. I know it's intimidating and I know you just think you have to know which way those ships are pointing by inspection only, but trust me, it's better the Trigger Maru way, and way more exciting.

I was tracking one of the infamous 2 ship medium speed convoys once and made the mistake of pinging when they were 1000 yards away to do the WernerSobe sonar targeting trick.... The trick was on me.:o A 30 knot charge from 1000 yards is as exciting as it gets.

[THE_MASK]

TM all the way. Even for river counters and realism extremists. The combination of NSM and low torp damage make for quite realistic damage models. I'm not really sure HOW RFB is better right now. I didnt know TM had more rivers . I might try this .

[OlegM]

I prefer RFB over TM. TM made DD AI even more dangerous and IMHO DDs are already too numerous and too smart and all-seeing even in the stock game. Japs were simply BAD at ASW, and the game should reflect that. There are other ways to make the game challening other than upping the DD AI and sensors.

RFB is not being updated anymore but I see it as a good thing as after some time all modders seem to fall victims to "overloading disease" and start adding stuff to their mega mods that I prefer not to use, and not to even have to deal with. RFB did what it planned to do, did it well, and that's it. It does not need updating every week or so. In all honesty I would prefer other mods to stop adding new stuff as well.

[tater]

DDs are certainly mor emunerous in the stock game. Every convoy has 4, multiply by 35 to 40 convoys that happen every 3 days or so 70% of the time on 1 week plus trips...

lesse, that's ~196 DDs just on convoy duty at any given moment in stock SH4. More than they had, actually. Then there are troop convoys, about 50% of which have 4 DDs. That's ~100 more DDs. Probably 50 more in subhunter groups at any moment, maybe more, and at any moment at least 50 in TFs, probably more. Then call all the ones in harbor maybe 50 for slop (I bet it's over 100 in fact).

So in stock: ~450 DDs at sea any given moment.

That's what you have if you play a stock campaign. 450 DDs at sea any given second (way more than the japanese actually had of all escort types combined counting all wartime production). The principal failing of IJN ASW doctrine was failing to task the ships as escorts and convoy. NOT just their capability.

With 450 ASW assets at any moment, the AI capability would have to be set very low to mitigate for the grossly excessive numbers of escorts. That's a principal issue I have with RFB, actually (I like RFB, BTW). In order to make the ASW less capable with the stock campaign's insane number of escorts, the ASW has to really stink for any given escort.

[OlegM]

With 450 ASW assets at any moment, the AI capability would have to be set very low to mitigate for the grossly excessive numbers of escorts. That's a principal issue I have with RFB, actually (I like RFB, BTW). In order to make the ASW less capable with the stock campaign's insane number of escorts, the ASW has to really stink for any given escort.

I wouldn't comment on that. I use RFB for all round realism, and your own mod on top of RFB for "traffic realism", so as far as simulating realistic levels of traffic go, I trust you did a good job and know what you're talking about.

However, my point was that I distinctively don't like what TM does, ie it makes DDs too smart and their sensors too good to suit my preference for realism. They are already too good in stock game. The fact that TM escorts have upped skill levels was a deal breaker for me and the key reason I never took TM into serious consideration (just my personal opinion of course).

[tater]

I actually think that the sensors in TM would be more realistic toned down a little myself. Course how to do that is in the readme :) BTW, AI levels (meaning crew quality) is pretty much in the middle in TM. The low AI crew levels in SH4 are pathetic, well below even the least capable warship, IMO).

I stopped messing with it (RL got busy), but I do have a mod to make multiple versions of the same sensors, and it seems to work. You could then have military visual and merchant visual capabilities (more if you wished). My thought was to have maybe 2 levels of visual capability for warships, and a lower visual setting for merchants. The 2 warship types would have 1 at current settings (which are pretty good, they spot scopes pretty far away), and one at a lesser setting someplace between the merchant setting and the good warship setting.

The problem is to work in the game, this mod would need to replace every single ship sns file.

It can easily get complicated, but could have excellent results. Variant ships are EASY to add in SH4, too. You could simply name a new DD, and point it at an existing model (Like I did for Yugumo---it's just Asashio with radar at an earlier start date (since a few DDs got radar earlier than others, and specification by "class" is the best SH4 can do). You could easily make some DDs have great visual AI, some regular, some small escorts like subchasers might have only merchant grade visuals. All with BP-cloned ships.

The trouble is really balance, and at a certain point you need to pay attention to more than one area. If you put the AI sensors at stock levels, you could easily find TM quite easy since the number and type of escorts is different than stock, and duc used no "elite" crew levels at all. Personally, I'd prefer to tweak the AI at some point so that elite is good, but not insane, and the average IJN DD Ai could be set down from Veteran to Competant where I think it belongs.

tater

[NefariousKoel]

I'm currently checking out a couple minor changes to AI detection on TM:

hydrophone sensitivity was .15 I lowered it back to .1 & layer atten to 1.6

sonar was .1 and I'm raising it to .11 or .12 & layer atten to 2.0

I might have to adjust a bit more but in essence I thought the DD's passive sonar was far too good but the active wasn't quite good enough. Most notably, the layer was like a wall before - get under it and it's nigh impossible for the AI to detect you, so I lowered that quite a bit.

It seems to be improving but I'm still playin' with it.

[C DuDe]

I'm currently checking out a couple minor changes to AI detection on TM:

hydrophone sensitivity was .15 I lowered it back to .1 & layer atten to 1.6

sonar was .1 and I'm raising it to .11 or .12 & layer atten to 2.0

I might have to adjust a bit more but in essence I thought the DD's passive sonar was far too good but the active wasn't quite good enough. Most notably, the layer was like a wall before - get under it and it's nigh impossible for the AI to detect you, so I lowered that quite a bit.

It seems to be improving but I'm still playin' with it.

I've read some of your post on the matter and agree with you.

I use TM but use the stock sensor.dat & Sim.cfg as I find the ability of the AI in TM way to... euhmm... powerful, sonar-, hydro- and visual wise.

The brick wall at X depth is also a issue for me.. So much so that I go and hunt in more shallow waters (90F depth) because of it just get the thrill of evading DD's. (when I have the option to go deep I do) :oops:


So I would like to ask you,

Are you, when you've tweaked the game to your liking going to release your work.
I'm asking this because I'd like to try your settings when your done.

[Rockin Robbins]

I actually think that the sensors in TM would be more realistic toned down a little myself. Course how to do that is in the readme :) BTW, AI levels (meaning crew quality) is pretty much in the middle in TM. The low AI crew levels in SH4 are pathetic, well below even the least capable warship, IMO).

tater
We're in danger of reducing Japanese capabilities to those of the Germans in Hogan's Heroes. Here's evidence that sometimes that wasn't the case.

I have spent time on the US Submarine Vets of World War II website for some years, as my wife's grandfather served aboard the Kraken, SS 370. I have been laboring under the generalization that Japanese destroyers were not even close to the killers British destroyers were. Maybe in some instances I was wrong. Check this out from the sub vets' web site http://www.ussubvetsofworldwarii.org/:

REMEMBER THIS USS TRIGGER?
After attacking a convoy of 20 ships, with 25 escorts, on 23 March 1944, Trigger (Harlfinger) was attacked by six of the escorts for over 17 hours. When she surfaced, Trigger's forward torpedo room was flooded up to the deck plates, her hull air induction was flooded, bow planes, trim pump, and sonar gear and both radars were dead and her radio antennas grounded. After making repairs for the next four days, she rendezvoused with Tang, borrowed air compressor parts, and continued her patrol.

They are asking the crew if they remember this? How could they forget! Now that's equal to any survived pasting of a U-Boat in the Atlantic. I guess we are forced to say that not ALL Japanese destroyers were like those in stock SH4, and even Trigger Maru doesn't come up to this level except for Bungo Pete. Here's a whole squadron of 25 well-trained and deadly destroyers.

Now, how do you mod that? More headaches for our overworked and underappreciated modders. Sorry tater.

Also, folks, please keep in mind that Trigger Maru is less concerned with historical accuracy than with Ducimus' idea of excellent gameplay. The AI is the level it is because otherwise SH4 is just a cakewalk with no continuing replay value. I was the first to object to the AI, but have learned to love TM on its own terms. Twice I have had destroyers glue themselves to me until they ran out of depth charges and continue making dry runs. TM hones your anti-DD skills to a level you will be proud of. No more "take her deep hit silent running and you're outta there!" You must actively beat TM and gameplay is much more satisfying for that, in my opinion. I left TM the way Ducimus wrote it for that reason. I just enjoy the challenge.

[tater]

Yeah, it's really tough.

I don;t buy the argument that IJN ASW was pathetic, either. It was ineffective all told, but a lot of that had to do with operational doctrine. It;s fair to say IJN ASW was at once capable, and terrible. Capable in that individual units could be persistant, capable foes, and terrible in that the IJN utterly ignored the big picture of maintaining their logistical connections via ASW, convoys, escorts, etc.

They lacked a plan, basically. It wasn't until 1943 that they assigned officers to plan ASW/convoys, and even then it was only 2 junior officers, and it was only part of their duties! In '44 it became more serious with dedicated officers. THAT is the failing of jap ASW, not so much the crews fighting the subs on their DDs, etc.

The "mechanical" problems early were things like setting the DCs too shallow (they only had 2 settings, 30m, and 60m, no finer control existed). COurse they dropped a lot of ash cans, so sure, they didn't SINK many boats, but they sure as hell held them below 60m for a long time. ASW is effective by sinking the enemy subs, but it is also effective to the extent it prevents sinkings.

I tend to think that TM is more, rather than less realistic in many ways partially because it changes player behavior towards more fear of ASW. Real people on real subs had that fear, it was a good fear to have cause it meant they'd live to fight another day. Dumb down the ASW too much, and it's a shooting gallery.

When looking at stats on sub losses, I think it would be fair to throw away all patrols that did not encounter ASW assets. I also think it would be useful to compare player patrols to the most aggressive RL patrols, not patrols at large. So if in RL, a boat should be sunk every 30 patrols (whatever it was), it should be more likely for SH4 players since we are pretty much by definiton FAR more aggressive since we can always reload a save, or start over.

The many variant sensor technique is the stuff of a true supermod, IMO. I think it's worth trying, I was gonna wait for a S3D version that might make exporting and importing a little easier before I really dive in.

My goals in such a mod would be for it to be possible to do night surface attacks without being instantly clobbered within some range. So crappy merchant visuals---though I'd make the odd merchant with better visuals to keep people on their toes). Maybe a few variant escorts with diff sensor quality packages, too. Some with decent crews and less capable sensors, some perhaps with average crews, but even better sensors. Really try to mix things up.

[NefariousKoel]

So I would like to ask you,

Are you, when you've tweaked the game to your liking going to release your work.
I'm asking this because I'd like to try your settings when your done.

Yeah, I'll put it out when I'm comfortable with their levels.

I was getting sick of being heard from quite a distance by their hydrophones and then having them 700 yards away and pinging but still not getting a fix on me. Not to mention being invisible under the layer.

If you want to help out and give it a shot change the following in the Data/Cfg/sim.cfg file with a text editor:

[Hydrophone]
Detection time=1
Sensitivity=0.1
Height factor=0
Waves factor=1.0
Speed factor=15
Noise factor=0.5
Thermal Layer Signal Attenuation=1.6

[Sonar]
Detection time=1
Sensitivity=0.12
Waves factor=1.0
Speed factor=20
Enemy surface factor=150
Lose time=30
Thermal Layer Signal Attenuation=2.0

I'm playing with the Sensitivity on both, Thermal Layer Attenuation has been dropped quite a bit too. I'm still not sure if it's quite done but I'm testing.

[C DuDe]

Detection time=1
Sensitivity=0.1
Height factor=0
Waves factor=1.0
Speed factor=15
Noise factor=0.5
Thermal Layer Signal Attenuation=1.6

[Sonar]
Detection time=1
Sensitivity=0.12
Waves factor=1.0
Speed factor=20
Enemy surface factor=150
Lose time=30
Thermal Layer Signal Attenuation=2.0

I'm playing with the Sensitivity on both, Thermal Layer Attenuation has been dropped quite a bit too. I'm still not sure if it's quite done but I'm testing.


I have 1 week of holiday left with my daughter before she has to go back to my ex. so until that time I'm kinda busy.
Also I'm not really good at altering .CFG files however I do understand some of it and think I can help with the tweaking.

If you don't mind I'll PM you with a few questions to get me going.

[OlegM]

They are asking the crew if they remember this? How could they forget! Now that's equal to any survived pasting of a U-Boat in the Atlantic. I guess we are forced to say that not ALL Japanese destroyers were like those in stock SH4, and even Trigger Maru doesn't come up to this level except for Bungo Pete. Here's a whole squadron of 25 well-trained and deadly destroyers.


This level of what? If we take crew *estimate* of 6 escorts depth charging them for 17 hours as true - which it might well not be - then the DD performance was outright *pathetic*. They didn't sink anything, they were just persistent in dropping DCs, obviously most of them blindly. Persistence = 5 out of 5. Skill = 1 out of 5.

6 Brit DDs would either eat U-boot for breakfast, or break the contact and go back to convoy.

25 escorts? Well trained and deadly? I'd say confused and talentless, but persistent.

Keep in mind that 25 escorts is sub commander's estimate, the real number of escorts was *probably* much lower. Also, they were not all DDs, they were just "escorts". This tells us just that this particular convoy was highly valued by Japs (carrying stolen gold or secret IJN nuke? LOL :arrgh!: ) but absolutely nothing about their skill. If anything, their ASW skills were terrible since all they managed to do in 17 hours of cat and mice was some moderate damage to ONE sub.

The sub didn't even had to go back to dock, 4 day repairs on the open sea and continue the patrol. Hardly an experience comparable to the North Atlantic U boote vs Brits and USN, sorry.

[tater]

That's the tricky bit. Right now AI scales in ability in such a way that they prosecute attacks more AND more capably at the same time. The 2 would ideally be independant of each other.

One possible tweak to TM that might produce the desired effect is to drop the DC effectiveness slightly. More DCs expended per kill. It's easy enough to compare the DC damage values to torpedoes and get a sense of what's going on damage wise, and RL IJN DCs (early, anyway) were not terribly powerful as I recall.

tater

[tater]

The current DCs are VERY powerful. The IJN had 2 explosive charge ranges for DCs. The common early war DC was a 100kg warhead. The 1943+ version was either 105, 110, or 162kg depending on the sub type.

Bottom line is that ~100kg was pretty typical. That's ~1/2 the warhead of a mk10 torpedo.

I'm messing with a DC mod (based partially on redwine's) right now dropping the stock explosion radius from 4m to 40m to 4.5m to 8m. Th damage values are also dropped rather a lot. With this mod, they have to really shack you to do bad damage. TM uses a max radius of 14.5m. Even 8m is pretty excessive.

Seems like instead of nerfing the sensors, a simple tweak might be to only tweak the visuals to allow night surface attacks, and drop the leathality of the DCs a little. Course the subs are overly strong, so scaling the damage to torpedoes is problematic. So I'm inclined to only mess with thr radius, and keep the explosive force pretty high.

[Vonsteel]

Thxs for all the HUGE replies basically RFB had well below 70ft sonar would mark all the targets on the map Black/Blue lines and if on the surface black squares to show where they were and what course they were tracking.

As i said TM is great has all those NICE little addons etc eyecandy and others RSM and LBO etc all in the 1 package but out of all of it i really miss what i described.

Is there a way to USE TM and get that old contact plotting back?

Thxs

[tater]

Check the TM FAQ. Duc left instructions for removing stuff. Most of it probably involves deleting stuff.

tater