Locating Merchant Ships

[theglenlivet12]

Sorry if this has been posted before, but I did make an effort to find the answer on the forums and couldnt find anything.

I am brand new to the SH series and watching youtube videos of campaign play, it looked pretty fun and I thought Id have a go. I completed the tutorial no problems and figured out how to select the next mission (eventually) and headed for the coast of England. I played for 5 hours last night. I saw 3 squads of planes and was spotted by an escort. Any time I saw a merchant ship, it just seemed to disappear, no matter how close I got to it. I tried going to peri depth, staying on the surface and even extreme speed ahead, but it would either seem to flee, matching my speed or simply disappear. Then Id always have some blue line shortly after drawn off the right or left of the ship that seemed to shadow me, saying it was a warship. I tried one time even turning into it to see if it really was a warship, and it just mirrors my moves and stays a short distance away. Im starting to think that it cant be this hard. Im playing on medium settings. Is there something Im missing or did I just get a bad install? I hope to figure this out because so far, this isnt a whole lot of fun :-?

[theglenlivet12]

Can anyone help me with this?

[Fmilk]

Well, I can tell you that the mirroring ship sounds like a bug to me. It happened to me once in SH4, and once in SH5. You can see the direction line, and you can never reach the ship. But you can force it into running aground.

[Noren]

Merchant ships have been known to suddenly disappear yes, guess its a bug.

Your lookout crew are'nt to good at spotting either and the sonarman cant track a target or report all contacts. What you can do is to submerge to 40m every once in a while, cut the engines and listen manually by the sonarstation and sometimes pick up the sound of ships/convoys.

Good luck!

[fw66]

The distant ship copying your manoeuvres is a known bug, there's a thread about it here: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=165133

It's usually a warship by the looks of things.

It looks like saving and re-loading would help the problem.

[theglenlivet12]

Thanks, chaps. I was ready to give up until today. 10 hours of combing the North Sea and nothing to show for it, until I got a ping. Then another. Turned out to be a convoy of 10 merchant ships. I couldnt believe it! I immediately saved the game so I could practice hitting moving targets for once and eventually had to come up to use the deck gun to sink the final five.
I noticed that when the "ghost ships" would show up as battleships, they seemed to be spinning around like a fruit fly. I assumed it was their radar. Silly me :salute: