Can orders be rescinded?

[Vaux]

I've not actually run into this situation, but I'm a "contingency planner" by nature and tend to brainstorm about possible scenarios I might encounter both in games and real life. I guess living most of my life in a hurricane prone area instilled this "quality" in me.

Anyway, let's say I have orders to patrol a given area that's pretty far from my home port, and let's say that along the way I encounter enough enemy shipping that I expend all of my torps before reaching my designated patrol area. If I call in a situation report with 0 torps left, will I be instructed to continue to my patrol area, or will that order be canceled and replaced with an RTB order?

[Armistead]

If you hit the status button and not completed your mission, you should get a message to keep radio silence for 12 hours and continue, regardless if you have torps or not. If you report a convoy or TF and have no torps, I usually just get a message..if fuel and weapons permit, attack. Really it's up to you.

You won't be punished per say for not completing a mission if you had a good patrol sinking ships. Now if you don't complete your mission and have no ship sinkings eventually they'll relieve you. Obvious if you get a mission to drop supplies or men, that's something you should do. Frankly I can't recall ever coming back to base with men or supplies I should've dropped.
I wonder what would happen if you ignored that kind of mission if you still sunk ships.

I have done up to three patrols without ever going to the mission area numerous times. I usually go to historical battle areas. I've never been smacked on the hand, lost boat, ect..Still get new boats regardless. I have heard that you should complete you mission ever so often for promotion, I just don't know what the limit is. It may be possible that you get demoted if you keep ignoring missions, but I've never have. I just did the battle of the Coral Sea and ignored my mission in the Bismark Sea. I docked and got another mission near Truk. I ignored it, going to another historical invasion force. So twice I ignored my mission and still got medals, promotions and a new boat offer. Just have some ships sunk if you ignore them. Still, I complete them when they don't interfere with my plans, which is most the time.

[Vaux]

Interesting. I've yet to get a mission to drop off supplies or personnel, but I would certainly complete those with or without torps. I didn't know if there was some sort of penalty for not completing a "proceed to area XX and patrol within 108 miles of that point for 4 days" mission. It seems reasonable to not get punished for not completing a mission like that when the reason is that you sank 30K tons or so of enemy shipping and were out of torps.... but until your response, that was just an assumption on my part. Thanks for the info! :salute:

Edited to add: I wonder what would happen if you had a mission to drop off supplies/personnel and, along the way, you had an encounter that damaged your boat to the point that it was unwise/unsafe to do anything other than RTB? (There goes that contingency planning mentality of mine again...)

[Armistead]

Like I said, never tried it. Next time I get some men to drop off, I'll save after I sink some ships and RTB...

"Sir, they'll have to catch another ride."

[WernherVonTrapp]

If you sink enough tonnage, it should offset any loss to renown if you fail to complete an assignment.

[tomoose]

...that aspect of the AI (i.e. HQ decision making) was overlooked or simply kept to the basics. I guess it depends on how realistic you want to play the game. In real life, ignoring your orders would have extremely serious consequences when you got back (assuming you got back) however in the game you are free to pretty much do what you want. You can spend months and months simply popping into Midway or other locations for refuel/resupply and patrolling anywhere you want without returning to your home base if you so desire. There is no major penalty for doing so.

It would have been a nice touch to have much more variety in the responses to radio calls back to base. I don't know if it's a moddable aspect of the game. IOW if you let base know you've expended all ammo prior to your end of mission they should respond with "RTB to nearest resupply point and continue with mission orders" or "acknowledge, RTB for resupply and new patrol orders". You can obviously do that in-game but it's not really reflected in any radio traffic.