no enemies encountered

[pickler]

i have been playing steam ver sh3 with gwx on win7 64bit and other mods:

gwx 16km atmosphere
gwx integrated orders
gwx merged campaign
open hatch
sh5 water
sh4 effects
eax sounds
rbs enhanced explosions
rbs water steams
rbs dual smoke
torpedo damage final v2
type ix skin
type vi skin
war radio broadcast
sh3 commander
4gb ram patch installed seperately


my problem is i have not encountered any enemy ships or planes. just friendly and neutral units. i came in contact with a friendly submarine in the middle of atlantic but no enemy vessels. i started new careers at different dates like 1942 to no avail. anyone knows why i got no enemies? running sh3 vanilla i get lots of radar warnings and enemy aircrafts and tonnea of convoys.

[Feuer Frei!]

As others have reported, you can go for days without seeing any enemy units.
Or complete your objective(ie patrol grid for 24 hours) and then sail home to refit without seeing a single enemy unit.
Thank god for dynamic campaigns :salute:
It is not unusual to experience what you are experiencing.
How long have you patrolled in these instances?
If you want enemy units at a great amount, i suggest starting a 1944 or 1945 campaign, i guarantee you you will have your enemy units then :D

[pickler]

As others have reported, you can go for days without seeing any enemy units.
Or complete your objective(ie patrol grid for 24 hours) and then sail home to refit without seeing a single enemy unit.
Thank god for dynamic campaigns :salute:
It is not unusual to experience what you are experiencing.
How long have you patrolled in these instances?
If you want enemy units at a great amount, i suggest starting a 1944 or 1945 campaign, i guarantee you you will have your enemy units then :D

thanks for the response, i finished about 3 patrols. one to kingston jamaica with no sightings. on the return home i spotted a single british cargo ship which i sunk with guns. other than that nothing else seen or sunk. i have tried following the convoy paths outlined in gwx map with no luck. each patrol is about 6 hours. im thinking of reinstalling the game.

[Feuer Frei!]

each patrol is about 6 hours. im thinking of reinstalling the game.

6 Hours? Be patient :)

Can take a lot longer to encounter enemy units than 6 hours gameplay.

Like i said, can take days.

No need to re-install the game, the re-install won't add more enemies in a shorter amount of time.

Good luck.

[Gustav Schiebert]

...i came in contact with a friendly submarine in the middle of atlantic but no enemy vessels .... i get lots of radar warnings and enemy aircrafts and tonnea of convoys.
You're not on U-96 with Jurgen Prochnow are you? Don't think they even see a ship until about an hour in, and they managed to bump into Thompsen.

It's frustrating at times but perseverance is the key. Try:

Hanging around the big convoy lanes - http://etnies.muskatli.hu/sh/faq/SH3_MAP.jpg
If you can spare the time, dropping the TC, as you'll miss fewer of the radio reports
If you have a decent hydrophone man, do more searches underwater. Best possible visibility is about 12km, hydrophones can hear much further than that
Other than that, it's just patience and perseverence! I'm doing a DID campaign on full realism at the moment which (so far) is going very well with 75,000 GRT sunk in about 5 months. But even on the successful patrols, 7, 8 even 9 days with no sightings at all are common.

Good hunting!

[HW3]

If you want convoys, hang out in BE64 for a week or two from 1942 on, you'll find convoys there.:yep:

:subsim:

[mookiemookie]

AM52!!!!!

[Johnfb]

If you can spare the time, dropping the TC, as you'll miss fewer of the radio reports
If you have a decent hydrophone man, do more searches underwater. Best possible visibility is about 12km, hydrophones can hear much further than that




Both very important points for you and worth remembering.
I usually run TC at no more than 64 but standard for me is 32.

[Marcello]

thanks for the response, i finished about 3 patrols. one to kingston jamaica with no sightings. on the return home i spotted a single british cargo ship which i sunk with guns. other than that nothing else seen or sunk. i have tried following the convoy paths outlined in gwx map with no luck. each patrol is about 6 hours. im thinking of reinstalling the game.

That's what convoys were for in real life: turning normally busy sea lanes into a desert where u-boats would burn fuel for weeks before they could make a contact, if at all. That's part of the reason the KM estimated before the war that something in the ballpark of a thousands of u-boats would be needed to rapidly win the war, as covering all the possible approaches in sufficient strenght required huge numbers. That the Luftwaffe could never provide a meaningful number of properly equipped long range patrol planes with suitably trained crews only made matters worse. And thanks to allied code breaking efforts traffic would be actively re-routed around the u-boats (though british codes being in turn compromised the germans were sometimes able to repay in kind).
You can patrol choke points where trafic converge but it is a risk, at least in 1944 even raising a snorkel for few minutes is playing russian roulette in AM52, and you still have to be prepared to spend quite a bit of time there.

[scudder]

One thing this game teaches you pretty quickly is that there is A LOT of ocean out there, and one tiny u-boat just can't cover all that much area. As folks have mentioned, there are of course sea lanes that we can patrol around/through, but a lot of things have to go right to run into a convoy. Remember too that, at best, you can cover about 12 nautical miles/hr. To put that in perspective, the English Channel is about 300 nautical miles, or just over a day's travel, on the surface, at full speed.

[pickler]

thanks for the responses. I will be heading to AM52 and other coordinates as suggested. my other problem is also the never ending storms. I have read some threads here on them but i have had no luck including a mod I downloaded to resolve this. Either way after about a week of patrolling the weather gets severe and the storms never stop. I have started a career in mid 1943 now so hopefully i will see more enemies.

[Johnfb]

Its worth remembering that SH is not a shoot em up, its a game that allows you to experience the uboat in all its boring glory with moments of excitement and panic.
Thats what makes it so great.
Thats why the radio mods are so important...for listening while you patrol for hours without a sniff of a ship....enigma codes are another boredom breaker.

Real uboat life.

[Pisces]

I'd like to re-emphasize: stay low on the time compression. Higher than say 256 and you risk having them hyperjump invisible through your 3d-environment bubble. And in the worst case they (a nice convoy with 6 DDs) materialize when at point blank range, with you little to no time to dive and evade.

Well, atleast you are assured you weren't alone.

[iambecomelife]

Have you tried the Western Approaches and the area South of the Irish Sea? You say you have a GWX setup. When I had GWX installed there was usually quite a bit of traffic in those areas.

Of course, many contacts turned out to be patrol craft or small vessels. For the most part I was satisfied with GWX's traffic level - if anything the oceangoing traffic in GWX may be heavier than real life.

[CherryHarbey]

thanks for the responses. I will be heading to AM52 and other coordinates as suggested. my other problem is also the never ending storms. I have read some threads here on them but i have had no luck including a mod I downloaded to resolve this. Either way after about a week of patrolling the weather gets severe and the storms never stop. I have started a career in mid 1943 now so hopefully i will see more enemies.

you talk of sightings in an earlier post and now storms.....
are you diving for a listen on the hydrophones every few hours?
you can hear further than you can see, especial when your visibility is reduced by storms.

[TheDude107]

^ I didnt use the hydrophones until reading some posts on this forum. It helps for finding lone ships, even during the daytime with calm seas and a good watch crew.

During storms I just cruise underwater into the wind(to get out of the storm) or cut the engines while submerged.

Your crew gets tired faster out on the surface during a storm and your more likely to bump into a destroyer at point blank range then succesfully engage a ship by sighting it first.

[pickler]

oh i forgot i don't do more than 128x compression or 256 sometimes. Yes i have tried western approaches and just tried AM52 this weekend. I only saw a lot of destroyers and small vessels. However i ran into this small task force with escort carrier north of the scapaflow area. I managed to sink the carrier, so that was fun.

[mookiemookie]

If you're feeling brave, head on into the Irish Sea or St. George's Channel. Hang out outside the Liverpool port. You'll see lots of DDs and ships.

[tsotha]

This describes my last cruise to a "t". The only ships I could find were destroyers and patrol boats in the channel. Cruised around for weeks wasting fuel before finally docking up in abject failure. I should have had a shuffle-board painted on the deck and filled the tubes with schnapps.

[Rokko]

Funny, my problem is the exact opposite at the moment. I'm playing a NYGM carrier in a IXB in 1939/1940 and encounter way too many ships at the moment. I already deactivated Single Merchant Contacts. It's my third patrol and I have already encountered 4 convoys and 2 capital ships. Sinking 50.000 BRT on a patrol would have been a huge and astounding success during the war. Right now that seems to be my standard patrol achievement. I actually thinking about ignoring Convoy contact reports from time to time or long range sightings which strike as impropable.

[Rokko]

Oh wow, I just sank a Revenge battleship going in the middle of a convoy somewhere in AM02 with just one torpedo :o
Almost missed but hit right in the bow. Almost looked as if he was trying to dive and when the screws came out of the water and the forward gun section was underwater, all was over for him. Sank within 10 minutes.
I fired 4 torpedoes of course. One hit a different ship way too early, another went deep and the last one missed and clonked of another ship behind the battleship.

Edit
Oh and now she is attempting to backflip while sinking. Smooth move.

[pickler]

well i do use the hydrophone but i have never detected anything unless i was close to a ship i picked up with the radar. anyway i started my longest patrol ever by crossing the suez canal into the red sea. my whole journey i saw nothing but destroyers and escort carriers. i took a lot of damage from bottoming out once and hitting rocks and stuff. however entering gulf of oman i encountered a lot of unprotected tankers. it was happy times all over again. not like 1943 at all. i think ill transfer to penang now!

[HW3]

When you are using the hydrophones you need to turn up the volume on your speakers to hear better. You also can hear better if you stop your engines/electric motors.

:subsim: