Berry I have a serious problem with your Fatigue mod

[sdcruz]

I have just come through a 5 hour (realtime) depth charge ordeal - no joke i stopped counting at about 60 charges - and now my crew cannot even load the torps - I had to completely stop my boat and get everyone to the bow to simply load torps - this is very unreal.

Can you modify your mod a little so they can at least do their duties - I mean this is silly they wont even load torps cause they are "tired" LOL

Regards
Shelton.

[gonzman]

I might give this mod a try out soon.

Currently i've turned fatigue off because i'm worried this kind of thing will happen .

[Doolan]

Well, it's not that they neglect their duties completely, but they are too "stressed" (I believe the expression for beery's mod was "combat stress", not "fatigue") to do it right, to the point that they need assistance just brushing their teeth.

My view: I'm sitting in an iron coffin under water, too deep to escape swimming (and it wouldn't matter anyway since I'm in the middle of the North Atlantic and I wouldn't last too long if I did). If a single depth charge goes bang 10 m away from me I'm sure my chances of survival are practically nonexistent.

Then, a bunch of destroyers, flower corvettes and whatnot start pinging. Only that scares me to death because of the stories I've heard from U-Boot captains and, after all, I'm nothing but a simple sailor. Eventually, they find us and start their attack run.

If the first depth charge explosion isn't enough to make me soil my pants directly, there's a second one. And a third one. And a fourth one. Each explosion could mean my death and all of the crew's. As the charges go off, I remember the line "all hands lost" I read in virtually every report of a lost sub.

And the thing goes on for more than 5 hours. 5 hours! 5 hours hearing the hammering of certain death a few meters away and with only a sheet of metal to shield me, that seems thinner every minute.

Even if I don't simply faint two hours into that ordeal, I swear I wouldn't even be able to hold a cup of coffee straight afterwards without spilling all of it on my sailor uniform. If you ask me to load a torpedo, I wouldn't countermand, but my hands would be too shaky to even open the tube, and my arms too weak after having puked a week's worth of canned food.

What surprises me - honestly - is how your crew didn't crack and start calling their mom while sobbing. I'm sure they didn't because it's not modeled in the game, but that's about it.

For what I have seen, the black mark on a crewman's representation means basically that in the case of green sailors, general hand trembling in experienced mates and a paper-white face in the case of the hardest of officers. 5 hours of depth charge run is easy to say, but I'm sure I would consider death to be a reasonable alternative if I were in your crewmen's shoes.

Regards,

Jack Doolan

[sdcruz]

so what should I do - go back to port like a much of sissys cause they are too stressed to reload the torps???

Regards
Shelton.

[WalterNovak]

put all possible men, as well as an officer in the torp room, and they WILL load the torps
(also make sure that silent running is of again)

[sdcruz]

thats what I did - but I had no one in the engine room (with enought guts) to make the props turn!!! This should not be the case - they should have enough manpower to at least run the war machine.

I just hope there is a fix - or am I the only one who has expeienced this.

Regards
Shelton.

[Catfish]

Hello,
funny that i have to defend a mod i was the first to criticize when it came out ;)
The first 1-2 patrols are not easy, you have to command unexperienced people and officers to certain stations to keep the boat running. However that changes over time, after your 3rd patrol your crew will still experience this combat stress, but will be able to run engines, load torpedoes and so on even with a black mark. You have to train them though, after each mission you have the possibility to hand out medals, promotions and one training course for one of your officers. If you care for your men, they will reward this with better performance.
I'm currently having 3 torpedo men, 4 machinists, 2 gunners (deck gun), one FlAK/AA gunner, 2 radio men. Additionally i got a fifth officer with repairing and gunning qualification. As soon as i use him at a station within the engine room, for repairing or when the gunners are at station, the green bar will mostly be "full".
It's much more fun with this mod, besides you do not have to get your men to sleep all the time ...
Greetings,
Catfish

[Doolan]

Aye, the mod is brilliant. While the game engine can't model certain things perfectly, Beery seems to find near-perfect "abstractions" that make everything "feel right" within tech limits.

Of course, you have to use your imagination, as you must do in all sims to have fun. I don't mean you should eat canned food and moldy bread during no TC patrols or get under the shower dressed everytime you climb up the tower in a storm, but you do need to put yourself in your crew's suits every now and then to see why they react in this or this other way.

I am playing my current career with RUb 1.4.2 and I'm on my fifth patrol with my recently acquired IXb. Indeed, the fatigue model seemed odd at first, but it wasn't as absurd as putting the crew to bed and reading fairy tales to them every four hours, so I gave it a shot.

Patrol after patrol, the crew gets better, but even in the first patrol their behaviour was "reasonable". As real U-Boot captains probably did, I tend to stick to my patrol grid and investigate nearby convoy lanes for a day or two, but never ignore my orders and travel freely to "my favourite hunting ground" to run reckless patrols just for the hell of it. In these runs, my crew performed admirably: straight route at ahead 1/3 towards my patrol area, 24 hours there, 24 to 48 hours checking a nearby convoy lane on my way back. If I haven't found anything by then I just call it a day. Only once have I entered a port, and it was Dover, which is open enough not to be considered a port :) It was at night and during a storm, so I thought it was "fair". Plus, it was on my route to the patrol area.

Of course, if I went to, say, BF29 for a patrol, then spent four weeks hunting down convoys, then checked Loch Ewe and then endured a one-day fight with all the escorts Britain can send my way, my crew would have gone nuts and become highly inefficient.

In short, RUb 1.4.2's fatigue model makes it so fatigue is "not an issue" in a "normal" U-Boot patrol, and a very serious factor if you want to go "beyond the call of duty" and win the war yourself.

Quite on spot if you ask me.

Now if that deck gun felt half as right...

[mpugsley]

An Essay on Beery's Combat Stress Model
by Matt

After initially deciding to not play with the mod, I've learned to be ok with it. (Note: by the end of writing this, I've actually come to like it a lot.)

As I see it:
Pros:
1) Less micromanagement is good. Of course, Beery's mod is not the only response. You could tweak fatigue values--both the values of growing fatigue and the values of regeneration.
2) Combat stress is something that would be nice to model and I think Beery's mod does a good job of that, modulo the cons I will list shortly, although I think simple fatigue is not something to completely ditch either. It'd be nice to have both (which is obviously not possible in SH3).

Cons (criticism as a model of combat stress):
Given the aim of modelling combat stress, there are three things I'd do differently. It's not clear to me whether any of my suggestions can be implemented at all, given that we are forced to tweak the game's fatigue feature (which is originally designed to model fatigue) to model combat stress instead.

So many thanks for Beery for the good idea of modelling combat stress and for giving us a good implemented model of combat stress. It may be (as far as my concerns go) the best model that we can get, given that we have to work with the original fatigue feature.

1) Combat stress should be induced largely by combat. Simply running from point A to point B shouldn't contribute (much) to combat stress. Beery's suggestion is to run at high TC as much as possible. But there are plenty of times when I'm doing hydrophone checks, manually searching the horizon, etc. where I don't want to run at high TC. And those times simply shouldn't contribute to combat stress. If they do, it should be an incredibly negligible amount.

Now I grant that the threat of combat can itself induce some stress (i.e. chasing down a merchant at low TC suggests that action is going to occur, which would induce stress, though not as much as actual combat. Seeing/hearing enemy planes or warships, even if you don't engage them, would give everyone the heebie jeebies.

But just moving around, with no contact, shouldn't be all that stressful (although as the patrol gets longer, mere length should put some strain on the crew's nerves).

So I don't like the idea that we're forced to use the fatigue feature to model stress. It makes stress depend solely on where you are and how long you are there (at low TC). It has nothing to do with whether combat is imminent, actual, how many combats the crew has seen on this patrol, etc.

2) The complete lack of regeneration. I agree that very tense situations can make the crew unable to perform their duties. (Think of Johann in "Das Boot", who cracks after a DC bombardment even though he's been on nine previous patrols.) But after the tenseness is over, relaxation should reduce stress. How you feel during a wasserbomb attack is quite different from how you feel two days after you've survived said attack. You should be much closer to 'normal' (albeit still worse for the wear of the attack). Here, think of how the crew in "Das Boot" came together when they hit rock bottom near Gibralter. Everyone (including Johann) worked their butts off (and efficiently before they got super tired) to save the boat.

3) It seems to me a plain fact that stress can actually increase your efficiency, given a reasonable amount of stress and given that it doesn't go on for too long. Stress can help you focus in important situations. We have adrenaline for a reason! It helps you put aside any distractions and accomplish what you need to accomplish in a tense situation. Your achievements with tension can be better than your achievements without tension.

I assume we've all heard the folk-tales of the people who have been able to lift a car or some other ridiculously heavy piece of equipment (well beyond their strength) in order to save a child who was trapped below the equipment. And beyond that, just think of situations you face in your own life where some stress has helped you--an important test, for example, perhaps in school, perhaps in martial arts.

So I would argue that long-term combat stress should have a bell-curve effect on the efficiency of individual crew members. As they leave port, they are a bit 'too relaxed' from their leave. As the patrol 'gets serious', everyone buckles down and focuses on his own job. As the patrol continues to be serious, the stress begins to wear on everyone's nerves. Indivudal crew members' efficiency goes down as this continues.

Thus:

e |
f |
f |---------------*--*
i |------------*--------*
c |---------*------------ *
i |-------*---------------- *
e |-----*------------------- *
n |---*---------------------- *
c |--*------------------------ *
y |----------------------------------
-----long-term combat stress




So it would be nice to have the following implemented:
(a) Stress increased as combat or threatened combat or heavy U-boot damage situations occur.
(b) Regeneration in crew's quarters when outside these situatiions, but limited to a new max, which is continually lowered as situations mentioned in (a) occur or continue. The effects of how the red-bar-max is limited are cumulative during a single patrol.
(c) The effects of long-term combat stress are implemented as per discussed in 3) above (bell-curve model).

It might be objected that I am trying to combine both short term and long term combat stress here where (a) Beery is only trying to model long term combat stress and (b) we certainly don't have the resources to model both kinds of stress, given the SH3 framework.

Fair objection. I would say that regeneration is more a matter of short-term stress that goes away after the dangerous period is past. Regeneration shouldn't apply to long term combat stress, which is (by definition) something that continually grows as time goes on. I was trying to accomodate both by having a single stress meter. This meter would go up with stress, and some of it could be reduced with rest. However much cannot be reduced counts as 'long term'. The amount that can reduced is itself reduced as more and more tense situations occur. I think that this would work, if we could implement it. And if we could get both short term and long term combat stress, wouldn't that be even better?

In other words, long term stress should be linear with time, short term stress should not.

I think that the following are ways to most simply modify Beery's mod so as to address my concerns:
a) Choose to model either long term or short term combat stress.
b) If the choice is short term, implement some regeneration so that stress levels are not linear with time. We can't do limits (as far as I know). So have no limit, and allow all the stress to be eliminated. We have, after all, chosen to model short term stress (by hypothesis).
c) If the choice is long term, do not implement any regeneration. This is because we can't dynamically change stress limits during a patrol, and we don't want the crew to ever completely reduce long term stress and long term stress should always be cumulative.

But since we have chosen to only model long term combat stress, I would suggest that the values of the current mod are a bit too punishing. They are reasonable as values for short term stress, but the current mod is not doing short term stress (which is consistent with the decision to not have any regeneration). So my point is that if we're doing long term only, then let's do long term only. In other words, it should take longer to get stressed (as a matter of long term stress only).

So to keep with the current theme of Beery's model as a model of long term stress, I am in perfect agreement with no regeneration, but hesitantly suggest that perhaps the stress should accumulate at a slightly slower pace. I only hesitantly suggest this because I have played very little, and so haven't worked with an experienced crew. It may be the case that Beery's numbers are right on the money as far as an experienced crew goes.

My main complaint has just been that my sonar man (who I can't easily replace with a 'ton' of guys or a major officer) gets quite quickly stressed even without combat. Granted, this was a first patrol, but it was also without combat. I was just trying to get out of the Kiel area and past Norway. That seemed both unrealistic to me and also extremely punishing, since I need my sonar guy to operate efficiently and I can't 'overload' the compartment with stressed guys to get the efficiency up.

So if we're doing just long term stress and if we assume that Beery's numbers are the best, then I'm in complete agreement with the mod (modulo my discussion of the effects of stress in 3), whether this be long term stress, short term stress, or a combination of both, which probably can't be implemented).

This has been very pleasant procrastination on the papers I have to write. It's writing, but fun. I feel productive, but am really not getting anything done that needs to get done!

[CCIP]

Great response, sir :up:


Personally, I love the fatigue mod. It puts 'management' back into crew management. I've easily operated even green crews for long patrols (read: non-RUb crews with RUb fatigue - meaning they're much less qualified/lower-ranked).

It's easy to get scared of RUb fatigue at first, as I was. It's even easier to get scared of it when you didn't actually play it.
But it gets progressively easier to love it once you learn the ropes :up:

[Lane]

Do You guys leave with a full crew? I put all my off duty crews in rest
area's but I have sailors left over and have to put them in elec motor
room during time on surface? :hmm:

Lane :)

[Twelvefield]

That's what I do, too. And I put "fatigued" crew in the torpedo rooms (to polish the brass, I guess) during long transit times.

The more I use Beery's fatigue, the more I like it, and the more I agree that the little minus signs could be eliminated altogether.

On the other hand, to summarize, it would be nice for some commanders to have the ability to "rally" their troops in dire times.

[sdcruz]

Ok thanks for the nice responses - I now understand the mod better!!


Regards
Shelton.

[Beery]

So it would be nice to have the following implemented:
(a) Stress increased as combat or threatened combat or heavy U-boot damage situations occur.

Unfortunately I don't think it can be done. The fatigue seems to be hard coded to be instigated purely by time spent under a certain time compress setting. The only way to make it purely combat/threat/damage related is to do everything except combat/damage repair/preparation for combat at 64x TC or higher. It may be possible to have it purely triggered by combat, but in real life battle stress isn't always caused purely by combat, so I think that would be replacing an abstraction with a simplification, and I'm not convinced that the simplification would work as well as the abstraction, even if it could be done. After all, a patrol's duration has a marked effect on morale too, and poor morale increases the incidence of battle fatigue. Anyway, in the end, the boat still works with a fully fatigued crew, so the way the crew becomes stressed shouldn't be much of an issue, especially after a couple of patrols.

(b) Regeneration in crew's quarters when outside these situatiions, but limited to a new max, which is continually lowered as situations mentioned in (a) occur or continue. The effects of how the red-bar-max is limited are cumulative during a single patrol.

Firstly, there is no possibility of implementing lower maximum fatigue levels as the patrol goes on. This would require heavy duty reprogramming by the developers. Given that, if regeneration is implemented even at a low level, it will effectively break the system. Any level of regeneration tends to make the player try the short-term solution of regenerating crewmen rather than using the long-term solution of giving crew qualifications. RUb's battle stress model is a careful balance of the game's fatigue and qualification systems that drives the player into a positive 'reward for work' process. All aspects of the fatigue system are carefully balanced so that:
1. The first two missions require some crew juggling. Without this there is no incentive to get qualifications.
2. The boats can run with fully fatigued crews even in the first couple of missions. However, doing this is dangerous - loading torpedoes takes longer, and because of the necessity to juggle the new crew the boat is in a state where it is endangered. This simulates the inefficiency of a green crew.
3. Qualifications and promotions build crew efficiency and raise the crew's ability to work well when stressed.
4. After the first few missions the player will reach a point where the crew qualifications and promotions will effectively negate stress. All compartments should work at full efficiency even with a fully stressed crew. This means that your veteran crew can patrol for months without losing efficiency.

(c) The effects of long-term combat stress are implemented as per discussed in 3) above (bell-curve model).

This certainly can't be done without some heavy duty reprogramming of the sort that only developers can do.

[CCIP]

(a) Stress increased as combat or threatened combat or heavy U-boot damage situations occur.

Unfortunately I don't think it can be done.

Actually, it can be and is done! If my boat gets hit hard enough, I always have 'exclamation marks' popping up above people in a certain compartment. :hmm:

It's not frequent though, as that has to involve some rather heavy damage.

[HMCS]

. RUb's battle stress model is a careful balance of the game's fatigue and qualification systems that drives the player into a positive 'reward for work' process

Except that the time compression issue with harbor traffic and the unavoidable effect of weather on "combat stress" mean that whatever you do, in the first two missions, you will reach a point where you can't reload your last two torpedoes.

[Beery]

Actually, it can be and is done! If my boat gets hit hard enough, I always have 'exclamation marks' popping up above people in a certain compartment. :hmm:

It's not frequent though, as that has to involve some rather heavy damage.

Yup. The problem is it only happens with very serious damage. It's not triggered by combat/threat/damage. It's only triggered by damage as far as I can tell.

[Beery]

. RUb's battle stress model is a careful balance of the game's fatigue and qualification systems that drives the player into a positive 'reward for work' process

Except that the time compression issue with harbor traffic and the unavoidable effect of weather on "combat stress" mean that whatever you do, in the first two missions, you will reach a point where you can't reload your last two torpedoes.

You should ALWAYS be able to load every torpedo if you're using RUb 1.42. The only thing stopping you would be if you didn't get the right people in the compartment. Actually, this version is a lot easier - too easy - because the crew was not fully balanced in 1.42. 1.43 has been balanced correctly and will be more like previous versions (harder to manage). Basically, if you can't load torpedoes with a fully fatigued crew in RUb 1.42, you're definitely doing something wrong.

However, there is a bug in the game that sometimes stops compartments from working even with the proper number of men in it. All you need to do to fix it is juggle crewmen about a bit and it will soon 'click'.

[mpugsley]

This certainly can't be done without some heavy duty reprogramming of the sort that only developers can do.

I thought that would be true. I started thinking about the mod in response to the first post of the thread, but then decided to expand to work through my thoughts on how I would like the game to function (apart from how it could be modded, which, I admit, is off-topic for the mods forum).

In the end, I agreed that the only thing that we (non-developers) could do would be to tweak some of the numbers of the mod, but that's just an issue of 'exactly' what numbers are best. And I think your numbers are good. I don't think any noticeable changes should be effected. I've finished my first two patrols and the crew is much better now. Even the first patrol with my highly fatigued sonarmen went well.

Only problem was that I threw away two fish on a fishing boat (and missing both times!) only to shortly later run into a C3 in perfect firing position -- 400 m at 90 degrees port-- with only one fish left... :doh: