There are also areas that do not have much traffic and what little there may be, you could miss because not close enough to sense them. Another good reason to RTB so HQ can send you to a more productive area. South Japan is always a rich environment.
-Pv-

Yeah, you got to love patrols to Empire waters ! :up:

Here's my story - first patrol, starting 8 dec 41 from Pearl in a brand new Gar class. Set a course for one of those stupid "insert agent in Japan" missions. Set speed 10 knots. Sail away!

Upon arrivial I had yet to make contact of any kind with the enemy. Shortly after deploying the agent I got a contact report of a small convoy from the other side of Japan. Nothing I could do, so I set sail for East China Sea. After patrolling E China Sea for nearly all of my fuel, I was left with a sink merchants mission that I couldn't complete. My ONLY contacts were 2 airplanes and a convoy which I never cought up to (not havign radar + fast convoy + zz-ing = :( ). I resorted to raiding Saipan on my way back to Pearl to fufill my sink objective. The DD, sampans and 2 merchants there were the only visual ship contacts the entire patrol.

I docked at PH on the 1st of Feb 1942. 2 months and no ships spooted at sea. Dissapointing.

As you already know by now, a contact appearing on your map is not a directive to go sink it. These are just intelligence reports. After dropping off your agent and the icon goes grey, that is the time to call in and wait. HQ will calculate how much fuel you have and "try" to send you on a mission you "should" be able to complete. It's up to you to keep track of how much fuel you need to get home and turn back when you reach that point no matter how interesting or imparitive your patrol area.

It's really quite easy. I look at how much fuel
I used to get where I am and reserve the same amount of fuel to get back from the same location. I add a 5% fudge factor for contacts on the way and really bad weather. If I move to a new patrol area, I have to add the additional fuel used to my initial reserve. This sometimes requires me to "sit" in a lucrative area with engines at very low speed if I'm getting low on fuel and have too many torps left. If I don't get contacts, I start home when I reach the reserve no matter what.

The key is to think of yourself as if you are flying a plane instead of driving a car. You HAVE to land before the fuel gives out no matter what. Even more, you cannot land in any one of thousands of airports along the way. You only have a few landing strips thousands of miles apart so you cannot just go exploring without paying a price.
-Pv

I think i changed the wording for "refits" to just that. "ReArm/Refuel" or something like that. I have to give Ubisoft dev's props for figuring out a system that didnt break the patrol, but i think it should have been a more limited system. In reality, subs didnt fuel up from near empty to full, they just topped off their tanks, or took on just enough fuel to get home.

That oversight in place, it opens the door for some serious abuse. But really, doing so is working against yourself. The longer you stay out at sea, the longer your load times will become, as well as causing traffic issues (or rather lack thereof) as explained by Tater. The game really does load traffic in chunks based on date, but i never thought to push a patrol long enough to where it would cause issues other then loading times.


I usually refuel once, and thats come back from patrol at a midway stopover while enroute to pearl.

Like Ducimus, I use the refit as a way to give me the time to unload all the initial torps then it's back to base. Staying out longer to dump successive torp loads ruins the game for me.
-Pv-

Double barreled partols seem relatively common (not absurdly rare, but not SOP, either) for the australian based boats later (mid war) in the war. But the total duration was not massively increased. Go out, shoot all the fish, grab gas and fish, patrol the home.

If you are out past ~75 days, it's too long, period.

tater