I've been doing some testing the past two days about all of the above and have found some interesting things. I thought I would pass them along..for what it is worth..naturally...your opinions may vary.


The UNEXPLAINED DAMAGE THING..well it isn't unexplained any longer. Here is what happens.

Airplane patrol limiting mod is installed (in my case ASW 9.0). This mod allows you to be detected even after submerging. I believe I read a similar warning in other major mods that feature air patrol limiting.

That is certainly true. They can detect your boat submerged..and whats more they can also attack it. :yep: If you are under TC for some reason the damage doesn't register until you stop TC...then all hell breaks loose.

Here is the senario: I am steaming along at 1500+ TC and an aircraft is spotted. I order dive to periscope depth and cut speed to zero. I restart TC to 4000+ ...intending to wait until dark. What I did not realize is that while I was at periscope depth I was attacked,sometimes repeatedly by the aircraft, though because of the high TC the damage is not registered and reported immediately. So it appears that I have evaded the air patrol but the fact is I have been devastated by it...:nope:

When I come out of TC the damage is reported and registered and it is only an illusion that the damage was from an unknown source. :huh:

This can be avoided by never ordering dive to periscope depth but instead ordering crash dive and going very deep...or removing the mod entirely...I'm switching to Webster's limited Ac mod version.

13th Patrol Jinx:

Next what appeared to me to be a 13th patrol jinx was really a matter of the SAVE FILE becoming so large that it became unmanageable! It was simply a coincidence (though a seafareringly romantic one) that the 13th patrol was the point where this showed up.

Along about the 13th patrol mine grew from a few Kb in size to a whopping 25 Mb and weird things began happening..apart from the ASW mod's quirks.

Torpedo tubes damaged/repaired incessantly. All ahead full/All ahead stop incessantly. Unable to lay in a waypoint...on and on it went.

What finally killed my career on the 14th patrol(after many attempts to revive it) was this: I fired 4 torpedos at two ships and all four impacted and the ships sank. HOWEVER the game failed to register these 4 fish as impacted and the stopwatch kept timing their "runs". The torpedo icons continued to appear on the periscope screen and the TBT screens. Saving and reloading failed to clear these "running" torpedos from the game...in fact..returning to base, ending the patrol, and starting a new one failed to correct this problem. Yep..I started the 15th patrol at Brisbane with four fish running hot, straight, and normal and that goofy stopwatch cheerfully and dutifully timing their "progress into infinity."...:shifty: :nope:

My thinking is that after so many patrols the save game file simply becomes bogged down and goes screwy, keeping up with all those promotions, medals, and special abilities for the crewmen. I may (probably am ) wrong but I can't see any other reason the saved files would grow to such preposterous dimensions....:hmm: ..Of course it does keep a running tab on all your sinkings too...so... http://www.clipartof.com/images/emot..._shrugging.gif

At this point I said to heck with this and started a new career beginning at the point the old one ran amok. I really do want to see how the last year and a half of the war plays out. I really would have prefered doing it with a season crew rather than a entirely grass green new bunch though...:yep:..yep...

Using the free cam I can easily see my boats silhouette at periscope depth and even the periscope shears are clearly visible so if the aircraft are going to pass within 5 nm I'll wait it out at 140'.

I don't use the aircraft limiting mod so I don't know what effects it has but the largest my save files usually get are 5 - 6 MB during a patrol and only a few hundred KB in port between patrols.

Art

In the unmodded version it doesn't matter what you can see on the external camera. If you are at periscope depth with 'scope retracted these planes simply can not detect you.

In the AC patrol limiting mods I have tried this is no longer the case.They can detect you at periscope depth. I don't understand why limiting the number of patrols involves this increased detection ability...but it does....

from ASW readme: -Aircraft now 'see' the player at depth. Choice of dive depth is now more critical in aircraft evasion.

amen to that..:yep:

I'm pretty certaint hat I read somethinfg similar also in TMO's documentation.

I didn't say or even imply that the mega size saved game files were the result of any AC limiting mods. The fact is I don't know why they grow so huge late in careers. Even early as late '43 a new patrol starts out as a file of only a few KBs but over the course of one single patrol can and do grow to 25MB at least....possibly even larger. And as I said, it was my experience that at this stage the saves become unstable. Screwy events begin to occur.

OK. Understood. Kind of like high-scope then. When I first got SH4 I was patrolling using high-scope (mostly before radar) a technique I've read about and also used in the old SHCE. It worked great in SH1 ........ come to find out that in SH4 high-scope has no effect in increasing the horizon.

For realism I'll continue to dive to 140' for aircraft and also use high-scope before radar.

Right now I'm using a collection of mods and techniques I've learned from watching the modders probably best described as my version of flavored to taste. I'd like to avoid those 25 MB saves though.... so far I've been successful avoiding them..... lol

Art