Then simply don't award them.

Well not awarding them to crewmen is easy enough, what I want to find out is if I can make it impossible for the game to award them to me until it's historically appropriate.

I can use Commander to alter the relevant sections of the basic.cfg file, with different alterations depending on the in-game date. I'm just not sure how exactly to alter them to make it all work out.

For instance, if I just delete the line that applies to a particular award, will that make it impossible for the game to give it to me without screwing up anything else?

Is there away to tie awards to something other than what is already indicated (tonnage or renown), such as number of patrols completed?

Just due to the game limitations a lot of this kind of thing comes down to the whim of the player.

Personally, I promote only one to two crew per patrol. I narrow it down to the ones with the most experience points above their rank and then it's just a random choice.

Not as far as I am aware....but I've been known to be wrong before :doh:

I collect and personally have several of the above mentioned items (among some other interesting Kriegsmarine stuff :DL ) and ever since I started playing the game this has been a enormous point of irritation for me. Have spent more time trying to figure out how to control/fix how you (the captain) are personally awarded medals (no need for the crew as that's easily held in check) so that you don't get medals out of order or before they were available (something that I've found is not possible to do by putting a date restriction, only way is to by renown).

As the captain you can/eventually get the u-boat badge with diamonds. There were only 29 of these awarded during the whole war, and as a prerequisite you had to have a RK w/Oak Leaves before you could be eligible to receive it. At times I've been awarded it after my 2nd patrol, really burns me when I see such gross errors.

The u-boat clasp is my 2nd biggest annoyance with the medals, it was originally bronze, then in November 1944 a higher grade was created - SILVER. That was the final clasp made, there was never a gold version, not even a prototype even made. The game's looks like a gold award, or tombak (which wasn't used as a material for this particular badge because of its natural gold appearance) when it should be dull or silver.

My biggest beef is the RK Brillant, this was only awarded to 1 person, the famous Stuka pilot Hans Udel (who also had a very impressive medium/heavy/dive bomber clasp with an "1800" pendant), and that was didn't happen until nearly wars end anyways. That award has no business being in the game at all, its a wasted spot that could've been used for an additional medal like the war merit cross/knights cross of the war cross. Using the German Order would have been a much better choice (and very cool looking) to award insted of the RK Brillant.

Just deleting the relevant lines from the game doesn't work, there's a built in default or backup in the coding to handle that problem and the medals still get handed out. Only thing you can do is change the amount of renown required for each award, though that isn't 100% fullproof either.

For the crew their awards are determined by tonnage, easy to fix. The sub badge is odd though in its determined by how much renown you get per patrol. Don't remember the defaults, my GC is set at 60,000 and RK at 70,000 (U-boat clasp is at 200,000 right now so that it will practically never get awarded (only personally had 2 patrols with over 200,000 in tonnage) until 1944 and I then change it).

If you'd like to work on the medals I'd welcome the help, so far I've figured out what all the values are and what they are linked to, am just missing on last piece on how to restrict awarding/require other medals to be pre-requisites. Once that is finally done I can 86 the RK Brillant and add something else, probably the Knights Cross of the War Cross or German Order.

uboat.net is really good and accurate about their information, though not very detailed in some areas. I've got (what most consider) one of the best books around for info on medals/badges that focusses only on the awards themselves (as a collector there are a lot of books that are similar but focuss more on jewler's marks, manufacturers stamps and other characteristics in order to detect fakes), its Military Awards of the Third Reich by John R. Angolia LTC (retired). I refer to it frequently as it has a nice amount of photo's and historical information that doesn't require hours of digging around on the internet trying to find.

This is all I have tried so far, and I suspected that it was the best - if not the only - way to handle it. The trick seems to be settling on what amounts to use as requirements for each award. What I've got now has given me medals quicker than I expected, so I'll probably be adjusting numbers upwards between this career and the next.

Well that's interesting since I hadn't been able to figure that one out at all. Might help me in adjusting things so that the game doesn't award it too soon, but apparently there is no way to tie it to # of patrols? Which is a shame really. At any rate, I'd be happy if I could just prevent the game from giving it to me too soon... I'd rather award it to myself at the appropriate time by editing my career files once, than have to edit them several times over when the game keeps doing it at a historically inappropriate ones.

ATM I'd be happy just to get them in the "right" order and not on a date when it would be historically impossible. I don't care so much about matching up with historical records on how often a particular medal was given out, or what amount of tonnage on average was required to get it. It's the timing and the order that annoy me, because when that's wrong I know it immediately and it bugs me.

So far all I've done besides tweaking the tonnage requirements is use the 'static settings.cfg' file in Commander to create different versions of the relevant section of the game's basic.cfg that get applied to different in-game date ranges... in an effort to make, say, the German Cross unavailable before the appropriate date by assigning an impossibly high tonnage requirement to it until that date passes, and then revising it downward from that point forward. (Which is something I've seen referred to in other older threads on this subject, although I've not read a report that doing it actually worked as planned. And I don't know either yet.)

But that means tweaking the KC requirements as well for the same date ranges, since it seems like the GC should be awarded before a KC if it's awarded at all.

Anyway - I'm sticking with what I have for this career, and then I'll try some more tweaking before starting the next one. To that end, though, I would love to know the scoop on all the lines in that section that I don't have a handle on yet, and any help towards that end would be much appreciated. Even if doesn't result in solving the "problem" in my case, now that I've started looking at it, I'm too curious not to want to know how it all works.

Seems like altering the look of the Front Clasp would be easy enough, wouldn't that be just a matter of altering the appropriate graphics file to look like it has the correct metallic finish?