This whole DD and DC thing is confusing me. I mean there are people that find them to easy and other say they get offed' most of the time.

In GW i had the feel at the beginning that they were somewhat dumbed down Cuz i escaped every DD within 10 min. And that three times in a row in late war with an standart VIIC.
A fellow Kaleun told me it might just be luck...and well it was just luck :)

But they still could use some more agression.

It's the planes imo that get me most of the time!
:hmm:

All of what you've described is historically accurate. Contrary to popular wisdom late war was not a turkey shoot for destroyers. Anyway, destroyer AI ranges from bad to seriously deadly. There are more of the seriously deadly ones in the later war, but that doesn't mean you won't come across quite a few novices. The only real way to judge whether the destroyers are realistic is to measure how often you get killed in careers. Basically, if you run twenty careers (with the career length limited using SH3 Commander, in order for it to be historically accurate you should get results something close to this:

15 careers completed where your commander survives the career.
3 careers where you were killed by ships.
2 careers where you were killed by aircraft.

If you're simulating the boat's history (i.e. without limiting career length) after 20 careers you should see results something like this:

4 careers where your crew survives the war.
9 careers where you were sunk by ships.
7 careers where you were sunk by aircraft.

These figures reflect historical reality. If you're getting killed more often than the above, then the game is too deadly compared to the reality.

Thanks JScones! :up:

Why is the 45 minute value so important??

If the search time goes much over 45 minutes the escorts have a hard time catching up with the convoy they're supposed to be escorting. This leaves the convoy open to attack, so that after getting away the player would know for sure that the convoy was unescorted. Limiting the search time just removes the opportunity to exploit this.

Thanks Beery. The main thing I was trying to accomplish is the agonizing long depth charge attack and keeping the boat under. I read from a number of sources it was on the order of 6-24+ hours.

So far, with RuB 1.45, the longest an escort stuck around was on the order of 1 hour...and this was in summer 1944. I hate to go back to the stock game, but it seems that escorts should stick around longer.

Hehe, in the stock game escorts stick around only about 1/3 of the time they do in RUb (SH3 = 15 minutes, RUb = 40 minutes). In RUb we changed the lost contact time to make escorts stick around LONGER, not shorter. But we came up against a hard-coded limit to escort stick-around ability - that limit is about 45 minutes. There's no getting around that limit unless you're willing to accept the fact that with longer search times you'll 'know' that once you escape from the escorts the convoy they were protecting is now defenceless.

You can make the change yourself - the data is in data\Cfg\sim.cfg. Change "Lost contact time=40" to "Lost contact time=360" for 6 hours or "Lost contact time=1440" for 24 hours. But be aware (or maybe try to forget) that once you get free (and it usually takes less than an hour) no one's guarding the convoy.

I did change that value. I have been doing testing with RuB 1.45. Playing stock scenarios and a few of my own....U-505 and some I made up myself with veteran crews. Even though I have min stick around time at 2 hours, DDs still lose contact with me after roughly one hour. Then I sneak off at silent speed, 32x TC and I peek with scope to see escort still staying around...although they are back a couple of kilometers .....Scenarios are spring-summer 1944.

I know this has nothing to do with SH3 Commander which is a great program, its probably Hard coded AI behavior...


I have not tested this with careers as my IXB career is in Spring 1940.

I also tested destroyer agression mod...same results.

Once, with RuB and Hollywood damage I had a single DD follow me for 2 hours, and even at 200m it shook the boat every time, and sometimes even caused minor leaking.

This was my single best escort experience in the game.

Once the escorts lose contact the "[AI detection] Lost contact time" value in sim.cfg determines the precise number of minutes they will keep searching after losing you. After that time they will try to rejoin the convoy. As I said, in unaltered SH3 the value is 15 minutes; in RUb it's 40. In SH3 Commander the value is randomized, between 15 and 45 minutes (this randomization can be switched off or adjusted in the SH3 Commander\Cfg\Randomised events.cfg file. Nothing else relating to escort stick-aroundness has ever been altered from stock SH3 settings - that is true of all mods ever made.

If the convoy reaches a certain distance from the escorts the escorts will not speed up to catch the convoy, and instead they will simply go at the convoy's pace until the game session is over. Probably the hard-coded one hour limit that you've noticed is an attempt to make the escorts catch up with the convoy, but they don't. This one hour limit that you've observed HAS TO BE a hard-coded value, because I'm 99.9% positive that you're the first person to even notice it, and it certainly isn't in any of the config files.

I guess what I'm saying is that changing back to unmodded SH3 cannot possibly permit you to have escorts that stick around longer than in any of the mods I've mentioned. All mods and unmodded SH3 are the same - in that if you can't adjust it to meet your needs by using the "[AI detection] Lost contact time" value, then (sadly) it simply can't be adjusted to meet your needs.

I doubt that was true of a convoy escort. Hunter-killer groups would stick around for days if they thought they could get a kill, but convoy escorts rarely stayed away from the convoy hunting a sub that had gone deep. The game doesn't distinguish between hunter-killers and convoy escorts, so unfortunately you're gonna have to accept a compromise. With a convoy escort, the best compromise I've found is 40 minutes, which is probably about right for a convoy escort anyway. However, if you want every escort to act like a hunter-killer, then you can change it to be longer, but then your convoy escorts will stick around too long (and, as discussed previously, too long for the convoy's good too).

Added to this is the fact that it was incredibly rare for a DD or DE to have a successful hunt if the hunt went on for more than a few hours. I think most kills were most likely achieved with the first few DC or hedgehog salvos before the boat could get deep. Some hunter-killer groups managed to keep enough of a bead on the sub they were hunting until it was forced to surface and surrender, but those cases would be a very small minority. The vast majority of U-boats got away fairly easily if they could get deep fast enough.

Ah, the escorts don't speed up if they get too far from convoy. I wondered what they problem was.

Yeah. What you said, I suspected. :nope: I tried to make a Brit Hunter-Killer group attack a VIIC late war...They did not stick around long...about an hour or so....It would be nice if the escorts would keep contact indefinately so we would have the added complication of running out of air.... :)

As long as they keep contact with you they will stick around, won't they?

If this is true, then a group 6 DD's with good ASDIC skills might keep contact for a very long time, as long as the ASDIC skill is can be adjusted seperately from DC/Hedgehog accuracy.

The Allies were better at finding uboats later in the war because they had more escorts to make a bigger circle around the suspected position, but I don't believe their accurary improved a whole lot.

In real life, 1 elite dd crew probabaly wouldn't be able to keep contact with a uboat for very long under most conditions.

In the SIM folder you can adjust your crew's visual sensitivity to make your watch crew work correctly (changing from .01 to .02). I think you can adjust AI modifiers in this same file.

Also, I believe convoy escorts did stay around for about 40 minutes, at least before Black May 1943. Having some extra escorts to "stay around for as long as it took", was one of the big surprises for the Germans during Black May. They were no expected to have to stay submerged for as long as they often had to.

Yes.

Accuracy must have decreased (or German evasion techniques improved), since, in 1944-45 they were putting about three times as many depth charges in the water as they had been in 1939-42 for only about twice the effectiveness.

I agree. I think many people seem to think that ASDIC was a sort of infallible U-boat detector. The truth is very different. Even in 1945, only 30% of U-boats that were attacked were destroyed. That means that 70% of the time, if you were attacked by surface ships, you would escape. Not bad odds.

So, theoreticaly, if in SH3 Commander, you set the random time escorts spend looking for you after contact lost to 24 hours min, they will stick around for that long?