I had the battle of Coral Sea happen in one of my patrols yesterday.. and my orders sent me to patrol hundreds of miles away! I was so tempted to say stuff the orders and head for the battle area and try and get some carriers.. but I'm trying to play on 100% realism and I guess that means obeying orders too.. So far playing like this I haven't seen a carrier, much less sunk one!

It is a shame in a way that ships re-spawn, at least until the point they were sunk.. but the rate at which some people are sinking ships, would some then moan if there was nothing left to sink after their 4th patrol?

I don't know how many combat ships are sailing around during the campaign. Maybe there are too many? In the war they were in port longer than they were at sea.. is this modelled in SH4? Maybe the Carrier TF's should have more ASW escorts? I think one answer would be to reduce the chances of seeing a carrier.. reduce the intel from messages.. if you can't find a carrier, you can't sink one and, if you do find one, it will be the highlight of your career rather than 'oh another carrier, suppose I better sink it'

If youre looking for carriers just start chasing down task forces. Be aware though, if youre running on the surface during the day and you get anywhere near them, they scramble lots of aircraft.

I got lucky with mine and they passed right over me while I was in high TC wasting daylight. I was able to surface straight up, fire 4 fish, and submerged to 300 feet straight down again. They never knew what happened.

Good topic, Tat2, :up:

I suppose it has to do with playing styles as well as realism options. I play with all realism options on, including manual TDC, realistic sensors, and no automatic map updates; not because I fancy myself as a rivetcounter but I like the suspense and challenge of actually getting in attack position and getting a fish in the target. So when I do chase down a task force, about 3 times out of 4, I am not in a good position to attack. I surface and try to "end around" but I have to stay at least 7~10 miles away or the escorts come over and work me over (and cause me to lose the TF).

Even when I manage to stay just out of their detection range, still I frequently lose the task force. I use up to 64X time compression as I try to get ahead of the TF. Without the realtime map updates, the only contact I have are the occasional radio reports and visual/radar/sonar conacts. Sometimes when I drop to 1X to check contact, they are gone. They change course or zig when I zag, I guess. I do not mind the frustration, it's part of the simulation.

When I do get a good approach angle, I have to get in the escort screen. Quite often I leave my scope up too long or I'm churning too fast and I am detected…again, I have to go deep and spend 4 hours evading the escorts. Bye, bye task force :(

Ok, then when the magic moment arrives, I have gotten in front of the TF, managed to dive deep as the lead or side escorts pass over me, get back to periscope depth and take range, bearing, estimate the speed, and AOB of a capital ship; all the while not leaving my scope up for more than 60 seconds (in real life it was more like 10!); make 360 sweeps to be sure I have not been detected and impending doom is headed my way; set up the TDC for a final solution,…. Range to target closes to 1500 or less, good angle, I fire a salvo…

Dud torpedoes, bad TDC solution, misses, a couple of premature explosions…target changes course or zigs just as or after I fire… all these factors account for more misses than hits...

I've sunk one carrier and one battleship so far in 3 weeks of play/review testing. :) And believe me, there was a champagne feeling both times!

It's not how many ships you sink but how much gratification you get out of them. I do not look down my nose at people who play in Easy mode, not at all. Each to their own, and I am very appreciative that SH4 allows people to play at the level they enjoy most. I would caution someone saying the game is too easy or not a simulation when they are playing it in Easy more, though. I would say the game is pretty hardcore simulation, if played that way. Damn fun, too. :yep:

good hunting!
Neal

Ah gotcha. Ive only ever tried to chase down a task force once before. As I said in my previous post they filled the sky with aircraft as soon as they found out. The one time I did kill carriers was total luck and they ran into me while I was sitting still. All I had to do was wait for them to float 800 yards in front of me.

Thanks a lot for the info. Doing it the right way sounds like a ton of work but also a ton of fun. However I really did enjoy being spoon fed two easy carriers. :p Both of them went up in huge fire balls. I dont know if I got lucky and hit their fuel stores or what, but it was fast.

Guess Ill chalk them up as one in a million lucky chances. :D

That is the key to a great sim, IMHO. I have too many troubles right now to make SH4 running and working as advertized, but I have no doubt that I will eventually enjoy the sim.

This being said, one of the best patrol I had with SH3/GWX resulted in no ship sunk but tons and tons of fun trying to evade 4 DDs for hours in the Channel...
Partly out of luck and mainly thanks to good decisions (pat on the back, here...), I managed to sink two and to send a status report. As I was running desperatly low on oxygen and batteries, with heavy damage, I suddenly hear booms and bangs... Heinkel bombers came to my rescue to sink one DD and badly cripple the other one...

Before SH3, I never played a game which made me jump with joy like on this memorable night!

Nice description of the joys of playing at high realism, Neal. There's a lot less action but the action you do find is so much sweeter. I've only just started playing with no map updates, and I'm horrible at tracking down contacts, but I'm gonna stick with it and I'm really looking forward to being able to do it a little more consistently. I've gone from using all of my torpedoes before even reaching my patrol grid to, currently, only sinking 2 fishing boats and a merchant after 3 weeks of patrol. :o I'll get there.

Anyway, I'm a huge fan of dynamic content in games, and I would love a fully dynamic campaign in a silent hunter game, but I'm not sure it'd work very well. I mean, there's the practical issue of range. Jets can travel a lot faster than submarines can.. how exactly would a fully dynamic sub campaign work that would make it different to what we already have? The range/speed limitation would mean you'd have an extremely minor effect on any large scale operation.

DAMN NEAL!

I mean... DAMN!

Now I want to go home and run a few missions.

Stupid stupid job...

JCC

its a dynamic campaign as opposed to a scripted one, because you never know from one campaign to the next which ships you will encounter. The object of the campaign is not to recreate WW2, but to simulate being a sub captain where you never when or what situation you will encounter.

Certainly Falcon 4 has a more refined campaign engine (I have spent a lot of time in that virtual cockpit since '99), but it is simulating a war which lasts at most two weeks, whereas sh3 and 4 are simulating wars which last years. Furthermore, even after the close to 15-20 years of programming, there are still problems with the engine (visit any falcon 4 forums to see).

In the context of a submarine simulation, the actual dynamic campaign is fine, plus I'm sure the modders will fine tune it to lower the probability of warships appearing. From what I can see, there are too many japanese ships of all type roaming the pacific. I am sure that was a design decision to give players something to shoot at. In RL life a sub could be on patrol 2-3 months, see only 2-3 ships and sink only one ship, historical, but not much fun.

No this game doesnt feature a dynamic campaign - just a load of random and scripted encounters. A dynamic campaign alters as the player interacts in the virtual world. In SH4 the players interaction cannot change anything. IE all convoys respawn as do warships. The player cannot destroy something and have it destroyed when they start the next mission. The goings on in the campaign world are not affected in any way by the player. So no its definitely not a dynamic campaign in any sense. The Falcon 4 game is completely different in that the player can blow things up and affect future events because of it. Not only that but it is clever enough to allow the AI units to similarly alter future events over the course of their own missions. You do not see any of that in SH4 or SH3.

Dynamic requires things not in the game, IMO. There is a difference between a scripted campaign (mission_1, Mission_2, and so forth), a random campaign (Mission_1, Mission_37, Mission_5, Random_mission, Mission_13, etc, all with randomizedtargets inside the mission), and a dynamic campaign. A dynamic campaign requires that the actions of the units in that particular campaign propagate in time. Ie: If you are the sub at Midway and find the Kido Butai, the results of the engagement YOU get in can change the outcome of the Battle. You get there late, and the SBDs have no DD (that should have been chasing YOU) to follow to the CVs, and 3 CVs are not destroyed in 5 minutes. If the game doesn't allow for that, it just plain is not dynamic.

Not knowing what you will encounter in no way makes it dynamic. That said I don't actually like truely dynamic campaigns because there is no way the devs of such a game can model everything that matters well enough.

What I'd prefer is a semi dynamic campaign where there are finite numbers of units in each class, and sinking them decreases the number in the remaining pool of such units. Sink 2xYamato Class BB, and that's it, none are seen again by you in that campaign. If a future mission requires Yamato or Musashi, the mission treats the asked for unit as "Generic_BB" instead of NBB_Yamato (or whatever it is called in the sea files).

But he does make a solid point in that any given sub isn't going to have a huge effect on the war, except for the very lucky and very rare fellow who takes out an aircraft carrier or a transport with a general onboard. It's the cumulative effect over a period of years that made the submarines an effective force in the Pacific. Is a nuts-and-bolts, dynamic, sim really going to feel that much different in a sub sim? And if different would it actually feel better to most players?

He's also right about Falcon 4. This is a North Korean blitzkreig taking place over a matter of weeks in a relatively confined area where the action is moving all over at a rapid pace. Blowing out a bridge or taking out AA defenses might have a meaningful effect but you're still at the discretion of the AI that develops tasking orders. You're not going to win the war single-handed.

You cant actually havew a dynamic campaign in a game like SH4 because its very nature means that events will wuickly start to unfold differently from history so making the game not a true reflection of WW2 events. F4 it can work because its not a historical war. If it allowed you to blow up ships like the Yamato and rule them out of the campaign that would also change history. Its about as good as you can get in a historical campaign, the only alternative in my view would be campaign with the same historical forces but then events unfolding as they happen. That would be interesting to see what would happen if the Japanese had managed to get all the aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbour etc. They would of course still have lost eventually.

This is one of the things I dont understand about the entire Pacific conflict how Japan could even consider going up against America and think they could get any kind of successful resolution.

I believe the Japanese knew it was a battle that would not be easily won if at all. They were leaning on not at all. Cutting raw materials and oil, from what I understand, created the problem. Now if you are already getting cut off my the US and supply is short, winning looks remote at best.

Said it best in TORA TORA TORA...."I'm afraid we have awoken a sleeping giant."

TORO?

http://www.toro.com/index.html

I think you meant Tora!, Tora!, Tora!

;)

The Japanese knew they couldn't defeat USA. Their plan was to secure the oil and resources they needed and construct a defensive line (co-prosperity sphere) Yamamoto knew he could only fight on level terms for 6 months to a year after a successful Pearl Harbor, after that it would be in trouble.

The plan was that the US would see the strength of the Japanese defensive ring and come to a diplomatic solution that would allow the Japanese to keep the resources they'd taken. They completely mis-read the attack on PH because they assumed it would diminish America's resolve for war when infact it ensured America would not rest until Japan had surrendered.

The fact that the US carriers were at sea (only just) and their own mistakes and bad luck at Midway ensured that they got 6 months on the attack, rather than the year they thought possible. Although they were still on the offensive for longer on the ground campaign.