I also have to say that, especially the 'performance' of the sonar auto crew, has dramatically reduced the joy in playing this sim for me. First and foremost I wanna be a captain with the possiblitly to check out the station myself in certain situations.

The issue is that there is no possibility to enhance the autocrew by modding it, since it is hard coded. Many other bugs/open issues can/are solved by editing the DB or the doctrine scripts. (For example the catastrophic AI concerning air platforms).

I'm not a submariner but I think the performace of any (complex) naval platform is related to the quality of the teamwork on it.

What a pity that this probably isn't tough to code, since for a basic implementation you just need to generate some random properties based on a skill level. And I also think the bad sonar AI issue could be relatively easy fixed by a patch.

By the way: Is the auto crew of Sub Command really better?

Agreed! For whatever reason the Autocrew on 688i IS better, but not in SC IMO.

How do you know the Kilo didn't have you in it's sights also?:DL

Seriously, I like both SC and DW, SC being my preferred option, but that's a personal choice. Whilst I agree that the Autocrew could be improved upon if you like to play the CO's role in the sim, I find manning the sonar quite rewarding. In fact the only Autocrew I leave switched on is TMA, which is just too much for me to want to learn. I have played SC since it came out in the UK and added the SCX mod when it was released, which greatly improved the sim no end. My only gripe is that sometimes the AI isn't as challenging as I would like it to be, but other than that a top notch sim in my opinion. Never played 688i so can't compare SC and DW with it.

Nemo

It's relatively easy to learn....if there's like one or two contacts out there, but most of the time, there's LOTS of contacts out there. I've found it best to just let Autocrew handle this function and then concentrate on getting it the best data I can. I usually handle sonar myself but in a contact rich environment, I sometimes even turn sonar over to Autocrew or else I fall behind fast.

Doing your own TMA is fun if you're in a one on one battle.:up:

Generally by their behavior. When they detect an American boat they will begin to act erratically.

Even if there are many contacts out there, a proficient sonar player will filter out those contacts that are not relevant keeping only the most interesting one on which to do a tma.
I can agree that in singleplayer maybe putting tma on manual is too much to cope for a single person, but in multiplayer multistation with 2 players onboard it woud be a waste to have tma on auto and not manual.
Yesterday I played a great mission, 7 units in total, blu side : frigate (1p)+ helo(1p) + seawolf (2 p) + u212(1p) vs red side : 2 akula II and a kilo. Operation zone in the antartic with red side having to destroy a us installation (the kilo would search for the land target and relay the info to the akulas). Well let me tell you I was onboard the seawolf doing manual tma, weapons station and periscope and with a pretty good player on sonar we had to track many contacts (so much that at a certain point I was undergoing information overload :haha:). I had to tell my crew to stop marking every damn contact on sonar. Just look out for the interesting ones and forget the rest and what do you know, with a little search we got hold of the akula and sunk him. The other one we couldn't because the game crashed before my second attack could hit him.

If i remember well, sonar autocrew detected contacts only if the signal to noise ratio in the Broad band sonar was sufficent. No detection at all from the Narrow Band sonar, but I'm not sure.

It is a very frequent situation to see just one or two frequencies in the Narrow Band. This is practically always insufficent to classify the contact automatically...

And then the signal is also to weak to have the number of helix of the contact.

So my understanding is that to make the sonar autocrew work efficently it would have to cheat and make use of unavailable information, while if you man the sonar station yourself you can do one or two more things:

- If intelligence reports tell you there is a certain class in a certain area, you can use that info while autocrew can't.
- for example if between you and the contact there is seamountains, changing depth can tell you if the contact is surface or submerged (some times this sole information told me i was tracking a submerged contact)
- the sonar station includes the active station, with in DW was not so forbidden, especially when there were only Kilo's around...
- You might want to increase the strength of the contact's signal by changing depth, this happens quite often...

Those are some reasons that come to my mind to say that an autocrew sonar would have to cheat to do better or equal to an average manual sonar...

[EDIT] I see it more or less like doing good TMA: to do good TMA there's a need of interpretation resulting in maneuvering changes to refine the solution (witch you dont want to be automatic)

Helix? (activates universal translator) You mean the number of screwblades/proppellor, right?

Yes sorry :D

btw, were you known as "Fish" before ??? :hmm2: