When you come to fixing up the Gibraltar convoys etc, the 900m 9 columns may cause problems as the Gibraltar bay area where they spawn is not much over 7 km wide. Suggest you move some spawn points for these or dont apply the same formation settings.

Interesting observation I would not have even considered.

The most disturbing thing I have seen so far is 9kts HX convoys will slow 6kts after I hit a ship. I don't know if this normally happens or not. It's unlikely anything in the RND layer is responsible for this, although confirmation would be nice anyway. Is it happening to anyone else?

yup, I think you are ok on all other convoys, I don't see any other narrow "choke points" that may cause problems for wide formations, I may have missed something though.

Did you damage the leader? That may have that effect. It's safe to say the convoy maintains formation on the leader. But what if the leader is sunk? The next ship in the list may become the leader. I am not sure, but if that happens it shouldn't cause a problem. However if the leader is damaged , slows and is not sunk, its position as leader may not be handed to the next ship. Just a theory.

I will Hunt for a new topic on destroyer accuracy.

I had deleted that Hunt mod long ago Jason, so in doing, I agree it does not serve the greater good for a user mod but it should not hurt to keep it in the discussion regarding relevance to other similar inaccuracies that might be addressed.

In the end no matter what things are added that are corrected, by your or my opinion, the play must be competitive. That is, we don't have Wolf packs so our attacks can never be accurate. U-boats virtually never had lined up turkey shoots. If a convoy had no escorts it scattered and did not move at all like in SH3. By adding unhistorical trawlers with DCs to make up for that allows a variation for difficulty. It is not the best answer but being technically right with no escort when the merchants technically do not act right arrives at the incorrect scenario. Having a few more escorts on early convoys just restores some defensive capability missing by things beyond our control..

BTW, I found a bug in the Ureal RND file or the result of one or something it reacted too.
I started a new career in 1942, ran the first mission, which ran fine, I started the second mission and it CTD while loading. Replaced your stock RND with the RUB 20/20 and the mission loaded. That was May 1942.
Can someone else run a new career at 1942 and also a 43 and see what they get???? Any thoughts???? Don't have the Hunts mod so don't even think about that!!!!

Also I noticed your merchant ships are still referred to as US in the roster text files. It is not necessary to change the Norway version of US T3 Tanker to NO T3 Tanker? As it is now there will be duplicates of named tankers in the game which might (I actually do not know) cause a problem somewhere?????? Same for Netherlands; NE.

We will have to differ on the use of early DDs. By changing the called for to be any "4" and removing the Hunt dates to reality does not lesson the DDs at all. The CClass, V&W, JClass and Tribals will show and though the last two were not as likely in 1939 in NA convoys they at least actually existed, if that matters.

I asked Serg about renaming the River class and it does require a great deal of Hex editing to make the "real� A-D class. But, that would interfere with the present CClass and as you correctly assessed on the Hunt issue, create many SCR problems. In the end those A-d conversions are the River class just wrongly named as such. Changing that would be a much more complex fix than the Hunt class.

My actual suggestion to your mod was to add the ships for the four nations but never actually ask for them by name.
Having a Greek "4" would mean the Hunt I would show for anyone not adding the correct Hunt II and III. I do agree keeping it as simple as possible is the right way. I am not sure getting your shorts all in a knot is required when the Hunt fix is simple compared to others you are proposing or have done.
Wulfmann

It just seems odd that in three convoys I managed to hit the leader out of about 30+ ships. That's some serious luck three times in a row now although I did always engage some of the ships near the front.

Correct. My goal is realism with play balance, or it's no fun at all.

It's worth investigating. I haven't started a career out of 1941 yet.

Correct. I copied them without much thought to the effects, but that should be easy to fix. Thanks.

It's certainly possible to include a Greek escort or two, for example, in Med convoys. Based on the existing roster it would be one of the few escorts they're allowed to have in SH3. I haven't gotten around to doing Med convoys yet, since "Med convoy" is really a misnomer anyway. I notice the developers greatly reduced the frequency of Med 'convoys' I imagine because they were so irregular. Seems like the best possible fix under the circumstances for that reality.

In additional to the speed bug where 9 kts convoys slow down to 6 kts when hit, I am still performing general playtesting on Atlantic convoys for escorts and spawn probabilities. 85% chance to spawn SC seems to spawn a lot less often than my 90% chance to spawn HX in 1941. Very strange given the 5% difference.

My last three encountered with convoys have been turkey shoots. I am uncertain if it's worth modeling unescorted or weekly escorted convoys in the game if it's that easy to sink ships, although it's grossly unrealistic for convoys to be reasonably escorted before the beginning of 1941... Maybe all my escorts for weekly escorted convoys or when the spawn probability for most ships is less than 50% should be Veteran, even in early war, to compensate. Watching Flowers depth charge my position 2km away is only funny the first few times.

I have not seen this behavior. Did you hit the commodore's ship perhaps?

I think increasing the escort AI one notch while keeping the number of escorts low should fix part of this issue, and keeping the convoys fast should eliminate much of the turkey shoot because you'll only get one chance. From what I've read though, submerging or going deep during the "Happy Times" was often enough to shake an escort, so I don't find it ridiculous for the escort to DC the wrong position early in the way.

Sadly that'd be insanely complicated to write and you'd need to train modders on packaging stuff properly for it, or packaging the stuff up yourself.

Creating some kind of package management system complete with dependencies and such is no small task. It takes good software and a rigid packaging policy to get it right.

Possibly, but it would be quite complicated. The output would have to be quite human readable, and not the fun stuff that's actually in the raw Campaign_*.mis files presently.

Indeed. One somewhat easy workaround is to have a different directory in the distribution for each flavor of the mod. Then you just copy that directory into your MODS/ directory and you're good to go.

Perhaps. It happened two or three different times on two different occasions of playing the game. It's most strange.

It doesn't happen to you when you hit 9 kts convoys? I play with the WO, but aim manually initially. Once my shots start passing the bow of the targets I get curious and check to find everyone moving at a slow 6 kts all of the sudden. Very odd.

The wide convoy kept me near the outside rows. I got a shot off on a tanker near the middle, but it was 1 or 2 back behind a light cruiser. I crippled two others (medium merchants) in a convoy and it kept steaming on. I use manual targeting so they might have slowed and I missed it, but they seemed to pass by too quickly for only 6kts. I only had a chance for one shot with all tubes before the range and geometry was bad (no chance to reload).

I will paste and cut convoys in 1942 today and see if I can find which one might be causing it. I pasted them all in to the 20/20 RND and it still CTD so am reasonably sure it is in the convoys.

The first thing I do to any RND file is improve the crew rating of escorts. To suggest any Brit DD crew was poor is ignorant of the extensive training done by the RN prewar. But, they were lacking in ASW compared to fleet battle training. However, it is a matter of balancing the likelihood of them acting like buffoons that I seriously doubt they would have. There are no 0 or 1 escorts and very few 2 for mine
They would never be a 1, IMO. Making them have at least one 100% 3 is my minimum. The Trawlers with DCs have no sonar so at 3 are still not effective but must be carefully watched and are always near by.
I also remove all type 1 ships from 1939 as there were no Flower class ships in service but will add the Black Swan update as they can be Egret class and were busy in the escort service. This way no mod is needed to the roster and the Flower just is not there when it should not be.
In the end it is about improving this to be a challenge to attack convoys that get more difficult as the war progresses. I don't believe making turkey shoots is beneficial for being ready for real convoy defenses and I don’t personally want to skip that part to get to the real action either.
Wulfmann

Makes sense. I can't easily differientiate when I distribute crew efficiency points throughout the escorts. When I'm forced under I rarely have time to evaluate the flag on the ship.

I wish I could do something about that, but I'd need to redefine convoy routes for each major ships introduction so it could be included when it became available for real, and not before. Sadly that's just way too much work.

I could remove any COs from 1939 convoys and replace them with FFs, though. That's not difficult because even with a random type there's only one kind of CO available the whole game. So just not using it and changing it to FF resolves the problem partially, except the Black Swan isn't really correct either.