d/l now, thanks

BTW, aside from obvious bugs like me blowing up the harbors file (thanks for catching it!), I am really interested in feedback on:

1. Contact reports. How are they? Too few now?

2. Traffic volume. Seeing too many of X vs Y? Go on patrol and see nothing but liners in one area? That sort of thing. The nature of the zig-zags vs radiused waypoints is that the ships will follow the same path. Too many too close together might be a problem. Tried to keep em thin, but there are many many groups, might have missed some.

3. Truk and Palau. If you are checking that out, let me know if there are crashed ships on the nets, etc.

These might just evolve into what I really want to see, I'm waitign for 1.3 to decide. Also, I'd recommend playing with the ship speed correction mod since without it the AI is far more likely to crash, etc.

tater

Yeah, the speeds are the critical difficulty IMO. Zigs away from you are just as often zags towards you, lol. The speed of TFs and troopships makes them challenging, even for fleet boats, particularly combined with rare contact reports. Faster also means that once you spot them, unless they are bearing down directly on you, you'll have to rush to get in position, and the attack evolves quickly. If you need to switch targets near shooting range you then need to set up very fast.

tater

Personally, I think they're really good. Early on in the war there was little intelligence about Japanese ship movments, and so far I think your new campaign layers reflect this well. You really have to work now to find those contacts!

[quote=taterIf you need to switch targets near shooting range you then need to set up very fast.
tater[/quote]

Shooting the MK 10 is not a big help either. These were supposed to be the more reliable fishes at the start of the war, but they are not. (in my opinion)

Everytime I d/l your upgraded versions I start a new career from manilla in an old S class. So trying to figure out what was different with the last one. All in all the amount of traffic is dense (early in the month -dec 41) near manilla and the convoys I encounter are mostly on the same spot as the previous campaign layer tweaks you did. That's fine with me, cause they all have the long legged zig zag applied and as said before, that's very challenging in the S class. Haven't been to Truk as of yet, will go there later on.

What I'm trying to do now is finding a way to have Beerys RFB mod, Ducimus TMaru's AI tweak to get the DD more of a challenge, all the eye candy tweaks from kriller, this mod, and a lot of others into 1 mod.
So far I've experienced a lot of CTD's, but I'm not giving up.

I've installed an Nvidia 8800 today, I'm sailing now with external view enabled for the moment, my jaw is lower than it has been ever before.
Despite all the complains about the game, the graphics are, .........well GREAT

Loving this game, loving the mods, loving the modders mosthttp://www.subsim.com/radioroom/images/icons/icon14.gif

Regards
Bando

I haven't actually messed around much with the "eastasiacampaign" wich is the mission at the start of the war. I meant to do it with the exact ships, but didn't get around to it.

There is actually an invasion convoy in the Java Sea (in RL) that has something like 35-50 marus. That would be cool to add in.

Strange, they all do the zig zag and the speed of mil. vessels is increased

Well, there are 2 things going on. The random layers are always there. There are sets of invasion forces that are in addition to all the random stuff. That file is little changed, without ZZs.

So yeah, you can see both. The invasion forces are only 6-8 TFs.

I've seen the invasion forces. They consist of 1-3 DD's and about 8 smaal passenger carriers. It was in shallow water without wind so I decided just to report them, not attack.
Is there anything that can be done about the game saying you have to inflict damage, cause even after sinking the whole bunch it's still not accomplished.

This morning (lovely day off) I ran into a taskforce off Balikpapan on their way to Java sea. Zigzagging all the way, but now I had a lucky break when I was about to give up they zigged towards me. Sank one carrier and sneaked out safely. Great stuff.

The feel of the zigzagging traffic is much better, as in RL they'd do it all the time. This being a long legged ZZ, when a sub was detected near, they'd go to a short legged ZZ, meaning changing couse erraticaly every minute or so. I guess it's hard to implement and I'm happy that they ZZ in the first place.

I for one love this modification and will report now and then of any particularities when stumbling upon them:up:

Thanks big time
Bando

Yeah, I looked at the eastasiacampaign last night, and I think I need to fix it up. Some of the forces are rather less excorted than they should be. Why? because the stock game set them all to #$%#$@!$$#@! Akizukis. Odd since she wasn't even at sea during that time period (they used start dates for ships when they came off the ways or weere commissioned, but not fitted out or really ready to put to sea).

So I axed all of them, but forgot to fix them up. Next version will fix this.

BTW, the current version is zig-zagged etc through september 1943.

Also, in the latest version I changed the start date on Akizuki to ~mid 1942. I need to see if I can place them explicitly in scripted missions before the start date. If I can, then I would probably change the start date to 19430115 or so. Given that in the first year of the war there was (weighted) 1 Akizuki ((~9 months of 1, 2 months of a 2d ship, and 1.5 months of a third=12.5 ship-months) for the whole year. We should never see one statistically. Better to remove them.

I actually think that I made a bettwer east asia campaign, but forgot to move it from my old computer :/

Actually, Jace or someone might have already done a better one.

:up: I'll be awaiting the next version with high hopes. This mod really is worthwile for me. The reality factor went up sky high as far as I'm concerned.

Don't hurry though, I'm currently out on patrol, let me finish this one first.:rotfl:

Regards

Bando

Yeah, other than correcting any major issues, I'll wait for 0.7 with more complete stuff. Then from 0.7 to a 1.0 I will make it prettier. I'd also like the 1.0 version to have new patrols (truk, palau, etc).

I also need to add traffic to the Marshalls (there is about zero in the stock game) and to the Aleutians.

I wish some 3D guru would make some small coastal shipping, lol. I'd be all over that.

tater

About contact reports. Just finished my second patrol from 02 feb 42 untill 07 march 42. I had to patrol Celebes sea out of Surabaya. I received 2 radio reports of taskforces (both within 200Nm) and 1 merchant popped up on the map at about 20 Nm without a radio call. I think this is realistically correct. I don't know for sure how many they received back then but I can imagine it wasn't a lot.

There were a whole bunch of ships to hunt down, they just had to be found by eyeballmarkone and (for me) that's how it should be......

Go Tater Go! You have a lot of guys enjoying what you have done already:up:

I also need to go back and add alternate routes. I need to get the code right so I can demark the "bogus" return paths so that only the paths I want...

just got an interesting idea, maybe I needn't do that for some.

I'm leaning towards a traffic model where most ships leave a home port, sail to a destination, hang around a while, then RTB to their home port. Having most of the home ports in Japan meand there are fewer places to lock up tight. The idea is that once pace a certain point you'd never tak a sub into a real port (no US submarines ever entered Tokyo Bay until after the war was over, for example). I prefer the idea of ships disappearing out of any possible view of the players. It hasn't happened to me yet, but there are many places where TFs and convoys disappear in open water near ports (just NE of Rabaul, for example). You could literally fire a spread of 6 fish there and have an entire battlegroup vanish into thin air.

Mod sounds great.
Just want one point clarified,does all traffic zig-zag all the time.

Almost all of it, yes.

I have a few radiused waypoints here and there, and I have a few loops that skip the zig-zags (lazy merchant captains, TFs in a rush ;) )

The zig-zags are typically on the order of a zig or zag every 20 to 60 minutes. They vary over the trip for the group though.

Late war (which I haven't done yet) I'm going to experiment with some of the fast zigzags I read about in books like Silent Running---2-5 minutes per leg, truely short enough to foul up a torpedo attack at range.

I,m quite capable of fouling up my attacks without any help from the Japs.
Going to try it anyway,at least I'll have an excuse for missing now.

LOLTater, about the traffic. It may have been coincidence but I had to patrol Luzon Straits early march 42 and about every day a huge liner with a single DD escort came right in front of my tubes. (the torpedoe tubes is what I mean) This patrol I also had radio reports of contact at 900 Nm Just to inform.........Bando

cc, I need to check the troopships, they are pretty bad. Also, I need to add some alternate paths.

thx!

tater