I´m also getting this annoying bug. I was hit by an aircraft round in the AA gun, barely damaging it. The crew members assigned to it were also affected (only loosing some life points) but now it is impossible to heal them :o They started with 99 and 97 and now are in the 70s. They are loosing their life points very slowly but without stop!

I send a repair team which sucessfully repaired the thing. However, no matter how many times I repair the AA gun, when I try to submerge I get the warnining again 'the AA is getting damage' the sub enters in a uncontrolled dive, engines stop, water enters and everyone ends sleeping with the fish :damn:

There is also a small bug related to this and game saves/restores.

I don't know the EXACT timing, but it seems that if you SAVE within 10 minutes or so of an IMPENDING crew shift change (which could happen anywhere between zero seconds and 10 minutes after the hour) and restore that save, a large amount of health gets subtracted from the ACTIVE crew. Any that are near death die. I'm now in the practice of making sure my saves are a few minutes AFTER any shift change that may occure in the next 15 minutes. This seems to prevent health from being subtracted on restore.

Also as noted above, clicking a crew member seems to help update the status of the crew so you're not getting a false indication.

When substituting your crew members, do NOT drag an active injured crew FORWARD in the duty cycle (from I to II, II to III, III to I, etc.) When the next cycle occurs the injured crew member will go back on duty after only 4 hours of rest. Drag injured crew backwards and in 8 hours if health very poor, drag him backwards again when he becomes active crew.

Also note the other non-compartment stations (AA gun, deck gun, repair crew) tire more slowly than crew assigned to compartments (assuming they're not activated.) Something to take advange of when resting your crew. It also takes them out of the duty cycle so they don't get activated by accident.

In SH3 you can usually find a medic after the 1st patrol. Placing injured crew with medic in same compartment speeded up recovery. Has anyone seen medic skills in port recruitment? One of the most valuable crew members to have. I haven't returned to base yet in any of my patrols.

I will also mention for those still wanting to play, it IS possible to play sharp enough to avoid injuring the crew to this extent. This was also the goal of real sub commanders.

I realize bug exist and not all of them will get fixed at once. How many patches before your favorite issue gets settled? No way to predict. It is possible to keep playing the game, however. You just can't play it archade (I'm invincible) mode.
-Pv-

Further examination... the earlier hypothesis that it has something to do with the "Conning Tower" (i.e., the towers you can replace as a reward).

Reviewing ActiveUserPlayerUnits.upc in my savegame folder reveals the sub is broken up into 9 parts....

8 Compartments...

through

Corresponding with, in order:

Stern Torpedo
Engine Room
Control Room
Conning Tower (Sensor Room)
Bow Torpedo
Damage Control
Aft Deck Gun
Fore Deck Gun

Then you have the replaceable conning tower coming in as: "UnitPlayerSlot 1"

The UnitPlayerSlot 1 has 2 compartments, 1 and 2... corresponding with "Deck Watch" and "AA Gun"

All of the damage I have is confined to crew and components in UnitPlayerSlot 1.

Now to ascertain (if possible) why.

-m

Ok, yet more research (hopefully this is helpful)...

The deck gun is spared from the bug (and it's a part of the basic sub compartments, not the swappable conning tower)... but AA isn't. But there's an interesting behavior you can see with the AA gun that might be true of the Deck Watch as well.

1. The damage control doesn't repair the AA gun (or deck gun) when the stations are unmanned. You can activate the DC team, but if the AA Gun or Deck Gun are not manned, no repairs will happen.

2. If you repair the AA gun, the next conning tower damage "pulse" will damage the AA Gun and the crewman.

3. The AA Crewman is damaged whether or not he is manning the gun.

4. As mentioned before, the Deck Gun is not damaged by pulses... this is consistent with the theory that it's the swappable conning tower that is bugged.

5. If there isn't an undamaged component in the conning tower, the damage pulse won't happen.

6. Crew members in a compartment are only harmed if there is a component in the compartment that is damaged. I.E., if the AA gun is damaged when the pulse happens, it isn't damaged more and the crewmember isn't hurt. If the AA gun is repaired when the pulse occurs, the AA Gun is damaged and the crewman is damaged.


so... that's the latest i've figured out. Now i'm off to play a less buggy game.

-m

I got damage to a couple of the torpedo tube, not through enemy attack as I dived well before the plane got near and I never heard any bombs. In fact it wasn't until I was at Pscope depth and had travelled for about 10mins that the damage call came.

Now you say that a station has to be manned to be repaired, does that mean all 3 watches or just the watch that is on at the time?


Also as I could not see anything work as for repairs I went into MW for a refit, AA gun and torp tubes repaired came the call from the crew. I had a look and sure enough the 2 torp tubes and the AA gun were no longer in the DC repair box and there icons were Green.

As soon as I got outside the zone where the Refit Dock option appears, I get the call from the crew that the same 3 items are damaged again. I went to PH -home port , to see if it worked there, but as at MW after I got the Refit, as soon as I moved out of the "Refit Dock Option Pop Up Zone" about 20km outside PH, I again get the shout that the torp tubes and AA gun are damaged again.

I think that if you are in for a Refit , be it PH or MW or where ever else you can get this option, the refit should fix any damage. You should not have to end your Patrol to get these things fixed in a Refit. As well as that a Refit should not only refill your fuel and Torps, but also refill your AA gun ammo.

The AA gun, from my experience, needs to be manned. Not just a crew in the slot, but actively manned (the compartment is darkened, like when one of the 3 shifts is on duty).

In terms of the repairs for the torpedos... I can only make wild guesses since i haven't specifically looked at the behavior. Could be some damage can't be repaired at see (which is what has been reported in other threads). Best as I can tell though, it sounds like you're having some funky behavior with damage control also.

Honestly, it looks like the whole thing is a basket case. I'm not sure how problems like this made it through QA testing.

The game is playable so long as you're good at not ever taking damage....

-m

Of course our intention is to avoid taking any damage, but it can happen, and that's what's so great about this game eh? You don't want to take damage, but it can happen.. and the severity of the damage is variable. It's fun to take a few hits, repair, and live to fight another day. Continue on your patrol and sink some ships. But this bug strips all the fun out of that concept.

As I said, you can continue on by babysitting your crew for the rest of the patrol.. but having to do that is lame. SH4 introduced new crew management for a reason - most people hated having to manually deal with the crew all the time. And automated crew cycles with some minor management (moving to damage control, battle stations, etc) is very satisfying when it's working well. This bug is like a big black eye on the game.

My 2 cents:

Imho when the red bar of a system is all red it's impossible to repair. Happened to me with torpedo tubes, periscopes etc. And i like it.

Anyway going back to our main subject:
There is no way of getting the radar and AA gun invulnerable just to skip our damned error? Not fully realistic, it'ok, but maybe it's the best choice at least for now.

OK,now this is serious.I was here when this thread was only a dissapointment of a few people that happened to have bugs.But look at this now.This has grown to a huge rebellion of great number of people.This can't go on like this.

Those who have the oppotunity please notify the devs of this HUGE bug.I hope that this bug is added to the 1.2 wishlist.Speaking of that when is the 1.2 coming out?

I also get the stupid''Radar damaged'',''Radar repaired'' messages and it also happened to me that refit does not help.

I am new to the SH series(meaning that SH4 is my first SH)and I have a question.Every time but EVERY TIME smt gets damaged,on the damage control screen the field is red almost to the end(about 3mm is not red)What does it mean?That it is fully damaged,not repairable or what?

Ask and ye shall receive...

I just released an attempt to make the Conning Tower (represented by the Deck Watch and AA Gun compartments on the Damage Control or Crew Management screens) immune to damage. The crew can be harmed, but not the equipment, which keeps the bug from being triggered.

It's only got about 30 minutes of quickie testing, but it seems to work. More testers and feedback are welcome.

I hope this really does work and gives a lot of very frustrated players the chance to play.

Link to thread.... here!

-m

Thank you Modisch!

I will try your fix, if it works it will be handy, at least until a new patch arrives.

I think this is one of the most serious bugs, and as already suggested it is related with other(s) bug(s) in the Damage Control.

I would like to be sure that this information is forward to the Dev Team, so they can include fixes in a new patch. I already posted some comments in other threads but don't know what is the most effective way to pass this information to the Dev Team.

So, I make an appeal to all the seniors members of this forum to also report it, you must know better that me how to do it, and some of you must be experiencing these bugs too.

Thank you all

I'll check out your mod and let you know how it goes.

I think that would be pretty useful, modisch. But nothing to do with changing just the radar and AA? Can't we find a way to change singular pieces of equipment?

Nope. The devs, for the sake of efficiency, kept many variables general to the compartment, including exposure to damage. The only characteristics that are specific to equipment is "what goes where", "what's it do?", "What's it look like?" and "how many hitpoints?". But all characteristics like damage exposure, crew performance, etc, are defined by compartment.

I didn't change the hitpoints since i don't think that will do anything.

The only way that I saw to prevent the bug from triggering is preventing initial (legitimate) damage completely. It's an imperfect workaround.... but if you think about it this way... in terms of damage, it's not the most important compartment anyways. The crew is still vulnerable to gun fire... and what sinks your sub is damage to the bulkheads and flooding. You can still lose your periscope (because only the heads are in the conning tower) and your radar and radio (because only the antennae are in the conning tower). The only real function that is completely spared from damage is your AA gun.

regards,

-m

I can only say you did an excellent work then. I'll try this out this evening and testing myself.
In the meanwhile i would know if someone of you captains has some feedback about this little mod, which is little but could mean a lot :up:

I'm getting this bug too. I've never gone to general quarters (mostly because I've spent my first mission trying to keep my crew alive), so it's nothing to do with battlestations. My deck was strafed by enemy planes, and it suffered damage. The damage seems to be irreparable. Worse, my periscope was destroyed entirely, and it's definitely irreparable. Anyway, since those calamities, whenever I station a crew member on the deck, he invariably gets sick. If I leave him in that slot too long, he dies.

I got so tired of it that eventually I just left all the deck slots empty, or manned them with corpses.

This is by far the most irritating bug I've encountered in SH4 so far.

I had it happen last night. It seemed that only one spot on the watch caused my crew to die ( the 3rd slot on the top row of the crew management screen : the rest were fine). I had a full damage control team and replaced the dead watch member with one of them. Needless to say I lost about 6 men before I figured out to just leave the dead watchmen where he was:nope: . And here I thought i was such a bad captn. that my crew just wanted to commit suicide:huh:

Theory: as to why watch crew's ill health!
 

They don't sleep enough off watch. Right after duty section change,rest of crew sleeps,but watch function does not. They can be induced to sleep.by swapping each one out with a sleeping crew member,in the just off watch section,sleeping.:hmm: