Just reread a bit of a book covering Atlantic and Pazific War. June 25nd 1943 tankers were ordered to be the most important target behind all other military ships by Lockwood. Right before that the monthly rate just got near 65000 BRT for around 40 to 50 boats in their patrol area. :doh: Sorry, can't add more - more than 4 books I can't read at the same time. ;)

Ha Ha!

Another interesting tidbit from the book concerns torpedo usage. This endorsement was attached to one of Morton's Patrol reports by his commander after Morton went on a patrol and decided to use only one torpedo per ship. It ended up being a wasted patrol (unsual for him)

"The decision of the commanding officer to fire single torpedoes, while understandable, is not concurred in. A minimum of two, preferably three, torpdedoes, using a spread, should be fired at any target worthy of torpedo expenditure, taking into consideration the poor performance of the Mark XIV torpedo........Torpedo spreads must be used...."

So....taking these two exerpts into consideration...if I wanted to run my patrol that way and try to simulate a plausable WWII sub patrol outcome i would:

1. Not use my deck gun, unless on small targets, or to finish off cripples
2. Fire two to three torpedo spreads at any enemy ship

That combined with a mod that makes it harder to find contacts would probably result in a realistic patrol result...No more 100,000 Merchant ships sunk on a single patrol!

So...the book is definately a treasure to have! :up:

Don't worry. I'm just trying to learn a bit before I go into full info-gathering mode. I have two books coming in tomorrow, so by this time next week I should be less clueless. Anyway I'm not going to make any radical alterations to the game through RFB until I have referenced and cross-referenced a lot of info.

I'll be interested to hear more on this, because if we can adjust renown points gained for sinking vessels based upon these priorities it will go a long way towards getting players to play historically. If the navy wanted subs to support the fleet it would be good to boost the renown gained for sinking Japanese navy targets while reducing the renown gained for destroying merchants. In this way players will tend to seek out military targets - perhaps holding on to torpedoes in the hope of a juicy carrier or battleship.

If there's no incentive to attack military ships it will just be a tonnage war as in the Atlantic - clearly we want to avoid this if SH4 is to have its own separate identity - not to mention the historical accuracy issues that have been raised here. I think we have an opportunity to make the two sims (SH3 and SH4) very different in terms of the experience and the sense of history they give to the player.

Of course all this is moot if the developers have hard-coded the renown points gained for sinking various ship types.

Well, the ship cfg look like this:
So it looks like this is adjustable. Renown award for a sampan is 20, FWIW. Tyohei is 100. Warships are clearly weighted renown wise. A sub-2000 ton DD is worth more than a 5000 ton freighter.

Interesting; I think the Hiryu had more than 400 crewmen . . .

Does that variable even matter for an AI ship? It's something that's pretty abstract as is.

PD

All the crew numbers are very low. I assume it might have somethign to do with how many lifeboats/survivors are generated and so is an abstract figure.

tater

Excellent comparison.

PD

I pulled out some raw numbers from silent victory:

1942-there were 350 patrols resulting in 180 ships sunk (725,000 tons), including 2 cruisers and 6 submarines. 7 U.S. subs were lost, 1 in port to an air attack, 3 by grounding, 3 sunk. An average of 8 torpedoes were fired for each sinking.

1943-there were 350 patrols resulting in 335 ships sunk (1.5 million tons), including 1 escort carrier and 2 submarines. 15 subs were lost. An average of 11.7 torpedoes were fired for each sinking.

1944-there were 520 patrols resulting in 603 ships sunk (2.7 million tons), including 1 BB, 7 CV, 2 CA, 7 CL, 30 DD and 7 subs. 19 U.S. subs were lost. An average of 10 torpedoes were fired for each sinking.

No matter how you cut it, the overwhelming majority of ships sunk were merchantmen.

Interesting data. But the numbers can have various interpretations. There are always many more merchant ships on the seas than military ships, so whenever you have unrestricted submarine warfare merchants are always going to be the ships that feature most often in lists of ships sunk.

Beery,

Its clear that the US admirals wanted subs to sink warships, throughout the war subs were sent on missions based on Ultra info to intercept IJN warships, in most cases however nothing came of it. The skippers that did manage to sink one did get extra renown but the ones that only sank merchants were not penalized.

In 1942, 15% of sub patrols wers sent to the area of Japan, east China Sea and Formosa, they bagged 45% of the ships sunk that year. Seeing that success, 50% of patrols were sent to that area in 1943.

So they wanted to bag glamorous warships, but they were quite happy to settle for unglamorous Marus.

Regarding specific priorities, AFAIR, there was the one in June 1943 to prioritize tankers. There was also another one in early 1944, to prioritize Destroyers.

Good to know. Perhaps there's scope there to adjust the messages.txt file to include messages ordering such priorities.

Wow, 7 CV's sunk by subs!! Presumably some of these were finished off after air attack?

I have all that info somewhere, I will track it down and report back, sir.

:ahoy:

You failed to point out that there was an average of right around 1 ship sunk per patrol.

Taiho, Shokaku, Shinano, and Unryo were sunk by subs in 1944.

CVEs Taiyo, Unyo, and Shinyo were also sunk in '44 by subs.

Thanks Tater :)

Should'nt there be a smiley in there COB? you are starting to remind me of my boss.

:ahoy:

Blimey you're right! Well spotted!