GWX...ships have superhuman vision! They see me before my lookouts see them
 

Let me just say this: GWX is fantastic!! Totally new game. :up::up::up:

However.....

Even in 1939, by the time my 3 qualified lookouts, 1 blueman and 1 qualified lookout officer spot a ship on the surface, my sub icon is red.

Last night, I was alerted to the presence of a destroyer 5k out because shells were landing on my submarine.

Now I thought vanilla escorts were near blind and they needed a little vision help.....

..but this is overkill. Subs are small and low in the water. I should be able to see ships before they can see me.

Will this get better when my lookouts strap on some medals or am I stuck with this situation?

I think as the experience of your crew increases so will their efficiency. A few medals will help as well. This is a stock and not a GWX bug, but thankfully it doesn't occur so often, so you can still play the game without any real problems.

Although I haven't used it for ages, I think the color of the icon doesn't indicate if you are detected or not, but how detectable you are ?

Were you at high TC?

Regarding Night Time - GWX has fixed the Vampire Vision. This means that your crew will not be able to see as far as they could in the day. Yes your crew will get better with promotion/experience.

Edit - My suggestion is to play with the stealth indicator off as it gives unrealistic results.

Read the manual regarding real world gunnery and optics. Page 14. :arrgh!: They have more eyeballs and better optics than your bridge crew. The odds are that even a lowly small merchant crew will see you first.

Enemy optics in GWX are very powerful by design.

However, the more watch qualifications you have, the better. Furthermore, as in real life... night-time and bad weather are your best friends... also.. the faster you are going... the more wake the enemy has to spot you.

Surface attacks at night are quite possible...and adviseable... but don't hang around to watch the pretty explosions.

If you are on the surface near enemy ships during broad daylight... you've got problems. :huh:

For some REAL fun... turn off your stealth-o-meter.

If you have the U-boat Commander's Handbook... read it and love it. It actually does help you in-game.

So I should be surfaced at night only and creeping around at periscope depth during the day.

Not having a snorkel really puts a damper on things. I got too used to roaring around at full speed with the snorkel up.

I know what you mean:yep: :yep: GWX is not just eye-candy you see. It's deadly;) :up:

read my post again if you like... edited to include some more good stuff.:|\\

Yes, you're right.
It may helps some noob but should be get out after 3 or 4 patrols, maybe less...
and it's not very eye-candy :D

From all my testing... it seems to be a combination of how detectable you are ... and how close they are to actually detecting you...

When the icon pops to solid red... they do in fact have you though! :o

Stealth meter in my view is just stupid. But, hey, thats me. I'll buy the fact that the merchants/warships had more eyes looking and also an elevated view to spot u-boats. I think the AI are darn good(as created by the GWX team) As far as the vampire vision at night, it has been corrected for sure. I do not see boats 15000m off in the distance anymore...even on a clear night! I think the AI are dead on.

I've been red on occasions and remained undetected. It must be detectability and not actual detectedness.


Actually, sometimes, I gun to engines to get a reaction out of a destroyer so he'll chase me and we go head to head at 20 kts, I cut the rudder at 500 M and he misses me by a few feet.

Then I set a torpedo for 3.5 m magnetic detonator, fast speed, manual targeting set to shoot straight ahead and get into a flank speed periscope depth dogfight. I crank open my torpedo tube and wait for the destroyer to dogfight himself right in front of me and fire a torpedo under him.

I killed 4 escorts like this before one of them took my conning tower and periscope right off.

Man! The english channel is crazy now.

I suppose there different factors to consider, an escort watch crew have better visibility that a uboat watch as they have the advantage of elevation. However a uboat has a relativly small profile and doesnt produce a smoke stack, so its a close call as to who would spot who first, of course once you throw radar in to the equasion, its a whole differnt ball game. :hmm:

What is hard to create in computer games is REAL human action/reaction. There is always that human factor that just cannot be modelled no matter how hard you try!!! What has been created is about is close as it will get. Now go sink a ship you nancy boys.

I dont know, I sunk lots of ships in GWX while being on surface.

U-Boats have a lower silouhette than most surface ships of course, so in early war you can sneak close to them on the surface. Note that warships in later years have radar.

I good fix of GWX is that AI doesn't automatically know where you are if torpedoed. I noticed this on merchants outfittet with searchlights......BOOM....and immediately spotlighted me....

GWX now has fixed this and this is also some kind of human factor speaking of the panic thats caused by a sudden torp hit on a ship at night. (imagine getting waken up by an earthquake at 2 am.."aaahh....wtf????")

No ffense to anyone... but I flatly disagree that the AI visual detection is uber... or "over the top."

Six months of research and testing went into this one area alone in GWX.

Also, if you are getting very close in broad daylight without being seen in the surface... I start to suspect that players may have changed their files... which is fine. To each his own.

More than just the optics are dealt with concerning the visual detection in GWX... speed/wake and surface area (aspect ratio) exposed are important factors as well.

Again, page 14 in the manual will explain much.

I live in a town by the sea, and with a glass sea (no waves or very small ones), you can spot a zodiac type boat at 3 or more km bare eyes, sometimes is not the size of the object, but it's reflect/color properties in contrast with the ocean, the same applies to planes, depending on the circumstances you can spot an airplane at 10 km or more because it's reflections.

Ref

Good points, ref. Also it should be noted that the human eye is more apt to notice movement than to see an actual object. Part of the 'reflection' of a boat is its wake, and we are more likely to see the discrepancy of an airplane's movement before we would see the plane itself.

But smoke on horizon beats any optics.

No doubt about that, you're looking at a 30 mts high dark column against a bright background, what I don't know is how (and if) the game takes into account the particles, on the sensors you can adjust the minimum size of an object to be detected, but does this value includes the particles?, and what happen if you reduce the particles in video settings, the smoke is harder to detect?

Ref