Quick question
 

I play GWX 3.0 (Thanks Neal!), I always start in 39 and usually killed by Spring 41.
I have seen times where AI U boats are on patrol near me, notably in Norway.
Do AI U boats occur in later Convoy battles? I know they can not shoot torps, but they could help distract the escorts away from me.
Does this happen in later senarios?
Thanks for any replies.

Hey Rconch. Long time no see.
I keep hoping, but I've yet to see any AI boats in the vicinity of a convoy I'm attacking. I think they only patrol a small predefined area, so the odds of them being in the path of a convoy when you show up are small.

Sometimes they do spawn in 30 km distance together with a convoy. But they are hunted down by the escorts immediately within those minutes the convoy comes in range of your U-Boot. A good indicator for this scenario is a zagging convoy with damaged and burning ships.
If the weather is stormy and extremly foggy they sail with the convoy as long as they stay undetected and shoot at the convoy ships.

A very rare situation is a single U-Boot stumbling upon a convoy or a single merchant coincidently. It has to happen within a ~ 30 km radius around your U-Boot and you have to be close enough to observe it.

I have Never Seen A Uboat Spawn when im attacking a convoy,interesting I didnt know they could spawn,I will have to watch for this.:D

The odds are long, but it is possible.

I have never directly observed attack of ai uboat, but ive seen several times the consequences . Fires on ships generally. But it is nice to see you arent alone :)

I've never even come across burning ships nor have seen the flyboys or another u-boat in action.

Saw one once (a flaming ship, that is,) in the worst storm I've seen, in-game. It was so bad that I couldn't ID or lock the UZO on anything outside of 300 meters. I couldn't see the ship itself, just the outline of some crates on the deck outlined by flames. I don't know what caused them, but I assume the storm beat the ship to hell.

I closed on it, but by the time I got there it registered as sunk by...something else (in gray on the map.)

Curious what happened to it, or better yet, if it was part of a convoy, I started out roughly along the path it had been traveling. It lead me to one merchant...then another, and another. A convoy, which, because visibility was so bad, allowed me to torpedo my way through 4 or 5 merchants, surfaced, giving enough time to reload. Fired T1's at extreme close range, set at fast speed to pop just at their keel. Chalked up some good tonnage, all because I saw flames and went in to investigate. Had I not seen the flaming ship, I would have cruised right by the convoy without seeing anything but huge waves, heavy rains, dark skies, and a gray wall of invisibility at about 300 meters.

Yet another reason to love the game.

If you go into harbors early in the war, you can see bombing raids by the Luftwafe. At least I have several times while raiding harbors. See my post above of the Luftwafe stealing my two Modern Tankers.