What should I have done?
 

I've never seen this happen, until now.
It's October, 1939. Time is 22:20 and I'm west of Scapa Flow, and submerged. I hear "Sound contact, long range". Periscope up shows Coastal Merchant. I close to within 2000 meters. The lights on the ship are darkened. The seas are calm, so at 1400 meters, I surface. I have the crew man the deck guns. They fire one shot and hit the ship. All of a sudden THE LIGHTS COME ON revealing an Irish flag. Crap.
I give the order, "Hard to starboard" and bring the watch crew back on deck. I let him go.

I know it's too late now but, since the lights were darkened to begin with, should I have gone ahead and sent her to the bottom?

So far you've just lost a shell. Sinking her will cost you negative renown so I'd let her go.

But, I thought neutral ships had their lights on all the time, and darkened ships were fair game.
She didn't light up her flag until after I had fired on her. That's what I meant when I said I had never seen that before.
I don't want to sink the wrong ship but, it was lights out.
I guess from now on I'll follow and wait for it to get light enough to see the flag.

I've seen neutral ships travelling darkened out before but never have I known one to turn it's lights on before. But then again, I've never fired on a vessel until I'm absolutely sure of it's nationality.....

:smug:

Also, I use the Flags_Enlighten mod that I edited to make the flags a bit darker than the mod but lighter than the stock game so I don't have to get too close to identify. The stock flags are too dark IMO and when you add GWX's darker nights into the equation, it can be murder (literally..lol).

Or you can edit the renown values and sink her anyway, teach those Irish a lesson.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think he means they turned on their search lights. AFAIK no one has added a trigger to allow a ship to turn on their marker lights. I think they are just illuminated textures and completely static.

That's what I thought, I'm sure I've seen posts about neutral ships that stay illuminated when their country turns hostile because they either spawn illuminated or not. And I'm guessing that addon ships don't come in illuminated flavors which would explain me seeing darkened neutrals...

No. It's lights illuminated the FLAG. Maybe it was a glitch, I don't know.
When I surfaced the flag was not clearly visible. At first, I thought it was French ( blue, white, red). After one shot, lights came on illuminating the flag. Only then did I realize it was Irish (green, white, red).
I can't explain what happened, only tell you what happened.
Either way, I won't be doing that again. Like Damo said, I'll absolutely make sure of it's nationality before I fire.

Yeah, sometimes the lights that point at the flag glitch, and most of the time they make the flag black, lol, go figure. That's why I use the flag mod, because it stops that happening.

I'm guessing then that the ship was already illuminated, although in your post you did say the ship's lights were 'darkened', hence the confusion. Well rule of thumb is that they are neutral, unless of course the country they're from turned hostile since the ship left port, as it will retain the lit textures despite turning hostile mid-trip.

A rare find, but possible.

I don't know whether you are playing stock/vanilla or have a super mod added but in GWX3.0 neutral ships are not always lit up http://www.psionguild.org/forums/ima...ies/pirate.gif

WAC 4.1

Then why not try posting on the WAC thread or PM'ng Hansolo http://www.psionguild.org/forums/ima...s/thumbsup.gif

That would be the Italian flag. The Irish is green, white, orange.

:know:

I thought the Italian flag was plain white :)

j/k

Aye, though a whiter shade of pale then that of the French...

:-j

I'm not complaining about a problem with WAC, I was asking if I should have sank it.

The consensus seems to be that if I had of sank it, I would have gotten tagged for having sank a neutral ship.

No, sir. There's not a problem that needs to be addressed.