Seas are either too empty - or too crowded
 

hi everybody,
I played SH3 a lot, have just started SH4, have installed a pretty typical set of mods (TMO and RSRD - see here:)
http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/6835/jsgme.jpg

And have two questions - I searched the forum and couldn't find answers to either, thanks much for any help anyone can give?

1) The manual says on p.61 that the text by a marker can be edited _"you can modify this name (18 characters max.) and attach a note" - HOW? I can't get this to work. I get tired of trying to remember what "Mark 1", "Mark 2", etc. mean

2) More significantly - I'm wondering if what I'm seeing is typical gameplay. I started a campaign in January 1942, with an S-Boat out of Surabaya, and have done 3 patrols, all in the Makassar straits, on 90% realism (I keep external camera, I loves me my eye candy). 99% of the time, the sea is totally empty, and I'm bored. I even sailed in to Balikpapan harbor right after it fell to the Japanese and it was empty.

The other 1% of the time, I see a vast armada of Japanese ships (dozens, usually), with at least 6 destroyers, which see me about 2 seconds (literally) after I see them, and it's all I can do to (barely) survive. The lowlight here was my first such encounter (I've had two of these armada encounters), when my crew notified me of 'enemy in sight', I went to the binoculars, and see - a japanese destroyer shelling me! Is my crew _that_ incompotent? (It was daytime and clear, but jeez).

My _only_ other encounter in the entire game has been one airplane attack. I've literally fired zero torpedoes in 3 cruises.

Is this just the way the mods make the traffic, for this part of the world, for this type of boat, at this time? My only other thought is that there's something borked with time compression, I routinely run at 512X assuming the game will drop me down to 1X if anything interesting is going to happen. Or am I just really really unlucky?

Thanks for any advice,

thats typical for the rsrdc mod because it removes all non historic traffic and is the mod that changes how many ships you see or dont see

when using the rsrdc mod you must go to where the ships are or you wont see any so look at the shipping routes for the correct time period and look there for your ships and you will have enough ships to shoot at or just play the game without the rsrdc mod

it is a good mod for realism but if you want a good supply of target oportunities over wide areas then dont use it

Thanks for the response! :salute:

Just a message in a bottle in case anyone else has this problem - it turned out that the problem was, as mentioned in some posts here that I found by using 'search', is that, at least at the start of the war, your crew is very bad at detecting contacts. Thankfully, my PC is fairly old :), so I can use the cheat of running at 512X with the chronometer up, and when it jerks to a halt I can then use sonar myself. I hate to use cheats like this, but otherwise the game is basically unplayable :(.

Thanks again Webster - also, I take it by the deafening silence that indeed you _can't_ edit the label on a mark, which is too bad.

i never looked into editing it but i think part of the lack of response on that is that not many people thought about it so it may not be a well known thing.

also this isnt the most widely viewed forum area so try reposting your question in the sh4 mods forum, it gets way more thrafic than this general forum because most people are only looking for mods or mod info :up: