I cant find ny merchant ships to destroy.
 

I am doing career mode and i got a objective to engage and destroy merchant shipping in Celebes Sea but i cant find any ships there. I see the red square markers but when i go there there is no ship. What am i doing wrong?

Sometimes you have to be patient and wait for one to come along. Perhaps expand your search area a bit. Command assigns you to an area in hopes that shipping will pass through eventually. However, that doesn't mean they will automatically be there waiting for you when you arrive.

If you get a red square its pretty easy, use the ruler to plot their course (zoom in to se the squares tail, which is were they are heading from) and plot a course which will give you either a chase on their course, or a head-on course, and use speed to gain on them - your submarine has more speed on the surface than most merchants, and they rarely go faster than slow/medium speed 6-12 knots, compared to your 19-20 knots at full speed on the surface, when getting closer make sure sonar/radar is scanning constantly and sooner or later you will have them close enough for a attack - good hunting! :arrgh!:

But i try to follow them but i never see them.

They could have changed course on you. Far easier to plot a course to lie in wait ahead of them as long as they are not too far away.

Good chance though that they were on an established route, another convoy will probably come along on the same general course.

I like to wait in Sibutu Passage area or the northern end of Makassar Strait if I can, or on the eastern side of the Celebes Sea just southeast of the Philippines.

There are two types of contacts. You can get contact reports from base of enemy movements. I think in stock these show up at random showing the base course of the enemy. But this is seek and find, you have to plot a course to hunt them.

Then a real contact from your sub, where you have a visual or sonar contact.

Basically the stars put you near shipping lanes, something may come along. The easiest thing to do is figure where they're heading and cut them off, because they will change direction. Try to cut them off at a strait. Almost always they're headed to a port. Sit around the straits.

Sometimes you're not going to find a ship easily. It's rare, but sometimes I've headed home without a kill. However, in stock...ships seem to always be around.

Also, you will get what we call PC lag if you get a contact. If you come close your PC will slow down before you get an actual contact. It simply means one is in you best sonar/radar range. If you get PC lag, check your sonar. You can hear ships long before your sonarman will throughout most of the war. When you get a bearing at sonar, head that way, eventually your crew will give you a contact.

if they are more then 12 hours worth of sailing away, I'd say there is a big chance they have altered their course, which means not worth pursuing (unless its a big convoy or task force etc - then I go for it anyway! ;))

Luckily, my new uber-computer does not provide this lag, which I honestly think is a relief! ;)

You know what's really going to piss you off? If you're playing early war, when you finally find a contact your torpedoes are going to run deep and you'll miss your shot. Hahaha.

That´s what saves are for... :smug:
I played SHIII for some time... and after a long pause, I returned to the submarine warfare through SHIV and U-Boat Missions... and I am finding it quite dificult to start getting the hang of manual targetting again... so If I´m about to let go of some eels, I normally save my game, just in case I screwed up really bad.
Once I´m good enough, I guess I´ll have to stop doing that.:oops:

Torpedo depth isn't a problem early way unless you set them for keel shots. Early war I set most of mine for half the keel depth of the ship.

The problem is prematures and duds. I carry a lot of M10's early war. Not as powerful, but they work 90% of the time.

Yeah but that's not really "fair" is it? You have a sort of hindsight advantage. I use the magnetic detonator and give depth for the keel as listed. If it runs deep it runs deep. I popped off 7 torpedoes at a small tanker, all of which ran deep except the last one, which exploded right under the tankers keel, just like it said it would on the box, but the real bastard of the whole thing was that the tanker just kind of shrugged it off and went about its business.

My feelings exactly. In SH3 I used to keep patrol logs, then post them up here at Subsim. Once I complained 'in character' about not finding any traffic and I got several replies telling me where to go for better results!
:rotfl2:

It's hard sometimes to explain that I like having realistically empty patrols and dud torpedoes.

No, it's fair, just use a S or a Sargo, they used a lot of the early M10's, all the S class used them in real war...just what they were stuck with at the beginning of the war if you port down under. Sargo uses both, so I'll carry about half and half. If I port out of Pearl...I'll take mostly M14's

It's silly using the keel depth when all the Skippers figured out they were running much deeper. Most skippers ran them at 10ft. About 80% of the torps will run deeper than normal in the game, about 9ft deeper. A keel shot was seldom used against merchant shipping, they were used mostly against strong armored warships.

See, you're going by the books. Most skippers learned quickly this was failed policy and adjusted by mid 42, they used slower speeds, shot at angles and many used contact only and set them to run shallow. It was trial and error. Many were told to use influence regardless, but many refused knowing they would fail. The ones that refused the by the book were the ones that became the best skippers.
Yes, we have hindsight, so if you want reality, run em deep, but few skippers ever went for the keel shot.

If you enjoy empty traffic, stay out of the shipping lanes and waste fuel.
Your job is to sink ships, not patrol around empty seas. I spend most of my time fighting convoys with 50 ships or more. Playing TMO1.9 with RSRD, historically we broke their code and subs were vectored into convoy paths all the time. We really don't have that in game, contacts from base are few and far between, while in real war subs were constantly vectored in on enemy ships.

Still, mods balance it out. If you use contact only, you're gonna get more duds, influence more prematures. The best way is to use low speed, some angle and contact only and most supermods scripted this to work. Still, you're gonna have a 50% failure rate.

There's a difference between being real and just making it harder on yourself. Early war by the book skippers did as told, used influence, set torps deep, ect. Men like Morton, Dealy and OKane saw these tactics were flawed and made up their own rules, doing what worked. Skippers in war did what killed ships. I almost alwasy play 100%, no cams, no contacts and that's real enough.

Obvious, each should play what style they enjoy, but let's better define historical reality and game settings.

You do know that they move away from the location of the report, don't you? They could be far away from that location by the time you arive there. You need to steer to their future location.

This is a neat trick to intercept:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=118988