2 engines out and I'm dead in the water?
 

Just had bout with a sub chaser and gun boat. Before sinking the sub chaser, it got me with a few depth charges and damaged two of my 4 desil engines. After finally getting out of visual range of the gun boat, all damages were repaired, except the 2 desil engines, which I'm assuming that a full red bar means that they are not repairable at sea, but I still have 2 good engines, but no matter what speed setting I try, they won't start.

I can't believe I don't have any other options. The original game you could at least take a chance on either getting towed back or captured. Is there something I'm missing??

That's because you don't have two good engines. The game was based on SH3, and even though you should have four they're grouped in pairs, so in-game you really only have two.

In SH3 you could teleport home in that situation.

Stinks, doesn't it?

So there was no built in option that wasn't enabled for the release of the game, like an SOS call, that could be modded into the game??

Yes, it does stink!! :wah:

Thanks all the same, now I know I can just delete that save point.

While I'm not sure why they wouldn't do it, the 2 additional engines and electric motors that a fleet boat has are not included in the zones.cfg. I've been looking into a work around for this and have found one, but it's not practical for anything but modern boats.

Not only were there four engines, but there was a fifth auxiliary engine which could also generate power for the batteries and electric motors. That also is not modeled in SH4.

Could you set up two damage zones for one systems, e.g. have Engine Pair 1 with a damage zone port and starbaord or fore and aft, both taking 50% of the damage, so that if both engines get destroyed they both do, otherwise they are repairable?

Major Johnson, you can edit your save file to remove the damage from the engines and carry on with the patrol. Do a search on engine destroyed and save file and you should find it. It's cheating, but necessary because the game cheats worse.

Thanks for that tip Nisgeis. Unfortunately, I had a corrupted save that also for whatever reason, affected that save as well. I wound up starting the patrol over. I don't like do overs, but this time it worked out in my benefit.

That was another method that I had considered. It seems to me that whenever your engines take damage, they both take the same amount despite being two different dmg zones.

How does the damage zone work? Is it just a box/sphere that's set up to funnel damage to a piece of equipment, or has it got limits on HP damage and stuff like that? Sorry for being thick, but I've never looked at it.

Both actually. Spheres are used as collision objects to give the hull it's shape for say a destroyer ramming your boat. Boxes are the compartments and equipments location in the boat. So when a DC goes off next to the engine room it damages that compartment and its equipment not the bow torpedo room or the whole boat. Now the dmg boxes are part of an "open" triangle. Another part is in the boat's upc file that lists all the equipment and crew and links that equipment to a specific box in the dmg model. The third part is the Equipment.upc file that has the HP, AP, and other dmg related info for each piece of equipment onboard. That's what I've figured out so far, the Zones.cfg is mixed into this somewhere as well, not sure where though.