Awards/medals
 

I beleive that the Pacific campaign medal is awarded for simply being in that theatre of operations,not for "Extreme heroism".:hmmm:.Anyway i managed to sink 28588 tons of shipping while sailing out of Manila..Thats when i recieved this highly sought after decoration...:timeout:

:hmmm:Hmmmmm, I believe you're right.:D
http://www.history.navy.mil/medals/apcm.htm
:03:

Awards/medals
 

I do beleive that a remake of the medals needs to be made..Here is and example..Pacific theatre medal should be given to all crewmen automaticaly. Purple heart given to any who are wounded or K.I.A.automatic award.. To earn the rest you must meet tonnage requirements.. Bronze Star, 20,000 to 25,000 tons sunk,Silver Star 26,100 tons to 35,100 tons sunk, Navy Cross 35,150 tons to 40,000 tons sunk, Medal Of Honor to be awarded when the sub has sunk 2 or more capital warships in one engagement. Fleet Carriers,battleships,heavy Cruisers only apply..Well what do you think??

Sounds great! Only one small problem, the manner in which medals are handed out to you and your crew is hard coded I believe, other wise this would have been changed a long time ago.

I myself wish that there was a way for the game to show how much each crew member contributed to each patrol and certain things added more points than others like a watch officer and his crew spotting a ship in poor conditions they'd earn more points.Then at the end of the patrol you could see what each man did in the last patrol and each medal would require a certain number a points for a person to receive a medal.

For higher level awards like Bronze Stars and higher the points requirement would be much higher seeing as these awards are given for performance under above normal combat actions.Of course this stuff would have to be hard coded I'm sure.It would be very hard for a game to truly simulate a military awards system well seeing how they are given out in real life cant really be simulated.

So I just see who is at each post during every engagement during a patrol and the officers and men who where at posts most often and therefore contributed more to destroying the enemy I give the awards to them.

I don't like the in-game awards system much either. I can't put my finger on it, but the system in SHCE seemed to make more sense to me.

Another unfortunate element of the game is that no credit is given for damadged ships. I consider this a major blunder. If you are playing at high realism with a S-class and encounter, say a battleship, what do you do? You have no real chance of sinking it. Do you forget about it? Fire at it anyway and "waste" torpedos? This makes no sense. :x

Whenever I return to home port and find I have a batch of medals to give out, I have the crew fall into formation and then we have, what we like to refer to as, "Medal Toss". It's, sort of, similar to the bouquet toss at a wedding. I just tell them that they all did an outstanding job but, unfortunately, COMSUBPAC didn't meet my request for accredited medals. Those that caught medals in the past are required to "about face" when the toss is conducted.:D

Isn't there a couple of mods out there that improve the Medal/Award system?
I was hoping that one or more of these mods (that I downloaded) would help this problem. 'Cause if I see the term "Wounded Medal" instead of Purple Heart one more time I'm gonna' puke. Anyway, at least one of the mods requires one to install it at the begining of the patrol at least . The beginning of a carrier is better, I just hope one of these works at least somewhat.
I'll keep the fingers crossed!!
Good Hunting!
D40:salute:

covered previously
 

check past post re the medal fix mod, which I believe were posted in the mods forum. Some guy went crazy bitching. Someone posted the mod link.

Delta 6, if you received an Asiatic-Pacific Campaign medal you are apparently using a mod to do it. I put the medal into the lowest tier of awards simply because the U.S. did not have a "grab bag" full of medals to choose from (unlike some other countries that must have dozens of awards to pick from; every see the "hardware" worn on a Russians chest?).

The game has six award slots (although one of them is for the Purple Heart which of course has a criteria different from the others). The five "achievement" awards are based on several different factors; total number of tonnage sunk; number of patrols you have successfully completed; renown etc. This "calculation" is indeed hard coded, we can't do a thing about it. What we can do is keep the awards in the correct "tier order" when the game decides to present us with an award.

As I said, if you have the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign medal it's the lowest medal on the tier. The others are as follows:

Navy Commendation Medal
Bronze Star Medal
Silver Star
Navy Cross

I put the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign and the Navy Commendation medals into the game because (in my opinion) the two I removed (the stock game had the Navy Distinguished Service medal and the Congressional Medal of Honor) were not justified to be a part of the system. The Distinguished Service medal was probably never given to a rank and file seaman but to a navy serviceman who has preformed service of "great responsibility" (read HERE). Further, I just don't like the idea of receiving the Medal of Honor for nothing more than ringing up the tonnage sunk. To me it degrades the criteria for which the true medal is awarded. So, a medal that everyone who served in the theater received was used as the first tier award. The only other medal might have been the Navy Good Conduct medal !?! eh, I'm lukewarm on that one.

Dogfish40 (I like your 60 and 90 minute too!) you are quite right, the stock game award system is a mess. Not only does it not give you the correct medal for the criteria you preformed, it also has the medals mixed up when they are presented. The mod I would use for a stock game is U.S. Medals Fix II ,found HERE. TMO has my fix include with its mod (although early on, Ducimus did a lot of work in changing the medals to show correctly when it was presented). I know there is another by a guy named Latency but it's apparently just a knock off of my work. I have no idea if he copied the files to have the "corrected order" put with his mod or not? Because of this corrected order of awards found in my mod, you must load the mod when you're in port, or at the start of a new campaign. It's the way the game saves specific files before you embark on a new mission. The "award files" happen to be ones it keeps track of each and every time a new patrol or campaign begins. So, it's necessary to load the U.S.Medals Fix II mod when in port, before a new mission is started.

Thanx Cap'n,
If I can improve this medals situation, I think I'm going to have a near perfect platform (for me anyway), as I've used the mods to tweak a lot of the stock game issues, including un-doping the escorts.
I appreciate the help and I think this mod is the one I'm going to use.
Cheers and Good Hunting.
D40:salute:

capnscurvy
 

the scurvy dog is just one of the brilliant simmers we all envy. His realism targeting thread with map contacts turned off kept me busy for weeks.

Thanks "I'm going down", glad you read it. Probably could update the "High Realism" tutorial by now. :hmmm:

@Delta6, I noticed you mentioned the Pacific theater medal was awarded for "Extreme heroism". I'm assuming you're reading the written citation that goes along with the award. In the U.S. Medals Fix II mod (as well as TMO2) the citation reads "for extraordinary heroism". Now I know were mincing words here, but there is a difference.

One more point, the game doesn't allow for a differently worded citation to accompany the 6 different awards. The same worded citation is presented to all the different awards (including the Purple Heart). Wish we could tone down the verbiage for the lower tier awards, but what you have is what you get. :wah:

In an earlier post I mentioned we could have used the Navy Good Conduct Medal. There is a couple of other medals that could have been used, The WWII Victory Medal, or the American Campaign Medal. That's it! Unless you want to use The Congressional Medal of Honor as if it was awarded to several seaman on every boat that ever sailed, on each mission; that's the extent of the American medals of WWII that could be used for our game.

Agree, the CMH is special, and shouldn't be lumped in with the rest. In SHCE, I was once awarded one. It mystified me. I had a good patrol, but nothing spectacular. Didn't really make sense. I ended up retiring the character, as there was little more to reach for.

Also, in SHCE again, my boat got a Presidential Unit Citation. I don't remember the details. There was no medal. This seems like a good idea to me.

I read somewhere, that during the war, sinking a capitol ship rated a Silver Star. I presume that it is just a matter of tonnage in the game.

A Presidential Unit Citation would be good for the "highest tier" award but how would you present it to a single serviceman, over the others? We are limited to having awards that not only are given to the Captain but also the crew individually. Giving a PUC to just one member and not the others doesn't make too much sense. And like I said, we don't get the luxury of writing separate citations accompanying the awards.

As far as the award system of the game, the sinking of a capital ship does indeed increase your chances for getting an award, or at least a higher tier award over sunk tonnage that only has freighters. I ran a test once and found sinking a single BB produced a higher tier award at the end of the mission then sinking twice the tonnage of only freighters.

As I said, this criteria is not open for us to change (being hard coded) the only thing we can do is make sure the correct medal is presented for the appropriate action we take during a mission.