Something interesting I noticed last night
 

Maybe this is old news around here, but it's something I just noticed.

I was in the middle of a patrol when a merchant popped up. Then something went wrong graphically and I had to just CTRL+ALT+DLT out of it without saving. Then I loaded up my save, and that same enemy popped up in the same spot.

So is it true that as patrol is actually a scripted thing, without being truly random?

My next point was if I start a new game again, will everything be the same as it was in my 1st play though?

No.

There is a bunch of randomness there. Why it sometimes gives you the same thing is something I don't know.

That's the campaign behaving as it should. If you were to reload the save again, the ship would appear again - because the save is keeping a record of the locations of all the ships in the ocean at that time. As far as I know, the campaign randomly generates ships which travel until they arrive at their destination. It isn't simply randomly generating ships within your sensor range. The ship you saw is likely mid-cruise, and during this patrol will be there, whether you see it or not. Next patrol, however, the campaign may not randomly generate a ship which crosses that location.

NO if it did that I would soon get fed up with the game. :yep:

Just for testing purposes, I loaded up a save I had where I was a couple kilometers out of sonar range of a convoy and in 3/5 reloads of the same save, the convoy, it's escorts and their layout had changed. Only twice did I get the same convoy. This would seem to indicate that the game either picks random convoys based on a logarith or it has pre-made convoys which are picked from like a deck of cards. I've also done saves from port (standing on the bridge, not in the office) and the ships themselves are different when encountered in the same positions.

Interesting. I always do a save at the start of every patrol when I'm still at the dock and before I give the first command. Reasoning that should I come across something cool and unusual, like a task force, and I'm too far away to catch it, I can start again and alter my beginning course so that when that same task force pops up again, I can be in position to catch it. But perhaps that reasoning is flawed, and maybe that task force won't be there the second time around. I wonder if anyone knows for sure?