[vtccgolf]

Thanks for the warm welcome and the replies so far. Being a professional bubblehead yet only seeing the inside of a shipyard for three years...you can imagine why I love these games so much. Of course, my wife isn't much for any games whatsoever, even if I try to pass it off as "professional development."

Just to get back to a couple questions:

1) I have noticed the customary stutter when approaching contacts, the coastline (except those small islands you only see on max zoom), and when radio messages come in. The stutter that I am concerned with is when anytime I am above 2048X after sinking dozens of targets. I tend to go in a refit and go back out (particularly early in the Asiatic fleet...get 'um while the bases are close!). So, over time the sinkings on the map pile up, and the stutter gets worse. I have no problems when first heading out on a new patrol, so that makes me believe it is related to that. When I have about 50 total sinkings (yeah, I am playing "no duds" and do a couple refits), it starts to get bad around 1024X...to the point it is actually faster to keep it on 512X. I have seen it much worse when more of the sinkings are in harbors.

I haven't tried it, but I may go back through the bottleneck near Merak (west side of "Jawa") heading back to Fremantle and see if those tankers are still there sitting on their side in the harbor. I am thinking the game is slowing because it keeps those sunk targets in the game. It could regenerate them too...I have sank the same Yamato and Kongo battleships at sea (and received no credit the second time). That leads me to believe it is a respawning issue. Even better, I have been able to tell they were respawned when I see the contact show up at long range with the specific ship type, not just as merchant or warship.

2) On the video card issue, I have been told my 8600GT is on the low end now. I am thinking about bumping up to the 9800 series...just have to update my power supply too (running at 350W right now). That may help, but then I am thinking it is a game related issue. Don't want to drop $279 when it won't help right now.

3) About the awards issue...I can see how the initial difficulty setting does play into that. I have always set it to easy until recently so I could custom change the settings. Before, it was a record number of those Victory Medals, now only the Cross. They are shorting my crew too, so I think that needs some attention. I don't really care about getting a ton of medals, but when your crew busts their butts and survive some ash can rain, they deserve a little more than one silver star and a couple purple hearts for the whole boat. I already fight those award battles in real life!

Thanks again for all the help, and I hope that I can figure out this compression thing. It's really frustrating to run the game while running errands out in town just to come back and find a gunboat did you in.