Quote:
Originally Posted by Oneshot/Onekill
Personally i dont think there is an abnormal amount of ships in the game. You have to understand that most of the time that contact was made whether by hydrophone or visual, there were many factors that had to be accounted for before a U-boat commander could even think about making an attack or attempting an intercept. Here is just a small sample of what went into the equation.
(sea conditions)would affect a U-boats surface speed and thus their ability to overtake or intercept a target. Not accuratley moddeled into the game IMO.
(time of day) If during daylight hours had a much higher probability of being spotted on the surface.
(Fuel remaining)depending on how far away you are patrolling from your base had a dramatic influence and impact on how far away a Kaptain was willing to track distant contacts, especiallly if you were already mid patrol!
these are just a few, there are literally dozens of other factors that came into play.
You have to understand that in reality, during a typical patrol U-boat Kaptaind did recieve quite a bit of information about ship movements or convoy traffic its just that more than 50% of the time they were not in a favourable positon to prosicute these reports!
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I'll have to respectfully disagree, though admit I do so on the basis of limited research.
All the factors you list are modelled by the game, though perhaps they don't have quite as much effect as they did in real life. In the game, sea state affects a U-boat's speed, light conditions affect chance of being visually spotted and fuel affects range.
I do not disagree very much about the number of radio contact reports. The number might be a bit high, but German naval SigInt (XB-Dienst?) and reconnaisance from other boats and aircraft resulted in a lot of radio contact reports. In fact I don't like mods that remove the colour of contact reports from the map, because in reality, those contacts would often be reported as enemy or friendly.
You seem to be arguing that in real life, u-boats saw as many ships as we do in-game, but they sank a much lower proportion. I take the position that they made fewer sightings than we do. Perhaps they also sank fewer per sighting. I have no opinion on that.
As for the number of sightings, I have read a couple KTB's and a few books. The number of sightings per day on my in-game patrols is higher than what I have read was actual experience. Also, while the number of convoys spawned in the campaign
may be similar to historical, in real life the allies were using Ultra to route convoys around u-boats, so fewer were seen than is the case in-game.