Great news, everyone!
You know how in DW, whenever a platform detects an unknown contact (usually with radar), every sub on that side immediately goes to flank and races to identify the new contact, usually cavitating and making themselves easy targets?
A workaround for this problem has been found and will be implemented in LWAMI 3.10. The culprit is hardcoded behavior, and nothing can be done about it directly, BUT the navalsimengine does reference the database in deciding when to call upon the routine. In this case, the database entry is the Recon value in the Mission Priorities fields. By setting this value to 0, the platform will no longer rush to ID unknown contacts.
"But won't that prevent subs from prosecuting enemy contacts," you ask? No, at least not in any way I think is going to be noticeable. One of the oddities about the DW AI is that no sonar contacts are ever reported unclassified. (Stock DW deals with this by making the AI detection ranges pitifully small. LWAMI deals with this by programming some "prosecution" behavior into the AI before they start shooting. In case you were curious.) So, this change has no effect on AI subs prosecuting their own sonar contacts or linked sonar contacts from other platforms. And really, it's only sonar contacts that are going to matter. ESM contacts and most visual contacts are classified. Radar contacts are going to account for 90% of unknown contacts....the other 10% are going to be those contacts reported by players (unknown sonar, manual contacts to get a helo to investigate). And those contacts were the ones that were causing the problems in the first place. So the only downside is, if an unknown (radar) contact is reported on the link, the subs in the area aren't going to head that way. The aircraft and skimmers still will, which really is who you want tracking down the unknowns anyways, not the sub trying to stay hidden. Mission designers who need subs to pursue unknown radar contacts can still get this behavior to occur using scripting, and in doing so can control the speed and depth the sub investigates at so as to prevent cavitation.
If anyone can think up any side effects I haven't thought of, please let me know. So far testing hasn't shown anything unexpected.
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