von Zelda

The reason the Allies used convoys was that they were extremely hard to attack. U-boats had a great deal of success up until March 1941. As stated in other posts, most attacks were surfaced and at night. This nullified Asdic and gave the U-boats greater speed. In fact, the U-boats were faster than all escorts but the destroyers.

That said, the early convoy successes were due to the wolfpack tactic; mutiple U-boats attacking at once from several directions. This overwhelmed the escorts and allowed at least one or more surfaced U-boats to get within the escort screen to attack.

However, as good as SH3 is and as fantastic as GWX3 is, the game falls short on this one point. It does not portray muliple U-boat attacks very well, if at all. Thus, your single U-boat battles all the escorts by itself. And this makes the night surfaced attack very difficult. In my opinion, the escorts are able to spot the surfaced U-boat way to easily for realistic results in the early war years. This forces most of us to use a slow submerged attack instead, which is not realistic at night due to minimal vision of the real attack scope that was probably never used at night.