Quote:
Originally Posted by janh
I would very much appreciate a campaign walk through...
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To be honest, I'd view the current campaign as little more than something to do while waiting for a modded campaign.
I'm only on the next part so far, but it's basically been "sink more than any captain has in the whole war, in the next few months".
The first section, "Total Germany" has you leaving from Kiel to sink merchants. The first mission you'll probably take is the Coastal Waters. You're supposed to sink 50,000 tons. Missions can be completed over the course of multiple patrols though. This is a pretty fun intro the game. A trip or two down the Kiel Canal, a quick run to the coast and there are plenty of single merchants and small convoys to attack.
The second missions is "Southern Approaches" or something similar, this one is 100,000 tons in the south and east areas of the English coast. That number seems pretty high, but after a convoy or two you'll make it. Realism nuts will probably have popped a vein by this point with regards to tonnage. By this time you'll be using Wilhelmshaven as your home port and you'll probably be passing through the English Channel often, which is pretty easy at this point.
The third mission is more aggravating and the start of the "really? I'm supposed to do this?" style missions. You're told to sink 5 ships in the northern waters and a carrier south by the Channel. At first glance this will be easy. It doesn't tell you it's five
specific ships, troop transports we finally found out. Once you figure that out and find them where they spawn instead of where you're told to look it's easier. The carrier is sometimes hard to find and when you do it usually speeding along at 30kts. Thankfully missions are optional to campaign progress.
By this time it's hopefully around March 1940, and you can accept the final Total Germany mission, Operation Waterbong or whatever it's called. Another crazy mission where you need to sink like 5 destroyers and 2 battleships or something up near Narvik.
During these missions you'll get the standard patrol objectives as well. Most are "patrol this area" or "sink a ship" or "intercept a convoy" but the Narvik ones are more interesting, once sending you to photo recon a harbor and again sending you to infiltrate some commandos. Sadly for me by the time I got to this point in the campaign it was late April/May 1940 and I'd missed the Norway invasion so couldn't complete the OW mission. The campaign automatically kicked me out of game in June when it ends.
The second part of the campaign, Happy Times, is quite similar. This time you start from Wilhelsmhaven again for the first patrol or two before heading to Lorient and the opening to the Atlantic! Again you'll have a coastal mission, but this time with 100,000 tons required. A southern unescorted, unarmed convoy will make this easy pickings.
The other two missions are in the North Atlantic. One for 200,000 tons of general shipping and the other for 10 "war supplies" ships. At least this time you know the kind of ships you'll need, the war supplies ones are the steamers with tanks and things on their deck.
So far for me this has been a pretty easy campaign time. Not a lot of danger in the Bay of Biscay yet, and only occasional task forces. Escorts are getting more numerous for convoys but still not too dangerous. Aircraft to this point hasn't been an issue for me, even with the upgraded attacking aircraft mod.
That's basically as far as I've gotten. The Mediterranean campaigns sound like misery of trying to find 10 Dido Cruisers and whatever to sink and the Arctic Convoys ones sounds slightly better. From what little I've heard of Black May escorts are deadly and aircraft are numerous, so it does get more challenging.
The Total Germany campaign should last at least 17 patrols. That's how many it took me to load/quit through the whole time to see what failing was like.