I give out uboat war badges the way it was typically done in real life - anyone (including myself) who has completed two combat patrols gets one. From what I've read that was the only requirement, altho on rare occasions some commanders seem to have gotten them after one very successful combat patrol.
I'm not happy with the way the game awards them, since I typically start careers in August 1939 and finish the first patrol before the war even starts, the game usually gives me the war badge before I've done two combat patrols (and without any extraordinary achievements on the first one) so I just edit the relevant files after I exit the game until I've completed the second war patrol.
When it comes to the crew I use Commander to dole them out to each crewman after he's completed a second combat patrol.
And historically it wasn't reinstituted in WWII until mid-October 1939, so nobody should be getting it before that date... but I've never finished two war patrols before then so it's not been an issue.
Once I finish this career I plan to tinker with the config files again to see if I can fine-tune them to make the awarding of medals and badges more historically accurate, at the very least I don't like things being awarded in the game on a date when they shouldn't be available yet.
Regarding promotions, at some point it's going to get weird because I'm not transferring crewmen out at all at the moment... so at some point I'm going to have so many guys who are qualified for promotion, that if I promote them all I'll end up with far too many higher-ranking enlisted men compared to everybody else. But at some point I intend to use "realistic transfers" in Commander to alleviate that somewhat. And possibly I'll start dismissing the highest ranking dudes and recruiting more n00bs on my own just to keep things interesting.
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