[Beery]

There are two issues here:

Firstly the large merchant and the large transport were both reduced because they had enormous tonnages - well outside of the normal range for WW2 ships. This is a slam dunk - the earlier tonnage values on these were certainly too heavy. I feel they're within acceptable tolerances now.

The more difficult issue is the general tonnage mod reductions that came with Observer's random tonnage mod. I've actually done some research on this today, and I'm beginning to think that the mod may be a bit too conservative. When you calculate the random tonnage mod's tonnages and extrapolate them to careers they turn out to be very light (i.e. the ratio of of ships sunk to tonnage doesn't match up well with historical figures for the famous aces, whereas it should fall within a reasonable range). As a double check, I also took my longest career which used the standard SH3 tonnage figures and compared it to a similar-length and similar-tonnage historical career, and the number of ships sunk in both careers were almost identical, although the particular historical career that best matched up with mine (Schepke's) was very light in terms of tonnage per ship sunk. 18 out of the top 25 commanders got between 20 and 27 ships sunk, with tonnage of between 115,000 and 180,000 tons, for an average sunk ship size of 6276. My long career has an average sunk ship size of 4158, and that's with the old higher ship sizes - if that career had used the random tonnage mod it would have been well out of the range that we would have expected for a real career. Schepke has an average of 4213 (of the top aces, his is probably the smallest tonnage per ship sunk). The largest tonnage per ship sunk (of the top aces) seems to be Ernst Kals with an average ship size of 7282, which also argues for bigger (not smaller) ship sizes. I would have to say that the C2 is probably representative of the most sunk ship in the game - it's probably above the average sunk ship size. The standard game's C2 is 6200 tons (just 76 tons lighter than the average historical tonnage for the above listed commanders). The random tonnage mod has the C2 at between 4100 and 5200 tons. I feel a better range for this ship type would be 5200 to 7200 (perhaps even higher). That's just my gut feeling on the issue. If players are using the realistic career length in SH3 Commander, there is virtually no chance of amassing tonnage totals anywhere near the top aces. I feel the possibility has to be there. It must be at least possible to equal Ernst Kals's score at the time he made that score (July 1941 to December 1942), but with SH3 Commander at present, this is only possible if you generally sink larger tankers or liners. The chances of getting tankers on virtually every mission are very low indeed, and liners are very hard to find, let alone sink.

I think perhaps where the discrepancy comes in may be in using an average for all ships sunk by U-boats. The less successful commanders probably sank smaller ships on average, and this may be skewing the averages a bit. The game tends to simulate the very successful careers better than it does unsuccessful ones. Another thing that plays into it is the fact that we tend to be able to sink more ships than real commanders could. Our torpedoes are far less prone to failure. This results in a larger number of ships being sunk. Observer solved this problem by lowering tonnages, but there's a side effect, in that real commanders got less ships but more tonnage than we get when using the random tonnage mod.

I'm not sure what's to be done about this. Certainly the ratio of ships to tonnage has to fit with the historical tonnage to ship ratio. I'll have to think on this a bit.