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Old 09-20-10, 10:37 PM   #11
reignofdeath
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So youre telling me that when its later in war if I want to survive, my WHOLE patrol is best to be at 16 TC?? oh man Although I do notice that while on the high TC I still get the watch alerts that pause the game but usually my watch crew is always competent enough to spot them far enough out that even if I lose time I still have another few thousand meters before they even begin to see me.

EDIT: This is under good conditions with unlimited visibility however.

Quote:
Originally Posted by frau kaleun View Post
The general consensus seems to be that the highest "safe" TC for use in any area where you might encounter the enemy is 128. Anything above that, and too much "game time" elapses before you can react to the potential threat. Keep in mind that when you are in high TC, it's really the game that's going at "high speed" - you aren't. Your reactions still happen in "real time" but the enemy AI's don't.

I did the math once and it was kinda eye-opening. Assuming that 2 TC means 1 second of "real time" = 2 seconds in the life of your crew and u-boat, then 1024 TC would mean that 1 second of "real time" spent playing the game would = 1024 seconds on your u-boat.

1024 seconds = a little over 17 minutes.

If you are running at 1024 TC when, say, an enemy destroyer or plane is sighted by your watch, and it takes even one second of real time for the game to drop to 1 TC and alert you, you have already lost 17 minutes of reaction time in the game. By which time you may already be under attack, because the enemy AI takes its "orders" from the game, and in TC they just get them faster and react faster. Meanwhile, your crew is still at the mercy of human reaction time which simply can't compete at that level of TC.

At 256 TC, 1 second = a little over 4 minutes. That's still a pretty good chunk of time.

At 128 TC, you're down to a little over 2 minutes. I haven't played past 1940 yet, but I'm guessing that even 2 minutes can be the difference between life and death later in the war when Allied ASW tactics and technology begin reaching their peak effectiveness.

At 16 TC you're back into the realm of losing only seconds instead of minutes. That's got to make a big difference later in the war, especially when it comes to attacks from the air.
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