don't shout at me but i have the basics for a purely personal set up (just for myself to finally get some game play out of this fabulous moving oil painting of a game--it really is like watching a brilliantly animated oil painting of the uboat war!!)
in order to check something out and test the sort of behaviuor i went back in and REDUCED all the hydrophone maximum distances by 4000 metres (yes i did say 4000 metres) leaving only the AI_Hydrophone max range at 8000 metres- the rest once edited were between 2500 metres and 4500 metres)
another campaign patrol--- eventually tracked down a convoy in heavy seas and fog-- much rain and lightning etc--
couldn't see a thing so was a bit hard to tell at what range i was detected-- but around 3 to 4000 metres out as i submerged (i was having trouble finding it lol) at silent running of course--- this time i went thru every possible shade of green and red on the little sub meter -- spooky disembodied searchlghts started appearing all around me--- the detection meter going thro colour changes about every 30 seconds--
the DD's did a good job keeping me on my toes but never really presnted any real threat--- might have been different in calmer seas daylight no fog etc etc--but not massively so compared to the previous test patrol where it was exactly that and the hydrophones all had stock max distances--
as i was playing it occured to me that this patrol was doing a good job of representing early war/happy times difficulty levels--without ever allowing me to become complacent-- the DD's were allways too close to allow that- and they were DC-ing all around me at one point-- give all these same DD's k-guns and i would have been in trouble--- give them all hedgehogs and it would have been seriously hazardous
as it was (1942) only the corvettes had k-guns and only one on each side-- the rest only had the normal dc racks--
if i checked which hydrophones were early war (easily done) and left those max ranges as i have just set them ( 4000 metres less max range than stock--plus of course the 1000 metres minimum range on all the phones right thru the war)
for the mid war hydrophones i could increase the max range slightly and let the k-guns take care of the rest of difficulty level--
and for the late war hydrophones i could use the slightly less than stock max ranges and the mutliple k-gun racks and hedghogs would make things appropiately nasty
all the time keeping the minimum ranges at 1000 metres or perhaps reducing this slightly for late war
the DD's in this patrol did use their sonar and were actively (exsuse the pun) pinging me from time to time--so folks were right about that
this is just what i have come up with using all the information we have been trying and testing so far-- more to come and better i'm positive--
im not going to release a mod that's not what i came here for--but there's enough here to create interesting gameplay from the start thru to the end of the campaign--
im sure this is most likely down to the uberised hydrophones due to the sim.cfg entrys as i have made the hydrophones far less effective than stock and we all know what they were like for me with the stock sim.cfg entrys--useless
reducing the max range is hardly going to make them more effective (?)
incresing the minimum range isn't going to make them more effective at long range (?) and that is ALL i've done--so it surely is down to the unothodox sim.cfg hydrophone entrys (and i have Col to thank for that one !!
)
it may not be uber realistic but boy is it fun and VERY atmospheric--
and very simple to do aswell too--IF it works for every-one--IF it doesn't yikes then any set up isn't going to work for every-one so were still some way from solving that one--
i haven't even tried this set up in a single mission tho--it has to be said
i'd certainly propose this sort of edit if only on the grounds that it combines genuine challenge and fun..
it might actually be a good set up for multiplayer --theyre certainly not predictable--and do almost seem "human"
argghhh
SORRY G@ simulteaneous post-- extremely bad timing -- what i'm meaning to say is that it's a shame that the sim.cfg stuff is so incompatible with other approaches--may be if it does turn out in the end that their are two sets of people whose game suffers from different DD issues this is a way to deal with one of the problems