And this is what a 14 hour marathon chase looks like without map updates and steering completely manually from the first contact I got. (Am still using the alpha 2 wolfpack patch but will switch to Beta tomorrow.)
If you follow from the bottom left, you can see that I had a run in with a destroyer and took damage when I broke off. Attacked twice by aircraft and I still managed to come back, re-establish contact and successfully lead the pack into battle and bag myself a large tanker to boot. You can also see the impact of the mod to make the distance reports you get a little bit inaccurate, if you follow my contacts going up and towards the top right denoted by the little compass circles. Each was a successful contact report but having slightly inaccurate data adds to it and keeps you right on your toes all the way through the tracking phase.
Bullets flying, ships sinking, flares and depth charges going off look awesome but wait until your hear things on the hydrophone! Without contacts switched on, you are forced to sit glued to your headset waiting for your turn to loose your torps and the sound effects of the actual battle starting are simply brilliant. It started slowly with a few depth charges, and then the guns on a few ships opened up, and then on more and more as it spread across the contacts on the hydrophone, until all descended into the chaos of battle. And all of a sudden, you are there in the middle of the Atlantic and the titanic clash unfolding before you is one of your very own making. It's 1942 and you are too scared to raise your periscope for fear of detection and so all you can do is listen to the battle unfold while you hope and wait for the convoy to slowly move into the range of your solution. After 10 to 12 hours of tracking that convoy and having endured 3 attacks to get there with damages and repairs, it becomes very personal... Stuff the crew, you should have heard me shouting when the torpedoes went in!
Who would have thought this possible in SH3? I never had a mission last much more than a few hours in the past but today, I spent 14 on one convoy...
Magic! LGN, Stiebler and H.Sie have reason to be proud.
DC