Honestly I can agree to some extent with Schwartzritter.I have been playing TMO for some time and I honestly grew tired of the AI it is way too good in certain areas but really stupid in others.I think that the AI stock is lame and the AI in TMO is very challenging but not very realistic some of the load outs are not very realistic either.In certain areas the AI is uber but in others TMOs AI is very easy to outsmart at least for me.I am not trying to say that TMO is a bad mod by any means I just feel that it trades off some realism to make the AI harder I agree that you should not get DCed every time you attack submerged many times subs from various naval forces completed an attack and received no depth charging because the enemy was either not skilled enough or form various other conditions.
An example: I have played TMO so much that I have gotten very good at the tricks needed to avoid getting attacked after you attack while submerged you just simply pull the plug and go deep as soon as your last fish is out the tube and begin your escape most times the AI never finds me because they more or less go blind once you go under a thermal layer not every time but if you get into good position pre attack and start your evasion you get away Scot free. Something else I have noticed is that sometimes after a night attack the aI shot dozens of star shells right above my position in the sky yet they often no one comes over and searches the area below the Star shells
strange because they would find me.
Flip side of the coin: I have seen some cargo ships have unbelievable either sound abilities or super duper lookouts (I am not talking about the Q ships either) this is one of the small tankers.On tow occasions I have had them some how discover torpedoes on very dark nights much to far away for it to be reasonable.
Honestly the AI was what made me like TMO a long time ago but I guess for me using the same attack patterns that best helped me avoid the AI that wound up making the game get very repetitive.
As of late I have been really enjoying Operation Monsun which I feel has a very balanced and more realistic AI sometimes they spot you and give make you fight for your life other times they just cant find you.
Last night I made an attack on a convoy above Finland and the seas where rough which was to my advantage as I was in the final run of my approach I suddenly saw a armed trawler less than 1000 meters from me he was pulling a random search pattern i had just missed him in the darkness and obscuring waves and it was so exciting to have him so close will he hear me or will I not get noticed?
I had to press on because my approach was against the head ships in the two rows(it was a small convoy by OM standards 12 merchants 6 in each row) the trawler was so close as I was ready to fire at the more distant vessel I could hear its screw roaring near by each second I dread the sound of a ping I fired two fish at each ship but I had to wait on the second nearer ship now less than 1000m from me lest he evade when the first ship got hit all the time fearing the trawler he was so near if he detected me wed surely get rammed.By some luck he did not and I destroyed both merchants and in the confusion caused by being so close the escorts just did not thin I was as close as I was.
In another attack on a mid Atlantic convoy in an XI/C a made a successful attack on two merchants one sinking the other being severally damaged this time a shot from farther away a slipped though a gap however I made the mistake of selecting a desired depth on the depth gauge rather than order dive planes to deep dive that was an error and it cost me because this time the Royal Navy was out for blood and my mistake to order a slower dive helped them to spot me I got nailed by a near miss and spent several hours trying to evade and to repair serious systems damage I escaped only because the escort started hitting on some other sound that they thought was the sub.I also like how in OM they tend to drop a much more spread out in depth pattern this is much more historically accurate.
The TMO AI simply does not allow you to get that close ever getting that close is almost a 100% guarantee of being spotted and that to me takes away from the game you
know in TMO if you do certain things you will get spotted when it should be more along the lines of if you do it well you have good chance of getting very very close even to an escort if you make a low sound profile to the near escort in my experience with TMO no matter what(except perhaps a full blown storm) the conditions no matter how well you hide your profile and screws from prying ears you can only go so far and they will spot you.
I am sure some TMO players will say other wise or say you are not doing it right but to me the AI in TMO is too skilled and as a result it actually can limit what you can do in the game more than it should.
I want a more unknown factor here might be a crack escort unit or a poor one today is my lucky day or today is my unlucky day,the fog of war you win you lose sometimes your side has a good day sometimes the other side does.OM seems to better provide this.
TMO is a great mod but I feel that some treat it as the best most accurate mod from a AI difficulty stand point in that respect I must disagree as I have read more about WWII submarine warfare I have felt that TMO has un-realistic AI challenging yes overwhelming no.
@WernherVonTrapp actually I think that a member of this forum if they read though the threads and such actually can have a good idea what a given mod is like they can surely choose that they disagree with a given mods design philosophy that is their choice.That is why there are so many different mods TMO has much harder AI,RFB in the most historically accurate,FOTRS is gap between stock and TMO,OM covers the Germans and generally follows the philosophy of RFB.
TMOs big "selling point" is the harder AI and it does say right from the start in the manual for TMO the reasoning behind the AI changes.