[Sailor Steve]

Obviously you're using GWX.

In the stock game you get renown for A) Going to the grid and B) Patrolling for 24 hours. In GWX you don't, on the principle that no one is rewarded just for following orders. In real life they were assigned a grid and stayed there until new orders came through. The SH3 system is a holdover from when the game was originally meant to be mission-based.

There are two ways you can get around the "Starting in August" part.

1) Do a short turnaround patrol (just to the end of the harbor and back). Actually you don't have to go anywhere, but I think it's fun. Then use SH3 Commander (the best thing you'll ever do) to A) Change Days In Base to 18, and B) Assign qualifications to all your petty officers. You will then be sent to sea on August 19, as fourteen boats actually were, and only have a short wait for the war to start.

2) Just select a September 1 start date.

If you sink a neutral ship you will lose the amount of renown it's worth. Not a good idea. You can, however, go into Basic.cfg and edit the renown rewarded. The file you'll find there looks like this:

[RENOWN]
RenownReachGridObjCompleted=0
RenownPatrolGridObjCompleted=0
CompletedPatrol=0
NEUTRAL=-1
ALLIED=1
AXIS=-10

You can change the renown for completing the assignment so you get some again:

[RENOWN]
RenownReachGridObjCompleted=100
RenownPatrolGridObjCompleted=500
CompletedPatrol=0

I didn't change the CompletedPatrol number because that is broken in the stock game and has never worked.

I changed my tonnage renown to look like this:

[RENOWN]
RenownReachGridObjCompleted=0
RenownPatrolGridObjCompleted=0
CompletedPatrol=0
NEUTRAL=0
ALLIED=1
AXIS=-1

My thinking is that it's still bad to sink neutrals, so with a '0' listing I don't get punished for sinking one, but I don't get rewarded either. I also changed the loss for sinking a friendly from '-10' to '-1'. This is because when a u-boat did sink a friendly ship (and it happened several times) it always happened that the ship they attacked was somewhere it shouldn't have been or was disguised to look like an Allied ship.

Of course you can change them to anything you like.