[Dogfish40]

Hi Troutish
I hear you. I have seen smoke on the horizon 90% of the time before my watch crew spots it. We must remember that the watch crew are tied down to very specific parameters. I think most of these are hard to get at, or we would see a lot of "Watch Crew" mods out there. When the crew miss your warships, is it 'Clear' weather? Or, is there Med fog? (I get a lot of Medium fog). It seems the watch crew don't see so well in any fog like conditions.
When I sail around Heligoland, there are something like four or five DD's hanging around that island. There's a good place to test how your watch crew are going to perform. Sometimes my crew calls'em out, but I can always see them first. I've also felt that there might be a relationship between the watch crew not calling out contacts, and the hydrophone (even if it's set for no contacts while surfaced).
One thing that they are really good at in my game is aircraft. They do very well at aircraft spotting, so at least that's something, and since TDW did some very good work on fixing both the soundman and the watch crew, the latter does work.
Maybe we can get this tweaked in a bit better or at least find out why the crew is still slow at spotting, (the enemy).
D40