[Wolfcat]

I am on patrol 5. Some post action thoughts:

1. Sonar officer is sooo bad. Especially when asked to track warships. There are multiple times, the warship close by, you can clearly hear it loud on hydrophone, but your sonar guy just keeps saying no contact. One time it reports it can hear merchant ships 4km away but can't hear a warship traveling at 20kts at less than 1km away. He has all the metals up to iron class 1st class, promoted to senior and has radioman qualification, but still can't do his job right. (However, it may be a Hsie's mod issue not WAC issue)

2. U-boat's starshells fall too quickly: it seems regardless of your gun elevation, the starshells would pop at about the same height and quickly fall into the water. It is practically useless.

3. Torpedo: it seems side-impact hits are more powerful than under-keel explosion. My Scapa Flow raid, first try, I hit the battleship with 4 under-keel hits, but the ship didn't sink. 2nd try, I hit it with 3 side impact, it exploded in a giant fireball. Also, early war period, if you set contact fuse, it will reliably go too deep, but if you set magnetic fuse, it is not as bad.

4. Early war destroyers: I am pretty sure these ships are not equipped with ASDIC (at least I didn't hear any pinging sound). Somehow it can still accurately locate deep diving sub on silent running and at full stop. The first pass, I side-stepped the ship at pretty wide margin and depth charges fell pretty far behind. I went full stop on the last depth charge explosion at 150 meters deep. The 2nd pass, the destroyer turned and went directly on top of me. I maneuvered out of the position and 3rd pass the ship still found me and went on top of me again.

5. Too many friendly contact messages: Do I ever care about some destroyers departing Wilhelmshaven? (This may be Hsie's mod issue)

6. Shipping traffic too high: historically most u-boats came home empty-handed, not because their skippers sucked or their torpedoes failed. They simply couldn't find any targets. Here, I pretty much used up all my torpedoes before reaching designated patrol zone. The first mission I was patrolling in Baltic against Poles. I saw streams of polish ships and convoys escaping, many are very close to Germany's coast and even protected by polish air force. I mean seriously? What is Luftwaffe doing? What about Kriegsmarine's surface ships? No one cares about them besides a few u-boats?

7. Night vision bombers: in my Scapa Flow raid, the moment I hit my target, you start hearing swordfish bombers overhead. Without any flares or star shells, they immediately dived and bombed me. How did they see me? I wasn't moving and there was no wake in pitch darkness. They have night vision goggles?

8. Some special mission's instructions are vague and confusing. There was one that sounded like those secret supply ships/commerce raiders are passing Faroe narrows to head back to Germany. But it didn't give specific coordinates or date/time. It just says on "10.02". What's that supposed to mean? It definitely doesn't mean date because I am in February.

9. Game stability: 5.2 is way better than 5.0. I don't experience any in-mission crashes. The only crash I experience is at mission-loading stage. At early game, it rarely crashes. As the my campaign progresses, the crashes become more frequent. Now I would say I am crashing about 1/3 times at mission loading. Should I delete some of the old saves?

10, Can we put some beard onto the first Watch Officer? After months at sea, he is still so cleanly shaved.

Those are my observation so far. Will report back when I have more infor. Overall, the mod is great.