[Fidd]

Further to this, I think as a general principle, wherever possible, AI decision-making, and attacks, should be conducted by human players, because they're capable of artifice, deception and intuitive guesswork - and other necessary qualities for hunting uboats in a way that AI really struggles to do. We call AI "Artificial Intelligence", but I submit it should more properly be called "AS" - Artificial Stupidity", because it is such a blunt-instrument and largely incapable of nuanced decision-making.

Example: Escort has firm pings on a uboat and is prosecuting a DC attack. Another uboat surfaces 8km away, and commences firing it's deck gun, causing the escort to cease prosecuting it's DC attack, and it then seeks to hit the surfaced uboat with gunfire!

Self-evidently therefore, AI is both as dumb as fence-post, but also, and this is borne out of experience in dozens of games, bloody difficult to program so that it behaves similarly to a half-way intelligent human! Another example is AI "gunnery". At range, we do not experience a gradual nearing of shell impacts before we're hit, as one would tend to experience for real. Instead, we have a number of highly inaccurate rounds land, and eventually a single hit is landed, whereupon the gunnery becomes laser-like in it's precision thereafter!

So AI (AS) sucks badly, and anything that can be done to reduce it's idiocy by replacing it with humans is a very good thing!. Conversely, much of the tasks required of an escort crew, are mind-numbingly dull and repetitive. Endless days or weeks of pinging, with no returns from a uboat, and the occasional false return from a hapless whale or wreck on the sea-bed. (virtually ever ww1 and ww2) ship-wreck on the sea-bed around the UK is literally hammered-flat by DC's dropped during the war to ensure that if they were a uboat, they were dead!

AI is therefore required to do the heavy-lifting of these boring tasks, so that AI escorts can still pose a problem for uboat crews, until they are taken over by allied players to do the attack/asdic search or surface gunnery - better (which is not necessarily more accurately!) than an AI would do in the same scenario.

If we consider the "get to 185m and you're safe" is got rid of (or is a lobby-setting so to allow/prevent), then a human player would know to keep a u-boat down until it has fallen well astern of the convoy, and likely would keep it down until dayight, so that it had to spend much longer overtaking the convoy even on the surface. An AI one is incapable of any such nuance. It has to be remembered of course that this has to be kept as a playable game, and few are so hardcore as to wish to play with realism wound up to full, however, if AI and human operated tasks can be intelligently applied so that the game is capable both of more varied outcome, but also increasing difficulty, then this will help retain players.

The same applies to the complexity of operating the boat. At it's most simplistic level, we have the bots. Then we have players some of whom have only been playing a day or so. Better skilled players of a few weeks usually improve over the next year or so, but often inside a year, they're able to dive/use the engines/helm with little or no further scope for advancing their skills, beyond playing in shallower water and dialling up settings such as torpedo reliability. Wouldn't it be great if even the simple-jobs could be made (electively) more difficult to vary the expertise and difficulty of performing a role? Such flexibility in the game would also help player retention.