So far I'm thinking that the DD sensors are much more realistic in GWX than anything that came before them. No more insta-flank with all guns blazing if you're on the roof and cross the 5000 meter redline, early war you can get quite close to them if you plan it right and the weather and sea help you out, etc. Yes they are very deadly, but only if you get yourself into a position to allow them to be, if that makes sense.
Early in the war (Nov. '39) I was running on the surface at night during some heavy seas and rain but with only light fog and my watch officer spotted a DD at 2,200 meters. I almost flipped out because that meant you'd get hammered hard most riki-tik with GW 1.1 or Stock, but here I spotted him well before he spotted me. So to test things out I kept creeping in on him, I reached 800 meters before the lookouts started freaking out about all the other ships around. Here he was the point dog for a convoy. So I backed off and did a night surface attack, successfully as per the German doctrine at the time, and got away without so much as a scratch. The only time the DD dropped DCs it was around a km away from me as he was looking where I would have gone if I were being lazy, but not where I really was. He never got a good lock on me either visually nor with ASDIC.
So I don't think the early war DDs are overdone at all, you just have to attack whatever they're escorting the way a real U-Boat skipper would. On the next patrol I ran into another convoy that was only escorted by a pair of Flowers (or so I thought) so I went in cocky and overconfident (basically how I played everything before GWX) and nearly got my clock cleaned. Again it was night, the seas weren't quite so bad and I was foolish and greedy, when you have that combination even a "lowly" Flower in '39 can really mess your day up. I did get kills on a medium merchant, whale factory ship and large tanker, but the 2 1/2 hours of trying to get out of Dodge with them plastering me with DCs was very frustrating. Although you do feel a sense of accomplishment out of outthinking the escorts to escape, and that's really what you have to do outthink them.
As for warships, they're dangerous as hell if you don't pay attention to everything that's going on around you. Nothing says bad day than having a US cruiser fire his main guns at you from 12,000 meters just because you didn't think their radar was that good yet in '42...
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