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Originally Posted by Captain_Jack
Dont get me wrong. I truly appreciate all the work modders have done to improve SHIII and SHIV. RUB, NYGM, and GW were works of art!
But as I read these posts it seems many are just trying to put the Atlantic Campaign into the Pacific and call it "realism". It was a different campaign all together. The Japanese escorts were no where near the skill of the allies. And in the early years of the war many Japanese Merchant Vessels traveled alone without escorts. Mush Morton attacked an unescorted convoy of four merchants in 1943. And the Japanese did not even have their depth charges set to correct depths until mid war. US Subs did not have widespread use of SJ Radar until Aug 1942.
But then I read posts of modders giving US Subs SJ Radar in 1941, Making the Japanese Escorts Much more deadly, Getting rid of small unescorted convoys, etc....
Is this the Pacific War? Or just a transplanted Atlantic Version?
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He has a point. The lack of success of American subs in the early war was mostly due to passive sub commanders that were making sonar only torp attacks (when the Germans were attacking at night on the surface), dud torpedo's and lack of experience.
I've had a few torps explode early in SH4, but no duds at all yet despite having the realism option ticked.
Once the US started copying the Germans and doing night time surface attacks there are accounts of escort DD's heading in entirely the wrong direction.. dropping depth charges when the sub was still on the surface, some distance away.. and being tied to their escort duties and only chasing the subs a few hundred yards away before returning to their merchants, when obviously the sub would come around for another attack. The Japanese didn't get a good handle on ASW.
You can never simulate the fear of dying, and the cautiousness that brings, but we can have more/some early war duds (I say early war, I don't think it was until mid 43 that they sorted that problem out completely) and probably less ships so we spend more time searching.
Also, the Japanese regularly patrolled certain corridors that were known sub passages. I haven't seen that in SH4 but it would add to the difficultly of even reaching your patrol objective.
There are various ways of making SH4 harder but I don't think making the escorts uber effective is the way to do it. Sure there may need to be some tweaking, but nothing too extreme.
If you want realism.. apart from the above suggestions, how about..
Use manual TDC
Even if the stopwatch speed bug is fixed, still calculate speed manually
Don't use map updates
Patch so that you lose 25% of your best experienced crew after every patrol
Patch to lose a lot of the contact reports.. there was only ULTRA and that was vague
Add in a bit of tweaking to escort AI
Play so once you die you don't load a save, but start again
I reckon that would make it a bit more challenging, if that's what you're after..
Edit.. I should add that there are also documented cases of Japanese ships that were very adept at ASW.. that pinged very effectively and knew just when to listen, just when to move and just when to depth charge.. it would be very realistic to have 'some' escorts that were very skilled.