[OddjobXL]

This does strike me as fairly realistic. You do read about submarine captains surfacing in the middle of convoys and engaging in surface attacks until the escorts can get in and come after them. I'd never try that in SH3 GWX! Every single escort seems deadly competant. It definitely makes for a much more challenging engagement but, for my tastes at least, mixing it up a bit works better.

Last night, for example, I was trying to pick off a stricken ship after the merchant escorts finally got bored of looking for me and hauled off. But my air and battery were low. I was down to one torpedo which I wanted to save for emergencies. Came down to a dawn deckgun attack for me. Now the destroyers were still visible on the horizon chasing after the merchant convoy of theirs. In SH3 I might have just cut my losses and gone home rather than risking the wrath of those evil psychic bastards. In SH4, I'm thinking I might just roll the dice! And rolling the dice is always more fun than cutting your losses. That's why Vegas works.

So I come up and have the lads plink away on the waterline. We're orbiting around the freighter at a low speed. I wanted to hit as many different compartments as I could in order to flood her faster. Eventually I start hearing shells wizzing past and distant cannons firing that don't belong to me. Well, I've read about sub captains taunting gunners by "shaking a tail feather" (gunners would commonly aim, evidently, at the most visible part of a ship in low light which would often be the phosphorescent wake - though I doubt this is modelled in the AI) so I did the same. Put them on a 180 bearing and zigzagged. They couldn't hit me but they were getting closer. Finally my guys cheered! Enemy unit destroyed! The merchant was sinking.

We crashdived below the thermal layer, snaked our way out of the old position while silent running, and then played dead. At least I had air now!

I will say this, though, the convoys slowing down to a crawl or stopping when a ship is damaged is annoying. It does take alot of fun out of an engagement and needs to be fixed. The reason I was so low on air and batteries is because I was trying to wait for the other ships to leave the area before I went after my victim. And they wouldn't even move for the longest time. Then they putted away at 2 knots.