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Old 04-28-07, 10:28 AM   #5
tedhealy
Grey Wolf
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: St. Louis, MO, USA
Posts: 772
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Beery
Here's the place to discuss issues relating to the development of RFB.

I'll start the ball rolling.

Issue 1: I'm considering crew ratings for the Japanese escorts. The problem is that the game is overstating the chances of getting killed by escorts by a very wide margin - currently the game's survival rate is worse than it was for German U-boats in the Atlantic and that's way way waaay off. A whole lot of SH4's destroyer crew ratings are set to 'elite' and the abilities for the escorts seem virtually unchanged from SH3 - i.e. if you're faced by more than one elite it means certain death no matter how deep you dive or how good your escape tactics are. It appears that elites cannot lose you once they have your signal locked. I'm considering doing what we did in RUb and simply replacing all level 4 (elites) with level 3 abilities. Does anyone who uses RFB have anything to say on this? Would it be better to reduce ratings across the board (i.e. 1 to 0, 2 to 1, 3 to 2 and 4 to 3)? Also, how were Japanese crews in real life? In RUb we left in a few level 4s because the Allies did indeed have seriously dangerous hunter-killers who were excellent at their job, but I'm not sure if the Japanese had such units. The high survival rate of real US subs argues against ANY level 4 escorts, as the game's level 3 AI will occasionally kill us.

Issue 2: regarding contact reports, I'm thinking of instituting an 'across the board' adjustment so that contacts are reported only 20% of the time (just as they were in RUb). The problem is that at the moment there's no use in stopping every now and then to check for sound contacts because the game is set to report contacts pretty much 100% of the time. With 20% reporting we'd have more incentive to play the game while transiting to our destination. Right now it's just a matter of taking the game to high TC, toggling between surface at night and periscope depth during the day (to avoid air attack) and waiting for the reports to come in. This results in boring play and high tonnage gained for no real effort.
I agree with number 2. Cut the contact reports. I haven't really played enough to make informed comments on number 1, but I will anyways Anytime I've had the depth, I've always been able to get under a thermal layer and get away. The only times I've been killed lately is in shallows or pushing my luck at periscope depth trying to get that last salvo of torpedoes off before that DD 350 yards away runs me over. But like I said, I haven't played enough to consider my recent experiences the norm for me yet (career on very hard if that makes any difference).
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