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Originally Posted by czACha
it passed my mind that real captain really make more than 6 patrols, sinking usually less than 100.000 BRT, encountering one convoy on 3 patrols it would be better to be forced to remain underwater longer because more aggressive escorts than in reality.
I am not quite convinced that it was so hard to be killed be escorts. Usually captains were attacking and running immediately after attack being bombarded anyway few hours after all.
What I am trying to say is to have some compromise, more kills more dangerous situation. What do you think about this guys?
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The numbers clearly show that either Japanese escorts performed poorly or they just were not around in enough numbers to be a real threat to sub operations. 50 subs were sunk out of 250 in 4 years of war (a sub lost approximately every 50 patrols, or something like a 2% chance of getting sunk during a patrol). The game currently has a loss rate of a sub per 5 to 10 patrols, depending on how careful we are. That would be perfect odds for an Atlantic U-boat campaign but it's seriously off-balance for the Pacific and I'm looking for ways to make it more realistic and therefore less deadly in RFB. Even if it was possible to increase escort AI effectiveness I don't see how it could help make the game more realistic, especially given the enemy targeting ability which is outrageous - if they keep us under longer they will eventually sink us, which will lead to a much increased mortality rate - something that the statistics don't support.
The statistics also don't support the idea that more kills would present a more dangerous situation. I'd imagine the opposite would tend to be true - lots of tonnage would be scored when the enemy's ASW abilities were either extremely poor or absent altogether. The really dangerous times would be when a sub was spotted early by a destroyer and thus got no tonnage whatsoever.
The statistics also support the idea that sub effectiveness was more effectively curtailed by faulty torpedoes than by Japanese escorts. I've read lots of reports where all torpedoes were fired with no effect due to duds but I've not read many reports saying that escorts were so effective that the sub could not launch an attack. If US torpedoes had worked properly US subs would virtually have had free rein to destroy Japan's ability to wage war and Japan would have probably been effectively out of the war by 1944.
It may be the case that in reality Japanese escorts were good at hunting and hearing subs but not at killing them, but I don't see how that could be possible since subs have a limited underwater endurance. Anyway, the limited options we have to tweak the enemy's ability to target our sub makes it hard to get a good balance if we aim at longer evasion periods - at a certain point the balance can't be maintained and we have to opt for either always getting sunk or always escaping. I don't see a point in either of those - there has to be some limit to our ability to escape and some limit to the enemy's ability to kill us and in order for RFB to live up to its name the balance has to be supported by the reality.
Personally, I believe that apart for accidents US subs operating in the Pacific in WWII were safe unless they were caught at or near the surface. I just don't see how Japanese sonar and hydrophones could be effective if a sub got deep enough. It's hard to bring that reality to the game because an escort is almost as able to kill a sub at 400ft as it is to kill it at 50ft and I think many players are getting killed due to deep attacks that could not have been successful in reality. At this point I don't think RFB needs tweaking either way on the deadliness of escorts except in terms of their ability to hear and attack deep subs - I believe this aspect needs to be adjusted so that escorts are less deadly. There are a number of ways to do this and I'm considering all of them. The easiest is to adjust the effect of thermal layers and this may well be the way I do it.
Players of RFB have to get used to the idea of surviving careers and having a relatively tame time compared to arcade style games because this mod is aimed at realism, no matter how boring that might seem. In a game, a career mortality rate of 20% might seem incredibly tame, but in real war a 20% mortality rate is incredibly frightening. To get an idea, imagine if your community was struck by a similarly dangerous disease outbreak - say of bubonic plague (with a 1% to 15% mortality rate when treated) - that's the level of fear we should experience if we're playing the game as realistically as possible. RFB can bring a certain amount of tension into the simulation but the player has to supply a lot of the empathy for the crew that allows him/her to feel real concern for the crew's safety that will lead to the player behaving more like a real commander. An RFB career demands a mindset that is focused on real sub commander concerns such as getting a crew through the war safely while getting the mission done. Just as in the real submarine service RFB probably won't suit folks who are in pursuit of danger.
In the end, excitement and challenge aren't the primary motivations behind RFB. These are only secondary goals, with uncompromising realism being goal #1. RFB isn't meant to be a game - it's meant to be reality stuffed into a computer.