Interesting discussion, but to answer the original question, unless the UBI devs modify the game beyond what we know about for patch 1.4 at this time, you only have limited options:
Revert to a save game.
Modifiy your game save to give you unlimited fuel or undamaged components.
Do the best you can at minimum depth and battery speed.
Try any of the other more humorous solutions offered.
I'm pretty sure we've determined as long as there was diesel, WWII fleet boats had the equipment and expertise to come up with innovative propulsion solutions. Without fuel, as long at the transit was realatively short, even tradtional solutions could be employed (when nature cooperates.)
Another turn on the argument is what are we really asking the devs to do? What we are batting around here is the question "what consitutes game end?"
Are there conditions other than destruction and death where we can consider the player has failed in the mission to preserve a battle worthy or transit-worthy engine of war?
There are many vessel components in the sim most of which can have partial damage of various sorts which I assume triggers limited effectiveness in the code for those components.
There are some components when fully disabled make the game difficult (or meaningless) to continue but for one aspect- willingness to spend the time to return to port and repair or get a new sub, then continue the battle. Loss of guns, crew members, pariscopes, radar, radio, etc. obviously fall into a different class than propulsion.
Once mobility is lost, it becomes a different game. Completely pointless to continue in terms of adding to your tonnage score. Loss of the rudder is another show stopper. We then come to the point where we decide if propulsion can and should be lost in some way as a "tilt" game ender. If no, then some (potentially) complex code and graphics support needs to be added to the game which wasn't intended by the devs. Indeed they went to great lengths to explain to the community they decided to have a "simple" propulsion model and have stuck with that decision. You open a large can of worms as players will also expect the AI vessels to have limited or varied aspects of the same system.
In discussing this in detail, we no doubt start the wheels turning in the future decision process. I see a damage indicator being added as a result of user feedback on the "ghost" status of the damage model.
If and until code is added to all but eliminate loss of propulsion as a game ender, the empetus is back on the player to do what I think the devs intended:
Do all possible to preserve the fighting integrity of the sub and crew while carefully judging risk to gain as much sunk tonnage as possible. This decision then to eliminate one of the show stoppers of the game also eliminates one of the balancing factors of the game: risk vs gain.
-Pv-
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