[Kpt. Lehmann]

Originally Posted by Fenris_Wolf

Thanks for the clarification.

So the improvisational trick was to use small merchant vessels instead of larger ones which a U-boat captain would deem unworthy to attack (while giving it enough destroyer escort screen for deterrence).

Interesting.

Game-wise I would call it quite a nerf. Or atleast a new and clever time-sink for the whole game. Couple that with realistic torpedo behavior (a greater torpedo failure rate) and you'll see why I felt like pointing it out.

Not a 'nerf' at all, as you say, but a solution for not having a better variety of smaller-tonnage ships available at the time we built it. (dunno what the status is today on smaller tonnage ships available by the various 3D ship builders.)

In real life too, there are/were far more smaller ships available to merchant fleets for the simple fact that they were more inexpensive and less complicated to build.

Larger ships took longer and cost more. (usually... am not referring to the situations of mass production on the scale of the Liberty ships) nAturally they were not as common, and this fact should be reflected in-game.

Also, 3D ship modellers are typically interested in building large ships like liners, or more warships. (Because that's what everybody wants to sink! )

AG124 was good enough to basically make a series of small tonnage ships to order, to reflect our effort to inject a tonnage spread that made more sense/mirrors real life shipping by tonnage scale / availability more closely.

One of the worst things working against the 'simulator' aspect of SH3, has always been the enormous possible tonnage hauls players could drag down with little effort, even playing at 100% 'realism.'

GWX addresses that problem by making smaller ships far more common, and larger ships more rare based on their tonnage. This reduces the player tonnage haul, which pushes the average player tonnage haul down in the direction of being "more believable."