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Originally Posted by difool2
Invariably I'll be dropped into the gameworld fairly close to my objective, and it won't take a huge amount of time to find my target(s) (with the exception of Kara Sea, but even then I found my target within 10 hours of starting the scenario).
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Is there a technical reason why few/no scenarios like this exist, or is every designer merely following some sort of community standard where such things simply "aren't done"? Does the AI go haywire or something after 24 hours or so?
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I think it's so interesting to listen to how long people take to find the SSBN in Kara Sea. It's usually pretty close to where statistics would predict it. That makes me happy.
There's not really a technical problem behind it, though. It's more a problem with the scenario designers. I think the problem you're describing is a symptom of several things. First, in order to hold most people's attention, a scenario must be exciting. That means they want to quickly be in a situation where they can start shooting and evading torpedoes. People want their scenarios to be fun, and sailing around an empty box looking for an elusive submarine can be boring. Unfortunately, in a real ASW battle, you're going to spend a lot of time sailing around an empty box, which brings me to the next problem.
Most people designing scenarios don't have a very good idea of what an ASW battle looks like, and the distance and time scales involved. There's actually formulas that one can use to take quantities like search speed, sonar range, and search area size, to predict statistically about how well a given platform will do. Using those will allow people to better allocate platforms to appropriate sized areas given their estimate of how long they want the scenario to run. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of people here who know how to do that.
When you look at the numbers, then for the sonar performances that say, a 688i has in the game, and make some assumptions about search speed, then you can easily search a 50mile box in 10-12 hours, often less, but people don't want to play for that long. The truth is, a lot of ASW is sailing around looking at nothing. Too often victory is defined as "nothing happens." That makes for very poor video gaming, unfortunately.
Huuum... I've never made a realistically sized barrier patrol...