Some of you have WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much free time on your hands. I'm either disappointed in you and/or I'm highly jealous. This game is NOT playable without using high TC. How do you sail around the entire coast of Africa on less than 256x? You'd spend, quite literally, an entire day just getting there, let alone the individual time spent with contacts.
If you have hours and hours of free time to watch an empty map (or stay close enough to your PC to be alerted), good on you.
If you are worried about losing contacts or sudden attacks, those are
SH3 urban legends. I personally cruise at 1024 whenever I can, including when I'm closing in on a convoy on the surface AND HAVE DETECTED RADAR. The notion that 1024x is instant death is 100% untrue. Does it make
ANY difference? Possibly. The nano-second between getting a contact and the program automatically booting you to 1x
might take a few extra nanoseconds. Maybe even a few seconds. But the bottom line for me is that:
1- I use time compression all of the time. When approaching convoys, when evading escorts, when patrolling, etc. I use the max TC allowed in the situation (e.g., 8x with escorts close, 32x with enemy shipping close, 1024x cruising).
2- As you can get from my 100K+ club thread, I have NO problems detecting large amounts of shipping.
3- As you can get from my 100K+ club thread, I have NO problems evading destroyers and airplanes beyond the usual challenges of GWX. I've only be surprised by airplanes when I couldn't detect their radar, and 95%-99% of the time I am able to dive my IXB in plenty of time even without detecting them (weather is the factor here). Destroyers are not even close to be an issue other than in extremely poor visibility when they can pop out of the gloom and surprise you at close range.
4- Crew fatigue is moot as most of my crew has enough medals (all 2+ medals, most 3+) to overcome any related issues. I do get significant crew fatigue during combat encounters, which is about all I'm looking for.
So I would strongly encourage everyone to try higher TC values unless you get some intrinsic enjoyment in spending loooooong quiet periods staring at your screen. Looooooong periods.
Maximum TC has no effect, or a negligible effect, on detecting contacts and evading air attacks (let alone surface). Long-term fatigue is generally porked IMO, and it is most certain not practical to run the game at 32x just to simulate it throughout your patrols!
So Happy (Faster) Hunting!
