[Fidd]

As an addition to the concept laid out in the previous post: It's important that if more prolonged DC attacks come into existence, eg with a human escort commander keeping DC attacks/asdic lost-contact searches going, that there's ALSO a change to the way "alerts" works, so that the other 3 uboats are not compelled to wait for an hour or more of the 1st uboat being detected/DC'd/reacquired on asdic. The simplest change would be for a convoy to alert as it does now, however, once a given u-boat has been detected, it ceases to be re-alert the convoy if re-detected or continuously detected by any or all of the escorts, past 5 minutes from the detection. At which point, the convoy would de-alert, even though AI or human player operating an escort had it detected. Naturally, AI escorts in asdic contact with that u-boat would continue to attack it until called back to the convoy by the convoy commander, or it is sunk.

In other words, after a fairly short alert, the convoy would settle to a heading and speed fairly smartly, allowing attacks to be resumed by the other u-boats, even though, one of their number remained detected and was being attacked. This would keep gameplay going for the 3 undetected u-boats, whilst the 4th was suffering a prolonged DC attack(s) from one or more escorts (as directed by the convoy-commander.