[Bullethead]

As the Germans, the most important merchants to go after are in the Channel, because these directly impact the progress of events on land at Verdun and the Somme. Take out enough of these and you might win WW1 in the summer of 1916. But if you fail in that, merchants still help you win at the bottom line as to who's better off at the end of 1916.

Merchants typically hug the coast until they have to cross some wide body of water, and then they tend to do that at the narrowest point. So filling the Straits of Dover up with mines is always a good idea, as is always having U-boats patrolling there. The lower Channel should also be assigned to U-boats. And putting a few CLs and a bunch of DDs in Zeebrugge or Oostende for surface raids is also helpful, although the Brits and French are strong enough to start with to give you some trouble, and get reinforced if you're too successful.

There are also a fair number of merchants coming in from overseas (as in entering on the west and south map edges), many of which head for Liverpool. Thus, patrolling and mining there or at the entrances to the Irish Sea is also helpful.

Right now, when your subs or mines do anything, it's just reported as a transient line in the text buffer in the upper left corner. What's here is mostly sub successes. With mines, you usually have no idea if any foes have hit them, unless you happen to have a unit there to see it happen. But mine losses do show up in the game_log.txt file, so if you want to read the enemy's mail, you can look through that periodically. Just search for the word "mine!"