U-Boat-behaviour in GWX?

[AS]

Hi all,

I was just testing and playing around using SH3 1.4b and GW1.1a. Here´s what really annoys me and what I´d love to see changed in GWX (IF that is possible!)

1. Fuel and battery consumption doesn´t play any vital role in SH3, because
- you can always teleport back to base without any fuel left
- BdU does NOT consider your remaining fuel (e.g. at 0% fuel I send a status report and they wanted to send me some 500miles away)
- even without ANY fuel left and NO battery capacity you can do 1kt forever when submerged AND you can refill your compressed air, which is nonsense because compressed air needed compressors running on - guess what - FUEL!
- battery power was VITAL. Without any power left, submarines had to surface. There was no hovering or whatever some people say on this forum. Truth is, once the battery was too low, U-Boats had only one chance: surface and hope the Destroyers aren´t already waiting for you.

2. Flooding cannot be countermeasured in an realistic, active way. In reality, flooding could be countermeasured by either using pumps (which certainly made a lot of noise), increasing speed (dynamic effect) or - in great depth or when flooding was really heavy, compressed air was used intensively.

In SH3 we are condemned to passively stare at the repair screen and hope that things will work out fine in the end. I´d love to have full controll over
a) pumps!
b) compressed air (and not only in those uncontrollable heavy doses)
c) dive planes with speed making a difference
(Strangely enough both SH2 and AoD were more accurate in these points.)

3. Food and water supply is also NOT simulated at all. Maybe tweaking the infamous crew fatigue could solve this problem, e.g. having your crew´s "power" slowly decrease to almost zero after 4 or 6 weeks (in a VIIc that is)

Back to my first statement: why do I stress the point "fuel" so much? Well, because dfrom all that I´ve read fuel consumption and possible speed was one of THE main factors in U-Boat tactics and captain´s decisions. So what I ´d love to see in SH3 is that I get a contact and really have to calculate whether or not I can reach it AND make it back home at so and so many knots. This is one of the aspects real submarines always had to deal with, especially the small VII-types.

In "Das Boot" (the novel!) there´s a long passage about how the diesels stuttered because on the way back home they had to reduce speed in a way that the engines almost "died" and ran very un-smoothly. It is also said how angry the captain was because he couldn´t afford hunting a fast travelling ship because the LI always warned him (this is also shortly referred to in the movie).

In short: a main aspect is the way U-Boat actually behaved like. I want to feel the fear of running on a low battery while Destroyers are around, I´d like to calculate fuel consumption and I´d like to be aware of how crucial compressed air is!

Now I know many of the things I mention have been said before and I am aware of the fact that some features may be hard-coded thus making it impossible to do something about it. However, this is what I´d love to see - maybe SH4 will ship with full U-Boat controll (the flight sims have it, too!)

My two cents, AS

[AVGWarhawk]

1.Teleporting is a little suspect, no doubt. But you do not get your 100 renown points for getting to the port. So there is a penalty for that all be it small.

2. BDU is not to bright so you have to make that command decision whether to go to new coordinates or not.

3. I have never been down long enough to run out of battery power so I cannot comment on that issue. Is the one knot after the batteries are gone perhaps an idea of drifting?

4. Yes, compressed air seems to never end while pressing the E key. Seems odd to me also.

5. Food, I think the crew fatique model is not the greatest and that also means any mods I have tried for this issue. Food is the least of my worries compared to the current fatique issue.

6. Your navigator can give you realtime distance at current speed using the diesels. He cannot however do so with the batteries. From what I hear, 3kts on batteries will net you 80 nautical miles.

7. I believe SH3 Commander has a program that has random failures of engines, etc. while on patrol. Perhaps this is what you are looking for on stuttering motors etc.

[The Munster]

Good points but I think your post is in the wrong section, I suggest you re-post in the Mod Workshop Area.

[AS]

That´s just what I´m talking about: if you never ran out of battery power, then you were either damn lucky, early in war or there´s something terribly wrong wrong with SH3! And no, drifting is not an acceptable answer since you can change direction and head any way you want. Besides, you wouldn´t be able to maintain buouncy so finally you would have to surface - maybe in quite an embarrassing situation

[raymond6751]

WW2 boats were not intended to spend more time down than necessary. They were essentially surface boats that could dive to avoid detection/trouble.

The hours of battery power do drain the cells if you stay too long. I have done it just for a test. I got about 14 hours at 1/3 speed or slow. True, you don't get sunk as the boat will continue at speed of 1.

I think that mods have made it so the boat will sink slowly at that speed anyway.

[THE_MASK]

1. Fuel and battery consumption doesn´t play any vital role in SH3, because
- you can always teleport back to base without any fuel left

NYGM already addreses this by being able to tick the essential boxes only like unlimited fuel etc (you can still have WO assist ) and still give 100% thereby having to return to base (BTW if you play on 100% then you have to return to base).

SH3 sucks on the rest.

[THE_MASK]

Another thing that sh!ts me is that when you are close to an enemy ship the TC drops and its a dead giveaway . TC should drop when your close to every ship weather enemy or friendly . I can be travelling along at 256TC and suddenly drops down to 32TC . Geez i wonder if theres an enemy close by . Then again i can go right past a non enemy at full 256TC . I bet nothing like this has been addreses in GWX .

[ref]

Originally Posted by sober

Another thing that sh!ts me is that when you are close to an enemy ship the TC drops and its a dead giveaway . TC should drop when your close to every ship weather enemy or friendly . I can be travelling along at 256TC and suddenly drops down to 32TC . Geez i wonder if theres an enemy close by . Then again i can go right past a non enemy at full 256TC . I bet nothing like this has been addreses in GWX .

As you must know hard coded things like that can't be addressed by any mod team.

Ref

[panthercules]

I'm sure things could be better in many respects (and I'm all for that, if it can be done), but for the most part I think things have gotten pretty good with the latest mods. I did think there may be something funky going on with battery vs air, as I do almost always seem to run short of air before I run out of battery if I'm forced under for a long time. However, I checked some math - if 3knots = 80 nm, that should equate to about 27 hours of battery life, which I guess sounds about right - I've never been forced down for more than 24 hours so I wouldn't really expect to have experienced battery problems, and I haven't yet - so maybe that's not really a problem after all.

With the LRT mod by Drifter, I have experienced some pretty impressive flooding/damage situations, including one where I really did almost run out of compressed air and was forced to surface a few hours earlier than I would have liked because I was not going to have enough compressed air to correct the next time my boat started sinking into the depths because of the flooding.

Although I know it is possible to do the esc/teleport thing, I never count on it and always am very careful to shepherd my fuel supply and save enough to make it to home (or at least to a milkcow, if available), so I feel like I have to take those things into effect (including foregoing a chase of some juicy convoy that's just too fast or far away to be safely reachable from a fuel standpoint) - I think the game handles that pretty well if you want it too, and lets you ignore it if you just want to teleport, which is probably the best possible design decision from a gaming viewpoint (options are good).

It would be nice to have the option to do more complete/complex systems management, sort of like you could do with CEM on IL-2 if you wanted to, while still using auto if you didn't want to mess with it.

I've always run out of torps or fuel and had to head home before I think food would have become an issue, but it would be nice to have food be a more relevant/important factor somehow, especially for those longer patrols and perhaps the later war patrols where you may not get as many chances to fire off all your torpedos as you seem to in the target-rich environments early in the war.

I think all of these sorts of things would be very nice to have, but I would really like to have some more work done to make tactical factors (moonlight and position, wind speed and direction, likelihood of being spotted at night on surface early in war, etc.) matter more than they seem to now, so that the tactical/attack situations would be more historically accurate/appropriate if possible.

[kiwi_2005]

I like the idea where if you ran out of fuel while 2000miles out at sea you cannot press esc button to get home. Many times i have not watched my fuel while giving chase to ghost convoys only to run out somewhere in the middle of the atlantic. Oh well esc button!

Amazing technology these germans had back then:

EDIT: I know you can edit keys a few on here have given details on how to take away certain key commands like no (.) key to see external view etc i wonder if this would work for the Esc key? Has anyone tried it.

[THE_MASK]

Originally Posted by kiwi_2005

I like the idea where if you ran out of fuel while 2000miles out at sea you cannot press esc button to get home. Many times i have not watched my fuel while giving chase to ghost convoys only to run out somewhere in the middle of the atlantic. Oh well esc button!

Amazing technology these germans had back then:

EDIT: I know you can edit keys a few on here have given details on how to take away certain key commands like no (.) key to see external view etc i wonder if this would work for the Esc key? Has anyone tried it.

Play 100% and you have to return to base .

[kiwi_2005]

Originally Posted by sober

Play 100% and you have to return to base .

True? Will this also stop the esc and zap to port option? I play with everything checked except external view - But at 100% is there no way i could zap to port if out of fuel?

[THE_MASK]

Man i tell ya , without external view and being submerged with a DD on top is a totally diffrent game .

[kiwi_2005]

Originally Posted by sober

Man i tell ya , without external view and being submerged with a DD on top is a totally diffrent game .

Yeah i know i tried it a few times and the atmosphere had jump 150% especially when being hunted! It is better. Way better. I tend to go back to external just so i can watch my sub :rotfl:

I need more discipline pity it could be once you choose 100% in a new career it cannot be changed back. Stays that way throughout the career.

[THE_MASK]

If SH3 gets frustrating you could always look out of your window at the ice bergs .