Follow orders from BdU?

[TheDudTorpedo]

Hi all,

I was on patrol off Freetown, and on 9/11/41 BdU instructed me that "restrictions on American shipping are removed". Germany officially declared war on America on 12/11/41, so I was wondering if I sank an American ship between this period whether it would be treated as a 'neutral'? I suspect not, but fortunately or perhaps unfortunately, never came across a juicy American target during this period to test the outcome.

Has anyone found themselves in this position, and if so, what was the outcome? Enemy or neutral tonnage?

Regards,
Dud

[Annatar]

If American ship are still lit up like a Christmas tree it's a good bet that the game still considers them neutral and will penalise you for sinking them. Another way to check would be to look at the USA on your Nav map - if its all in red then its ships are valid targets.

I had a similar situation in the Irish Sea at a point in 1940 after BdU had said that all foreign shipping in British waters was illegal and viable to be sunk. I stumbled across an American Tanker the next day but it was all lit up so I let her pass.

[GREY WOLF 3]

if in doubt send it to the bottom

[mookiemookie]

Sounds like you're running GWX. They've included the real life radio messages sent to the boats, and while if you were truly a u-boat Kaleun in October of '41, Doenitz would probably be fine with you sending American merchants that were aiding Britain to the bottom.

SH3, on the other hand, counts Americans as neutrals up until Dec 12th of '41. You can check this for yourself by scrolling over America in the nav map. Are the cities still green? Neutral. Not until they turn red are American ships counted as enemies.

The penalty for sinking neutrals is that their renown value is deducted from your total. Be careful who you sink!

[Otto Heinzmeir]

You can probably edit the renown for neutrals. Go to the file at Ubisoft/SilenthunterIII/data/cfg/Basic.cfg

You can open the Basic.cfg file with notepad but be sure to uncheck the option 'always use this program to open a file of this selected kind'. Also make a copy of the original someplace safe in case you need to restore.

Anyway in this file are these values:
[RENOWN]
RenownReachGridObjCompleted=500
RenownPatrolGridObjCompleted=200
CompletedPatrol=100
NEUTRAL=-1
ALLIED=1
AXIS=-10
WrongShipSunk=-5000
FirstRankRenown=1000
SecondRankRenown=3500
EndCampaign=-5000

I have yet to try this but I suspect that if you change the value under NEUTRAL from =-1 to 0 then you would likely not get penalized. It may be possible though that 0 is not a valid entry. Perhaps -0.1 would then help.

I just haven't got around to trying this yet. But I have edited these cfg files before. Such as the time compression one.

[Jimbuna]

NEUTRAL = 0 is fine.

[Sailor Steve]

Yep, 0 works fine. I've been using it for a very long time now. But then I never sink a neutral unless it's in a convoy, and even then only by accident. I've recently changed my 'Axis' value to -1 after reading several reports of u-boats sinking friendlies that turned out to be disguised as Allied ships or in waters where they shouldn't have been, and the resulting court-martial let the kaleun off with a mild reprimand.

[JScones]

Originally Posted by Annatar

If American ship are still lit up like a Christmas tree it's a good bet that the game still considers them neutral and will penalise you for sinking them. Another way to check would be to look at the USA on your Nav map - if its all in red then its ships are valid targets.

Keep in mind that a ship's basic model remains the same for the life of the ship. So, if the ship spawned with lights on 1 Dec 1941, then it will stay with lights until it is either sunk or reaches its end point, regardless of the date.

Its allegiances, however, will change on the correct date.

Of course, this means that if you don't want to be penalised, you have to ignore any random radio messages that tell you to sink everything at anytime.

[bgey]

Hmm... this makes me wonder about the dates given in the tabel "Enemies of Germany" or something like that (when you press F1). Do these show the correct game dates or historical dates?

Benny