I do not understand this sim ..

[Catfish]

.. or better what UBI did with (or to) it.

Going through the boat is great, even if climbing ladders could be better, and the graphics are great - even if the graphic mods done for SH4 are not far away. But all else ?


They have learned nothing from SH3 and 4, regarding operational dephts of U-boats, their diving capabilities, and the accuracy of destroyers in 1942 ?

Again this Gibraltar single mission (NOT campaign, i wonder if i will ever try that). After sneaking through i wanted to test the AI, and sadly it is the same as in the earlier stock game SH3.

Dive below 150 meters and the hull gets damaged. Bull, even the early VIIAs were capable of at least going to 160 meters, and more. Then the boat you get in the Gibraltar mission is a VIIC, so 150-60 meters and HULL DAMAGE ? Astonishingly at the same second, underwater propulsion is damaged. How does water pressure do that ?

Ok, new try, reload - oh, saved games mysteriously vanished ! Thanks UBI for online-"saved" games. So once more, great !!!

Now after sneaking through new test, alert a destroyer and dive, creeping at one knot and running silent at 160 or so meters: All destroyers of Gibraltar, and it must be 40 or more they put in this mission, are closing in as if i was surfaced and waving a flag, with a torch: HERE, HERE ! Ok, this is what i wanted ...

But ..
They find you at periscope depth what seldomly happened in reality due to the surface noise at 0-20 meters, they find you at 160 meters running silent or stopped, and they place depth charges EXACTLY at the depth you are = 160 meters. When you are at 140 m they will explode at 140 meters.
(B.t.w. in all the books i read slow silent running means 2 knots, 2 !! Not one !)
But regardless from 0 to one knot they know exactly where you are, their course gets DIRCTLY across your position invariably, and drop the charges where you will be in 10 seconds or the time the depth charge needs to reach you down there.
And not one variation, or at least 2 or meters higher, no, exactly at the depth you are, all explode exactly 1-2 meters level sideways from the hull, and one beside the tower. In 1942, mind you.
Great, i never knew they were able to do that, i wonder why they ever improved a perfectly working system after 1945.

Now from all the books i read about the U-boat war, from allied to german accounts this is complete bullsh!t. It is the same as in SH3, subs in reality would have been toast already in 1939 with that. Remember Mr. Oesten who said he would have been killed soon if it had been as hard as in stock SH3 ?
Destroyers sometimes did not see Uboats as close as 20 meters at night, they were barely able to locate a deep-diving sub at more than 120 meters and they sure did not know how deep the boat really was, at least not with an acccuracy of 1 meter when switching their charges. AND they did NOT find a U-boat at periscope depth in anything than completely calm seas. You can show me all kind of diagrams, no book, account or report of the time mentions this capability, not until 1943 and afaik not after this. The only advantage the later small XXIII boats had was that they were at PD almost always.

So they did not improve the AI towards the real thing, they did not refine U-boat data, and the only thing that is new is the possibility to walk through the craft and "talk" the same sentences to the crew over and over and over again. All else is SH3.

Why does nobody read about a book about this time ?

I wonder why people now try to improve the destroyer AI ? It should be lessened, not improved. The ASDIC or better underwater radar (because it obviously is exactly this) does not ever miss, and the AI is perfect, in 1942.
The old "Aces of the deep" made it possible up to 1944 to sneak into convoys or get away unharmed as it was, but not so in SH5.
IMHO mods should decrease the ASDIC and night vision capabilities, this is UNREAL.

/rant

Thanks to the modders, but regarding AI i will try to set this to zero

Greetings,
Catfish

[Harmsway!]

It's alright Catfish the UBI Developers don't understand us either.

Why didn't they ever think to come over here and hand pick a few beta testers? They seem to develop in secluded isolation. I could understand this a little with a game but this is a simulation.

Anyway moving forward SH5 is incredibly customizable now with TheDarkWraith mod New UI.

[UGCnim]

The cool thing I've realized about this game is if you don't like it, you can fix it. Ranting is not going to get the game we want. If anything, it's an insult to all the modders who have been hard at work fulfilling eveyone's desires. The SH5 community has been hard at work getting to the game we expect. We know the stock game isn't perfect and was rushed to market, but if anything, Ubisoft has given the modding community a blank check to do what they want with the it. So let's make the best of it, and how about some respect of that elite group of modders who have been busting their @@ses to give the game those attributes that make it enjoyable for all expectations, from the "let's sink some sh1T"-shoot-em-up gamers, to the simulation purists?

[Sailor Steve]

While I agree on the whole, I'd like to pick a couple of nits.

Originally Posted by Catfish

...and the accuracy of destroyers in 1942 ?

I might agree if you had complained about 1939, but in 1942 the tactics were improving dramatically. That is the era of Johnny Walker, after all.

Now after sneaking through new test, alert a destroyer and dive, creeping at one knot and running silent at 160 or so meters: All destroyers of Gibraltar, and it must be 40 or more they put in this mission, are closing in as if i was surfaced and waving a flag, with a torch: HERE, HERE ! Ok, this is what i wanted ...

Exactly how many u-boats successfully passed through the Straights of Gibralter in 1942?

But ..
They find you at periscope depth what seldomly happened in reality due to the surface noise at 0-20 meters...

Someone here has said that before, but is there documentation? If it's true, then why didn't all u-boats just stay at periscope depth where they couldn't be found? The American admonition "Run silent, run deep" was there for a reason.

I do, however, agree with your complaint about laser-guided depth charges. I haven't played SH5, but they were definitely there in the stock versions of the earlier games. But talented people have fixed the problem in SH3 and SH4, and it sounds like in SH5 as well.

Again, I agree about u-boats sneaking into convoys at night and not being caught, but...

AND they did NOT find a U-boat at periscope depth in anything than completely calm seas.

Again you repeat this claim. Is there documentation? Again I ask: If this is true, do any of the u-boat guides advise it (honest question - I don't know)? If it was such a good tactic, can you show where everybody used it and weren't detected?

I wonder why people now try to improve the destroyer AI ?

Perhaps because players complained about being on the surface in broad daylight and not being seen, even when they shot the destroyers. Your complaints about underwater detection and accuracy are valid, but when a modder talks about "improving" AI he's not necessarily talking about making it more accurate, but making it more realistic.

[Zedi]

Im sure Catfish have IRAI enabled, only with stock settings you can pass Gibraltar on surface and even having a wild party on deck while doing it.

Indeed, IRAI makes the AI very precise in droping dc's, no matter how deep you are, but there is an option to decrease some accuracy in the mod config files.

[Harmsway!]

"can be customized by editing the \data\Scripts\AI\init.AIX. I went to great lengths to make it user customizable and for testing different setups/configurations (testing)" TheDarkWraith

Glad you brought this up Catfish. I going to check this file out tonight.

[TheDarkWraith]

the only reason the DCs have pinpoint accuracy is because I gave them that accuracy. I set the depth precision to 2.5m. Why did I do this? Because the game gives no way to change that (or many other items) based on year. So let's say I set the depth precision to 10m. Then in '42 you'd have DCs being dropped with 10m depth precision (set depth +- 10m). Very unrealistic. I had to compromise and that compromise was giving them accuracy at the beginning years.

Now that I've just put my thoughts on paper it has occurred to me that there is a way to change accuracy via year. I would have to make new guns and just setup the controllers differently. Ah but we can't do that yet as we are unable to clone or import .GR2 files. So we're left at the current compromise for now

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Harmsway!

It's alright Catfish the UBI Developers don't understand us either.

Why didn't they ever think to come over here and hand pick a few beta testers?

How do you know they didn't?

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Magnum

Im sure Catfish have IRAI enabled, only with stock settings you can pass Gibraltar on surface and even having a wild party on deck while doing it.

Indeed, IRAI makes the AI very precise in droping dc's, no matter how deep you are, but there is an option to decrease some accuracy in the mod config files.

Ah. Point taken. In this case I shouldn't comment on things I'm unfamiliar with. Thanks for the update.

[Catfish]

Hello,
thanks for answering to my rant ahem - sorry

1st the developers can certainly not be made responsible what a later mod does lol, and yes, IRAI is hard (a word that is a plain understatement in the australian sense of expressing an extreme) lol

2nd i should have started with the vanilla game just to try it out, but when i read about those mods ...


Ok, it may have been me who already brought up the question about accuracy and sensitivity of allied sensors already in SH4 (U-Boat missions, OMEGU etc.). I cannot remember who posted this picture/diagram of a destroyer and which active sonar was able to scan which angle before and under the bow.
Things went downhill fast after 1943 for the U-boats i know, and certainly more than two destroyers using Walker's method usually killed a boat, if not so early before the US coast, or in the open atlantic.

Let's say i have to accept if someone tells me what the capability of ASDIC was back then but i doubt the destroyers and DEs had all those new systems immediately built-in, and it certainly needed a seasoned crew to really use it to full advantage - but in 1942 ?

ASDIC did not help England at first, because the boats were attacking surfaced, at night. The flower class corvettes had a top speed of 15 knots and the U-boats with its 18 knots just ran away, their silhouette making them almost invisible against gunfire.

There are a lot of acounts where destroyers, sloops or corvettes passed boats by less than 50 meters without seeing them, let alone firing at them in rough wheather even if they happened to see it. Some commanders swung their boat around and hid away in their own Diesel exhaust fumes. From an elevation like a destroyer deck it is unbelievably hard to see a near low dark silhouette at night or rough weather.

Even with radar a destroyer could not "see" a boat under 1000 meters, so if the boat made a sudden turn in rain, fog, storm, night etc. its enemy would just run past it.
And not all destroyers had radar early in the war, not all had experienced crews and they were so few that they had to stay with the convoy after a short search. Let alone few were real destroyers, but all kinds of boats pressed into convoy service.

The problem was that once the allies were aware of the 200+ meters diving depth and having cross bearings, going deep did not help the U-boats anymore, if there was no temperature/density layer.

The thing with submerged boats at PD not being detected:
It is possible to detect subs at PD, but you need some real good sea conditions. But from all i read it is almost impossible at some 12-14 meters of depth in anything but calm seas, there is too much surface noise for hydrophones, and the ASDIC of the time was not doing so well even in 1945 - you cannot compare this with modern systems or even with systems that only were available in 1945. It is theoretically easier in shallow waters, but there are other effects that spoil the target solution. Hardegen makes that quite clear when hiding in very shallow waters, at 20 meters on the ground, and some escorts buzzing across his fore deck but throwing their charges some 100 meters off.

There is a minutely detailed report of how a VIIc boat attackss a convoy in the eastern channel waters at pd in late 1944, and how he managed to sink one steamer, and still evade the destroyers - all at periscope depth.

There are other reports from the later small XXIII "coastal" boats who did just that. The hydrophone and the situation awareness by being able to observe the escorts, along with their small hull made them perfect for such kind of warfare.
As well there are other reports of tests done right after the war with ordinary (if late-built) VIIc boats, which could not be detected at pd with the most recent sensor arrays.

In the book on U-2540 (the boat now being in Bremerhaven as a museum ship being thoroughly tested after the war in the NATO) there is an article of how to evade at periscope depth as well. This was however not always a good idea since planes could sometines spot the boat from above.

When they tried to measure the speed of the V80 Walther boat they were not able to hear it in the hydrophones despite the boat making 20 knots, at 20 meters depth, and ASDIC did not work as well (this in a british report about testing a real Walther boat (with the Junkers steering colums running on Perhydrol fuel)).

I base my views on the following books, and some more:
- "U-Boot und U-Boot-Jagd" (GDR 1969) mostly dealing with Diesel boats and how to detect them
"Die Woelfe und der Admiral", Frank 1953
- "So war der U-Bootkrieg", Busch 1957
- "U 333", Ali Cremer 1982
- "Geschichte des U-Bootkriegs", Peillard
- "Heimfahrt der U 720", Lehnhoff
and 5 or so others i can list later if you want.

IRAI makes it look as if the destroyers and crews of 1945 had teleported back to 1942, leaving no chance for a boat to attack surfaced or submerged at all; but i realized it can be toned down, so i will test it a bit. I am just about to install the new big Opus Magnum mod -

And i want to express my thanks and admiration for the people who make those mods possible !

Thanks and greetings,
Catfish

P.S.
i just thought about how this "detecting" is done in SH V, or with TDW's IRAI ? Is it done with some percent of randomness, e.g. the destroyer listens or uses active sonar, and detects you at (for the sim) favourable conditions with a probabability of say 10 percent ? SO he will detect you statistically in one of ten sweeps, ok. BUT: If this sweep has a time of say 1 minute until the next, it is likely that he will surely detect you within 10 minutes - how is it done ?

P.P.S.
Just finished the Gibraltar mission, but man was that hard !
I followed the advice and initially ran surfaced at top speed to make it in those eight hours. In the beginning it is dark, but the night vanishes at around 0.30 pm.
So i ran along the northern coast and only slowed down when a destroyer came REALLY near. Unfortunately there must be 6-7 hunter groups with some 3 ships each, but they (thank god) run towards the center of the strait away from the coast, and they never saw me. When i was close to Gibraltar there was a destroyer anchored near the coast. Getting cocky I dived, crept past him, and sunk him with a rear torpedo. Then i immediatly surfaced and ran at 7 knots for 3 minutes until i saw some escorts heading for the explosion point. I shortly dived until they were past me, then surfaced and, reaching the entrance of Gib's port, i turned the boat right to 150 degrees and ran to the middle of the strait with 6 knots, straight towards another destroyer passing the strait from west to east. It was already getting brighter, and when i was close i dived to pd and ran on silent, again turning to 110 degrees. The destroyer, being faster than me ran on past me and vanished. Now all around my periscope was clear, but i could not surface -too bright sky now and i even saw a plane !
I had 4 hours left and decide to stay at pd until i realized visibility was suddenly down to some 50 meters - rain and fog !
I immediately surfaced, went to full speed without charging batteries at 17 knots and did so for 10 minutes until half the entrance of the Gib port entrance, until i received the message "radar detected". I ran on for a minute, turned south to 150 degrees to divert them, and made a crash dive at full speed. At 50 meters i switched to silent running and changed my course east to 080. As i could see with the periscope lots of light beams above and all hell broke lose. I did not dare to get deeper than 150 meters since my boat does not seem to like that, but indeed managed to go straight on until they gave up - they were searching in the wrong direction, and i was lucky.
I swear i was sweating at times ..

[Harmsway!]

Originally Posted by mookiemookie

How do you know they didn't?

I don't. My bad.

[Ducimus]

/popcorn

[Ducimus]

Originally Posted by TheDarkWraith

the only reason the DCs have pinpoint accuracy is because I gave them that accuracy. I set the depth precision to 2.5m. Why did I do this? Because the game gives no way to change that (or many other items) based on year.

I humbly, and respectfully submit to you an abstraction: That being an increased (wider) depth precision is plausible, because it is (as far as i know) impossible to limit the maximum depth on depth charges. Early war depth charges were shallow, late war deep, game uses same setting regardless.

Of course there are other ways to limit how accurate the AI is in its depth charge placement. Another method may be to lessen the max elevation of the sonar in use. The shallower the downward angle, the less accurate they become. of course, too shallow of a downward angle, and they won't be able to detect the player as the player is effectively under the sonar cone. Which is the case in stock SH4. Max angle on Jap sensors was 100 degrees. I forget what the first two active sonars is for the allies, but i don't think it was more then 120 (off the top of my head), i know the later war active sonars is sporting a 155 degree down angle.

it has occurred to me that there is a way to change accuracy via year. I would have to make new guns and just setup the controllers differently. Ah but we can't do that yet as we are unable to clone or import .GR2 files. So we're left at the current compromise for now

Try a normal dat file? Maybe it will work. It's my understanding that SH5 will accept dat files for some things, though i don't know if it will render correctly.

[Krauter]

I did not dare to get deeper than 150 meters since my boat does not seem to like that,

Try the UHS Mod, it will make it easier to cruise at depths deeper then 150m without taking damage.