Reduced Tonnage RUB/SH 3 Commander

[Enfilade]

This isn't a criticism, just a question. I have no problem with Rub reducing the stock tonnage of the C2/C3 from the stock game's 6-7k to 4+k if this is the realistic tonnage variation. Presently running Rub 1.43 (no chance to install 1.44 yet as still on patrol). But noticed the C2 and the C3 have just about the same tonnage values now. And they're pretty big suckers - especially up close! Wondering what source you're using for these dramatically reduced tonnages? Gotta sink a lot of C3's to make much of a splash..no pun intended....

[Kobal2]

There may also be another side effect - the renown gained for a patrol depends on the tonnage sunk. Lower the tonnage, you also lower the renown. Or maybe Beery adjusted the renown values accordingly ?

[Wolfram]

I like the tonnage adjustments

Large Mechants were ~17,000 at one time now they down to ~12,000 using the RUb (with IUB ovelay on it)

[Enfilade]

It's not that I dislike the tonnage adjustments... I was just curious to know what information they were based on. Tonnage variations may also be a result of changes made in SH3 Commander and I believe these will vary according to year. I'm an enthusiastic user of both RuB and SH3 Commander... they make a good game great.

[BladeHeart]

I was wondering the same.

If the tonnage is reduced and as a result the renown is reduced then surely the promotion levels, etc should also be adjusted.
Unless of course the renown remained the same. :hmm:

Maybe Beery could give his views on the matter?

[Wolfram]

Originally Posted by Enfilade

It's not that I dislike the tonnage adjustments... I was just curious to know what information they were based on. Tonnage variations may also be a result of changes made in SH3 Commander and I believe these will vary according to year. I'm an enthusiastic user of both RuB and SH3 Commander... they make a good game great.

Good points maybe Beery will catch this thread and answer but I meant I liked the fact the ships (tonnes) seem more realistic. Large Merchants always mystified me why they appeared bow to stern shorter and lesser keel draft than a light Cruiser but had about 50 to 60% more tonnage...

have Fun!

[Observer]

Originally Posted by Enfilade

This isn't a criticism, just a question. I have no problem with Rub reducing the stock tonnage of the C2/C3 from the stock game's 6-7k to 4+k if this is the realistic tonnage variation. Presently running Rub 1.43 (no chance to install 1.44 yet as still on patrol). But noticed the C2 and the C3 have just about the same tonnage values now. And they're pretty big suckers - especially up close! Wondering what source you're using for these dramatically reduced tonnages? Gotta sink a lot of C3's to make much of a splash..no pun intended....

You get this mod with SH3 Commander. I suppose since I did it, I'll explain how it works.

The data for this is from over 3000 actual ship sinkings that happened during the course of the war. This data was broken up by year (mostly..some years are combined), and then analyzed using some statistical tools for mean and standard deviation. I generically placed ships in classes such as Large Merchant, Medium Merchant, Small Merchant and Tramp Steamer (by the way I did a mod to get rid of the C2, C3, T2 and T3 names which applied to specific classes of merchant ships and saw limited action only during the later part of the war, at least from a actual ship sunk perspective). I then randomized the tonnage values based on the mean and standard deviation. If the standard deviation was large for a given class of ships it could result in tonnages being very close to each other (i.e. C3 and C2 which I referred to as Large and Medium merchants). This isn't unrealistic because many Uboat Captain's had difficulty estimating ship tonnages unless they could find the ship in the Lloyd's registry.

Just as an aside, the same database used for tonnages was also used as data for the improved convoy mod.

Hope that's the answer you're looking for. This varies in SH3 Commander by month, so some months you may get a 3500 gross ton C2 (medium merchant) and another month you may get a 5500 gross ton medium merchant. It adds to the excitement and means you never can count on a given class of ships getting you an exact 100% predictable tonnage. Every time. Now there are some surprises, and some disappointments especially when you spend 3 torpedoes taking down a merchant of only 3500 tons.

As another aside, the renown values for ships have not been altered. You should find, on average, the results from a patrol more closely match historical sinkings from Uboats during the war on a tonnage basis.

[Observer]

One other note, just for clarity. This database represents ships sunk by Uboats only (including mines). I didn't include ships sunk by aircraft or surface action. The sample size in this case is large enough where I don't think it adversely affected the statistical analysis.

[Enfilade]

Observer, many thanks for the informative post. Just what I was looking for. I like the variations possible depending on the month too.

[Kalach]

I think the reduced & random tonnages are great
Especially when you sink something a lot bigger than you expected it to be
I have noticed that getting medals for your crew is a lot harder through. The commander will be able to rack-up his medals quickly with some good patrols, but your crew getting medals is very slow.
I'm currently in my 25th patrol in a IID in '43 and have only 2 iron crosses between my whole crew

[Beery]

There are two issues here:

Firstly the large merchant and the large transport were both reduced because they had enormous tonnages - well outside of the normal range for WW2 ships. This is a slam dunk - the earlier tonnage values on these were certainly too heavy. I feel they're within acceptable tolerances now.

The more difficult issue is the general tonnage mod reductions that came with Observer's random tonnage mod. I've actually done some research on this today, and I'm beginning to think that the mod may be a bit too conservative. When you calculate the random tonnage mod's tonnages and extrapolate them to careers they turn out to be very light (i.e. the ratio of of ships sunk to tonnage doesn't match up well with historical figures for the famous aces, whereas it should fall within a reasonable range). As a double check, I also took my longest career which used the standard SH3 tonnage figures and compared it to a similar-length and similar-tonnage historical career, and the number of ships sunk in both careers were almost identical, although the particular historical career that best matched up with mine (Schepke's) was very light in terms of tonnage per ship sunk. 18 out of the top 25 commanders got between 20 and 27 ships sunk, with tonnage of between 115,000 and 180,000 tons, for an average sunk ship size of 6276. My long career has an average sunk ship size of 4158, and that's with the old higher ship sizes - if that career had used the random tonnage mod it would have been well out of the range that we would have expected for a real career. Schepke has an average of 4213 (of the top aces, his is probably the smallest tonnage per ship sunk). The largest tonnage per ship sunk (of the top aces) seems to be Ernst Kals with an average ship size of 7282, which also argues for bigger (not smaller) ship sizes. I would have to say that the C2 is probably representative of the most sunk ship in the game - it's probably above the average sunk ship size. The standard game's C2 is 6200 tons (just 76 tons lighter than the average historical tonnage for the above listed commanders). The random tonnage mod has the C2 at between 4100 and 5200 tons. I feel a better range for this ship type would be 5200 to 7200 (perhaps even higher). That's just my gut feeling on the issue. If players are using the realistic career length in SH3 Commander, there is virtually no chance of amassing tonnage totals anywhere near the top aces. I feel the possibility has to be there. It must be at least possible to equal Ernst Kals's score at the time he made that score (July 1941 to December 1942), but with SH3 Commander at present, this is only possible if you generally sink larger tankers or liners. The chances of getting tankers on virtually every mission are very low indeed, and liners are very hard to find, let alone sink.

I think perhaps where the discrepancy comes in may be in using an average for all ships sunk by U-boats. The less successful commanders probably sank smaller ships on average, and this may be skewing the averages a bit. The game tends to simulate the very successful careers better than it does unsuccessful ones. Another thing that plays into it is the fact that we tend to be able to sink more ships than real commanders could. Our torpedoes are far less prone to failure. This results in a larger number of ships being sunk. Observer solved this problem by lowering tonnages, but there's a side effect, in that real commanders got less ships but more tonnage than we get when using the random tonnage mod.

I'm not sure what's to be done about this. Certainly the ratio of ships to tonnage has to fit with the historical tonnage to ship ratio. I'll have to think on this a bit.

[CCIP]

Hmm, looking over my WaW career, I've sunk 43 ships for just over 250,000t now. That puts the average exactly where it's ought to be as you say Beery, and I've been using Observer's mod all along.

Luck, perhaps? :hmm:

[Observer]

I'm afraid I have to disagree Beery.

It is an error to look at just the best performing aces as a method to evaluate the correctness of the tonnage mod. From a statistical standpoint, you have to look at the aggregate of the data in order to get a representative sample. In this case, using Uboat.net for a data source, I can see the aces who sunk over 100k tons of allied shipping had on average a tonnage of 5,527 gross weight tons. These were the best performing Uboat Captains.

Also sucessful were the Captains sinking over 50k tons of allied shipping. These men had an average of 4991 gross weight tons. These men, on average were very sucessful. Of course this completely disregards every Uboat Captain sinking less than 50k tons, but there were many who only completed a few patrols before being lost, and some only sank 1 or 2 ships. I don't have the statistics at hand or the time to compile them, so I can only assert this without data to back it up. I think a spot check of uboat.net will reveal the truth to this statement though.

By comparison, the C2 merchant, which makes up a fair amount of pre-1942 convoys has an average tonnage, in the tonnage mod from 1939 - 1942, of 4,516 gross weight tons. By comparison, the C3 merchant has an average tonnage, in the tonnage mod from 1939 - 1942, of 6,618 gross weight tons. If you consider in IC (Improved Convoys) that you will see about 24 C2 and C3 merchants, on average, this equates to about 6 C3 merchants and 18 C2 merchants. Using the above average tonnage values from 1939 - 1942 this gives an average convoy tonnage of 5,042 gross weight tons. This is to the lower end (near the 50k aces), but still only 500 tons off of the best performing aces.

Further, the best performing aces should be, from a statistical standpoint, rare. These aces are at the extreme of the bell curve (you could argue that the 50k aces are near the extreme as well) with the majority of the Uboat Captain's never performing anywhere near this level. From a statistical standpoint, this is comparing the performance of the P95 Uboat Captians and wondering why everyone didn't performe this well. Clearly these men were very special and acheived something special in the process - performance that should be difficult to match, not routine.

Finally, this discounts the presence of Liberty and Victory ships (more so Liberty ships than Victory). These ships had very little variation in tonnage, and because of it, they are not altered in the random tonnage mod. These ships are heavier than those in the random tonnage mod, and would be cherry picked by SH3 skippers if given the opportunity. These merchants will also tend to move tonnage averages up rather than down. Of course this depends on how many patrols a person runs and the time in the war they start the career.

In conclusion, I stick by the values as represented in the random tonnage mod. While not perfect, they are close enough that I don't think many would be able to notice a difference of a few hunderd tons either way. Similarly to CCIP, my WaW career has sunk 46 ships for almost 270k tons. This averages about 5,800 gross weight tons, and is consistent with Uboat aces scoring over 100k tons.

[panthercules]

For what it's worth (not much I'm sure), if you're looking for data from game careers my first/best career had my kaleun sinking 85 ships for a total of 437,782 tons over 17 patrols (Sep '39 - Jan '42), for an average of 5,150 tons/sinking - I was playing stock at first and then various RUB versions up to about 1.42 - never used any other mods that appeared to affect ship tonnages, and didn't do anything like harbor hunting or tanker farming or whatever to get any really big ships.

In my second, rather less successful career, I sank 9 ships totalling 57,930 tons, over 6 patrols, for an average of 6,436 tons/sinking - using RUB 1.42-1.43 (first 4 patrols were with a Type IIA, so I was only shooting at the larger targets first and didn't have many fish left or a deck gun for shooting the smaller targets, which probably skewed the average to the high side a bit).

I like the variability of the tonnages to some degree - it was pretty weird that first career seeing how many ships I sank that were all within like 2 or 3 tons of each other - certainly didn't seem very realistic.

[Observer]

Originally Posted by panthercules

For what it's worth (not much I'm sure), if you're looking for data from game careers my first/best career had my kaleun sinking 85 ships for a total of 437,782 tons over 17 patrols (Sep '39 - Jan '42), for an average of 5,150 tons/sinking - I was playing stock at first and then various RUB versions up to about 1.42 - never used any other mods that appeared to affect ship tonnages, and didn't do anything like harbor hunting or tanker farming or whatever to get any really big ships.

In my second, rather less successful career, I sank 9 ships totalling 57,930 tons, over 6 patrols, for an average of 6,436 tons/sinking - using RUB 1.42-1.43 (first 4 patrols were with a Type IIA, so I was only shooting at the larger targets first and didn't have many fish left or a deck gun for shooting the smaller targets, which probably skewed the average to the high side a bit).

I like the variability of the tonnages to some degree - it was pretty weird that first career seeing how many ships I sank that were all within like 2 or 3 tons of each other - certainly didn't seem very realistic.

RUb does not provide random merchant tonnage. This is only provided using SH3 Commander. If you did not use Commander, then your number reflect stock SH3 tonnage values.

The first career looks about right. The second seems high compared to what I posted above. My guess is you sank mostly C2s during that career.