No contacts in a long time! Why?

[letterboy1]

I've been on this patrol for quite some time. I started out normal with contact reports and actual contacts (and some kills). I just went to Midway for my second refit and for the past several weeks there are no contact reports and no contacts except planes. It's as if the ocean is suddenly devoid of all shipping. Is there a big holiday I don't know about? Has anybody run into something similar?

[Packerton]

The Japenese are playing the new Dragon quest game.

[tater]

It is empty.

Real submarines patrolled for maybe 60 days.

The game breaks the war into segments. The first is from dec 41 til February 42. The next is march to august, and so forth.

The game ONLY LOADS TRAFFIC BASED ON YOUR PATROL START DATE.

So if you start in january 42, when the dec-feb traffic puts into port, that's it, no more traffic, not ever. There is a little slop set, so that if you start at some point in jan/feb, you will also see the spring traffic at the same time.

Go home, dock, start a new patrol.

This "refit" and go get more tonnage nonsense is what causes this.

tater

[GT182]

Tater is right. Plus the fact that the Japanese ships are hiding just out of your sonar/radar range. The crews are sitting there laughing at you running in circles looking for them while they eat their fish and rice. :rotfl: Stop and let the crew fish or swim for ahwile. Change your patrol plans to some place else and you you might get the surprise of you life.

Same happened in 1.4 SHIII. You could go for days out in the Atlantic and not see a single ship. Very frustrating to say the least but you had to change you way of planning your patrol.

But then again, Sh4 is not the same as SHIII in many ways.

[tater]

It's not really frustrating. What would be frustrating is for the crew whose skipper keeps taking the boat out for double, triple, quadruple patrols without letting them chase some tail in Honalulu or Perth. THAT would be frustrating.

tater

[Frederf]

Originally Posted by tater

It is empty.

Real submarines patrolled for maybe 60 days.

The game breaks the war into segments. The first is from dec 41 til February 42. The next is march to august, and so forth.

The game ONLY LOADS TRAFFIC BASED ON YOUR PATROL START DATE.

So if you start in january 42, when the dec-feb traffic puts into port, that's it, no more traffic, not ever. There is a little slop set, so that if you start at some point in jan/feb, you will also see the spring traffic at the same time.

Go home, dock, start a new patrol.

This "refit" and go get more tonnage nonsense is what causes this.

tater

This is new to me. I generally go for 2-3 month patrols with 1-2 refits. I'll be going in early after getting extensive damage during a harbor photo recon. Perhaps I'll have to start making my patrols shorter rather than longer.

[Snuffy]

Originally Posted by tater

It's not really frustrating. What would be frustrating is for the crew whose skipper keeps taking the boat out for double, triple, quadruple patrols without letting them chase some tail in Honalulu or Perth. THAT would be frustrating.

tater

Always a good thing to keep an ey ... er ... keep the men in mind. :hmm:

I just started a new career with 1.3 and TM 1.5 ... I see I need to update when I get home as 1.6 is now out. First mission on the new career .... take a porpoise to Honshu and photo a port. We've been 10 days now getting there, and not a sighting of anything.
(tonight we make the run up the bay to the port though.)

[tater]

Originally Posted by Frederf

This is new to me. I generally go for 2-3 month patrols with 1-2 refits. I'll be going in early after getting extensive damage during a harbor photo recon. Perhaps I'll have to start making my patrols shorter rather than longer.

It's very dependant on exactly when the patrol starts. The layers load from a little before a change, to a little after. If you load right at an interface, you get two layers running for a bit, say 42a and 42b.

The traffic also has to move around. So a convoy can spawn August 31st, and be on the map for 1 month as it drives around.

[letterboy1]

Thanks guys, going back to Pearl then for some tail. And to upgrade T Maru.

[Packerton]

I guess noone got my Dragon quest joke

[GT182]

Transfer to the Asiatic Fleet and you'll see more targets. All around Luzon is good, just check the map for the enemy's shipping lanes. You might not see as many convoys as SHIII, but they are there along with single and double targets. And when you run into a Task Force, be very very careful.

[letterboy1]

Thanks GT182, but what gets me is that suddenly there were simply no more contacts or contact reports . . . as if the ship spawning stopped happening. I even got a fax traffic mesage that there was a heavy naval engagement in the Midway area. I was right by Midway getting a refit when I got that message and yet I got no contact reports. I took my boat all around Midway and saw nothing.

Oh well, I'm about to start a patrol out of Australia . . . we'll see how it goes.

[tater]

Did you not read my post?

. . . as if the ship spawning stopped happening.

The ship spawning DID STOP HAPPENING!

You start a patrol, and the game loads all the background stuff (ports, airbases, etc) because it always does. They persist the entire war.

Then the game loads the mission layers as defined in campaign.cfg based upon the dtate you start your patrol. So it might load all the 42a_ layers. 42a_Jap_TaskForces.mis, 42a_US_taskforces.mis, etc, ad nauseum. Those mission iles each contatin traffic that spawns between 1 March, 1942, and 31 August, 1942. If you remain on patrol til 31 March, there is still traffic all over the map. As you get into September, all that traffic that might have spawned as late as 11:59 on the 31st starts going back into port. When it does, thats it. No more traffic.

The FOX traffic stuff is scripted, it gets broadcast all the time, the contact reports are generated by the game---no ships, no contact reports.

tater

[-Pv-]

Lots of good reasons to use the refit bases for what they were intended for- to top off your fuel on the way to-from your patrol.

By returning to base between emptying your weapons loadout, you benefit from crew upgrades (get rid of those dead beats) and boat upgrades (keep up with the enemy's advancing technology) and keep up the crew moral. Treking through those storms at high compression also takes it's toll on the boat making it less responsive and restricting depth.

Add to that what Tater says and you also benefit from more interesting and challenging contacts created specifically to emulate typical traffic of the period (including some battle events) rather than chasing the last dregs of storm-depleated convoys trying to pull into their destination.

The Midway spawning can be very frustrating because again as Tater said, it happens or not depending on when you leave base but the battle message from HQ gets sent regardless.

By continually refitting through the entire war, you miss out on some of the richness of the game making it more tiresome and repetitious. It also causes what some people lable as "bugs" when they are completely avoidable when the game is played as intended (repeat missions, early retirement, contact voids, sub becomes more vulnerable, crew tires quickly and often, poor visual contact sightings, reduced patrol range, etc.)

-Pv-

[tater]

True. The bottom line is that the game loads the war in layers to minimize overhead, and frankly, it's a great system for being able to work on the campaign in small bites instead of a single impossible to look at monster file.

So if you "refit" (very very poor word choice on the part of the devs, it's really "refuel/rearm") enough times, that's it, no traffic.

tater