2 game months and not so much as a sonar contact...

[treblesum81]

Hi all,

Over the last week or two, I've been running career start after career start with the same results. I'll start the career, run it for a couple of months during the first patrol, and not get so much as a radar contact for weeks (though I do get lots of planes to hide from...), after which time, I promptly get bored and start a new career in the hopes that something different will happen. Now I know this probably isn't the right response to this situation, but I need to be able to find something to shoot at, because I can't just sit here watching a dot rove around a map and call it enjoyment.

I'm left wondering what the culprit(s) of such empty seas are, and what steps I can take to fix the problem without totally killing the realism of the game or the historical accuracy. Right now I'm running RFB + RSRDC, I always start at the beginning of the war, though sometimes I start from Pearl and sometimes I start from Manila. I also tend to run at about 1024 TC with dipping stops every 2-4 game hours to listen for contacts. I'm even basing my search areas off of the traffic maps available from various mods here, but sadly, none of this is producing acceptable results.

Now when I say acceptable, mean that I need to be able to find at least one thing per real day of game play (figure 1-3 hours at best) to hunt / shoot at in order for me to justify spending more time on the game. This may sound a little hard line, but, as I said before, I don't find watching the dot move around the map to be exciting. I've tried letting the game run on low tc (x64 ish) while I'm doing homework, but its not producing any better results, though at least I'm not staring at a dot...

So my question is whats causing the dearth of contacts? Is it RFB? RSRDC? When I'm starting the careers? Where I'm starting the careers? Where I'm searching? How I'm searching?

Also, if there is some component there that needs to be removed, how can I retain historical accuracy? I've been told before that RSRDC could be the cause, as it makes the most changes to the campaign layers, but I also don't want the stock games blatant inaccuracies, or at least what I've been told to be blatant inaccuracies.

I also want to mention that I had this same problem in SH3 for a long time before I found SH3 map contact mod which then allowed me to find something to shoot at much easier without screwing too much with the campaign layers. I know from previous conversations that the only way I can get contacts back is to remove RSRDC or hand edit some 17,000 campaign files, of which the former is the most logical, but that goes back to the desire not to lose the historical accuracy.

Anyway, I'll stop the ramble here, but I would like to know what I can do to beat this game into line with what I want from it. Should I just dump RSRDC, or will that just cost me the accuracy without guaranteeing me better hunting? Has the map contacts mod been updated to SH4 that I just don't know about? Or are there other options that I might pursue to improve my contact rate without messing with the rest of the game?

Thanks,
Greg