Why lose the boat when your original Captain retired? Hmmmm . . .

I have an ideer I want to toss out and see if anyone's considered it before and see if anyone has any implimentation suggestions and/or warnings.

One of the (many!) things I like about running SH3Commander is the 'simulate a realistic career length' option. After all, at some point experienced Captains would be promoted and reassigned from commanding an operational boat on combat patrols. They didn't just keep running patrols until Fate finally caught up with them.

But what I did dislike was losing the boat after that. So I pondered, and came up with this idea.

When you finally get the message that the current Captain (you, of course :p ) has retired, and after the beer have stopped flowing and the party is over . . .

My idea is this: when that happens, take a look at your current crew, and select one of your officers to be promoted to the boat's new commander. (I use SH3Commander to keep cuurent logs of my crew, which makes it easy for me). For instance, my current WO is Georg Schnabl. So to start off I load up SHIII and select a new career, and enter "Georg Schnabl" as the new player's (and thus, new Kaleun's) name. Then go at least as far as you need (I'm not sure how far that actually is, alas, which is why I'm asking for help) in order to get a save in base before first patrol, and for the game to establish the necessary folders for the new 'player'.

Then exit the game completely, then go to the folders containing career information (should be something like C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\SH3\data\cfg\Careers)

Now here is where I need both advise (and to do a bit of experimenting :p ) There should be a way of copying the current crew configuration and the boat's current configuration from the retired Captain's folder and pasting that into the new Captain's folder. In effect, transferring boat and crew from one to the other. Yet not the accumulated renown of the former Captain.

Assuming this is workable, the only thing left to do once you reload the game is to go to the barracks and dismiss the officer that has been promoted to Captain and replace him with a new officer.

Now if this works (and I don't see why it shouldn't) you could now play out the life of a particular boat, all through it's different Captains.

Any comments?

[snwcrsh]

SH3 Dynasty Mode! I like it :-)

[NealT]

I would want to take my crew with me

[antikristuseke]

This is an exelent idea, think im going to give this a go with my curent career.

Before anyone just up and starts going copying and pasting (--grins--) I've got to investigate this a bit to find the exact file(s)/folder(s) that need to be transferred over (especially since, as you're using SH3Commander, there are likely to be files involved there as well). It's not just the crew; it's also the boat, and things like used ship names, etc. Also I have to make sure of the sequences, etc., so that the boat's 'new' Captain doesn't start off as if he already has 5-7 patrols under his belt.

Soon as I finish my current patrol I'll start monkeying around and figgerin' out which files and folders need to be copied and where to put them. Stay tuned. :p

[Koondawg]

I do believe I have let a Kpt go before to further his career but cannot remember loosing my boat