Question of the day. Surprise torpedo evasion.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by goldorak

No, fire a snapshot only when you're pretty sure the torpedo has been fired at you.
No sense in giving out your position if you're not in danger.

I used to think that too, until I wrote a little toy Monte Carlo to see what mattered. If you always shoot a snapshot, you do better on average.

I'm pretty convinced that if it's not shot at you, then you're actually in better shape than if it had been shot at you, because now you've attacked the badguy first. It's like a page from Fleet Tactics. The bottom line is that if you hear a TIW, you've either been detected first and are being shot at (therefore you should shoot back), or someone else was detected first and is being shot at (therefore you should shoot at the guy shooting at them), or someone else is dumb and shot before they had a good shot at anyone, thus revealing their position needlessly (therefore you should shoot them).

The more torpedoes you can shoot at a badguy the better off you are. What's the worst that can happen? Someone else shoots another ill-aimed torpedo at you down his LOB to you? Either way, nobody's torpedo is likely to hit anything. The only thing you can do to skew the statistics in your favor is to increase the salvo size, ultimately. Probably the best tactic is to fire all tubes and not just one. Maximum salvo size is a killer.

I believe it is much better to shoot lots of torpedos, whiff ten times and get the bad guy on the eleventh, than to spend so much time setting up a shot with a silver bullet that you get wacked in the process.

More is always better. The truth is, if you watch how people play this game, they rarely do more than shoot what essentially amount to snapshots anyhow.