DicheBach Questions

[torpedobait]

Originally Posted by DicheBach

Cool! I'll try that.

I devastate those escorts though. My new tactic is to just charge a large convoy, get the escorts to come at me wheel around and take them out one by one with the 4" 50 cal. I think in my current career up to about July 1942 I must be up to 8 destroyers 1 sub chaser and 5 gun boats killed and maybe only one of those was with a torpedo.

If the navy would let me pack more ammo for that deck gun, I'd take out the whole damn Jap navy!

Wow! I've never tried taking them head on with a deck gun. They are usually so accurate and do so much damage that I don't take them on while on the surface unless it is that or die. I do dive and turn towards (right at) them, periscope up to give them a good reference point, wait until they are just inside 800 yards, and give them a Mark 14. They will almost always initiate a turn upon spotting the torpedo, which will catch them in the stern quarter no matter which way they go. It the first one is not a fatal blow, their turn brings them broadside - an easy kill. I'd like to not "waste" a torpedo that way, but survival comes first.

Playing with realism @ 75% (camera on and auto-targeting, with difficulty set to "Realistic").

[DicheBach]

I'm on "Hard" in career mode which I think corresponds to "High" in the game options. I think that is about 75% ball park. Only things that make it easier are : 1. map contacts are turned on. 2. external views are turned on.

I tried playing a career mode in "Very Hard" (which corresponds to those two advantages turned off) and found it was (at my level of mastery of skippering) damn near impossible. Maybe after Hard gets boring I can do Very Hard, but at this point I just don't have enough situational awareness about the geometry. I can however see that those abilities are increasing as I play it on Hard.

I was surprised at how easy I find the Destroyers to take out. As long as I can take them on one by one--or at least engage only one of them at relatively close range while the other two or three are still at some distance--they are challenging but doable. I find they are terrible gunners, but then I'm going like 18 to 21 knots and weaving 5 degrees or more to port and starboard just about every other shot. The hard part is determining the range and for that, I use the compass on the navigation map. The technique is about like this:

1. Figure out how many escorts there are while submerged or at range with the sonar.
2. Position so that only one is closer.
3. Surface and charge him at flank speed starting at about 10 to 15,000 yards or so.
4. Once he sees you, he'll charge you too.
5. Using the nav map, estimate a good point to turn. There are two ways to do this, and a combination of both tends to work.
A. approach him at about angle so that he is in the <=345 or >=15 bearing
B. Turn and move away at anywhere from a 90 to a 180 degree (90 is hard because the range tends to change too quickly). Moving away with him somewhere in the 155 to 205 bearing ball park is good.
You can set up step 5 with waypoints and just make the turn away point far enough that it will take you 30 minutes to get there, this will be the course you follow as he chases you and you blow him to smithereens.
6. Plot this "running away attack" trajectory in the nav map and with a goal to make your initial turn in the 7500 to 4500 yard range.
7. Once you are in that ballpark (depending on visibility) you are in business as far as starting to get some hits (I have actually managed hits from as far as 12,000 yards I believe but it was a very slow moving target and involved lots of map interpolation).
8. Just switch to the nav map, use the compass to get a general idea of his range, switch to the gun and set the range and start trying shots.
9. Once you get one hit on him, it is generally easy to keep landing them next 5 to 10 and generally it never takes more than 15 hits to kill one, and I have on occasion killed one with only 3 or 4 hits.
10. The trick is just to anticipate what his trajectory and velocity are, lead your shots, and change range appropriately between each shot, switching to adjust course ("weave") using the rudder control as needed.

Out of the 12 or so I've killed in this career, I believe I've only been damaged twice, maybe only once.