DW Frustrations......help (LONG)

[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by Deep_Nukem

PLEASE LET ME SAY BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER, I AMNOT ANGRY, UPSET, OR SAYING THERE ARE/WERE BUGS WITH ANY MOD, etc. THIS IS NOT A GRIPE SESSION. I'M HERE TO LEARN.

Hey gang. I stayed up all night last night playing DW. I must say overall, the immersive effect felt good, but it's either been so long since I've played, or whatever that near the end of every mission it just seemed to end in frustration.

I love the Akula. Can't help it. Seawolf seems too arcadey for me. 688i, been there done that already with Janes../sub command.

Ok, so I have the following mods installed. DW/1.04/LWAMI 3.9/ and a few eye and ear candy things.

Ok, a lot of my frustration came from the simple fact that at certain missions, I could "classify" a contact, and be precise with it. What I mean is, the "Filter" would have the contact narrowed down to like maybe 3 possibilities.......and thru logic and brains, I could humanly exclude the other two options. Not a bad thing. Other times, the "Filter" would absolutley have it locked down to ONE possibilty. It was as if I had a proffesional crew onboard that knew what the heck they were doing. Other times, the "Filter" would give me so many choices it was impossible to classify a conctact precisely. I mean, yes, I could determine if it was surface or submerged, but that was about it. Didn't matter what I did. Turned the boat and waited, turned again, broadband, narrowband, didn't matter. I must have had at least a good 10 "possibilities" according to the filter. Call me old fashioned, but I like to KNOW EXACTLY what it is that I am about to send to the bottom of the sea.

The best example I can give you of above is last mission, I kid you not, I was less than 3,000 yrds from a submerged contact, and I COULD NOT get the filter to narrow anything down for me, no matter what I did. I find that utterly unnaccptably ridiculous. All these fancy sonars and computers these boats are supposed to have and it can't tell me what something is at 3,000 yrds? Come on......

Frustrating, maybe, but that's life. How many lines did you have? Because that's what the filter goes by. If you only have two lines, which is common for a sub (even close in), then you're not going to have it narrowed down very much. You'll get your good classifications on the louder targets that give you more frequency lines.

Which brings me to my next frustrations. Weapons themselves. Ok, I have a submerged contact. I know it's hostile. I have ID'd it, and done everything in my power to classify it, but I deffinately have it labled as hostile and it is red on the NAV screen. Clearly labled M01 or M02 or so on for the TMA. I have a good TMA solution. I go to select 65cm torp on "M01" and it will not respond. I have to do a "snapshot". I found this odd. Wish I could be more specific with this one but.....I felt like I had done all the necessary steps it just would not lock on so to speak. Had to resort to snapshot.

That happens because you're trying to assign a weapon to an invalid contact type. Submarines are not eligible targets for wakehomers. Try using an acoustic homing torpedo.

Next up....Autocrew TMA. I do everything else myself mostly. Does the autocrew TMA suck as bad as I thought it did? I was patient. Zig zagging the boat, trying to give as much info as I could to the TMA computer. But even when I felf like the TMA was dead on the money......showing truth later showed that not to be the case. It was just close. But nothing to be proud of IMHO. Any tips to help Auto Crew TMA? (Yes, I plan to re-learn this myself which I'm sure will make a huge difference)

aTMA is usually pretty damn good, better than a player could be against most targets. The programming is rather sloppy, though. Instead of using some sort of geometrical algorithm, aTMA more or less just reports the location of the contact with some amount of range error built in, which gets smaller over time. Manuvering will throw it off again, but it will stabilize again in time (and possibly more accurately or more quickly after the manuever, not sure). So really, there isn't much you can do to help aTMA. You can do plenty to help yourself though, the most important thing being to get two legs, at least one on a lagging course from the target.

Last. For you experienced skippers. I have never been able to wrap my head around this problem. Ok, I'm a Nuke submarine boat. Supposed to be quiet and sneaky and everything. My "Target" is at 90 degrees, and the TMA is showing he going away from me >>>>>>>> @ 19 knots.
Currently he's some 20,000+ yrds away. Two fold problem!!!!
Am I just supposed to kick her in the arse and chase that sucker down, cavitation and all? (Shallow water)........thusly showing my butt to the entire world? .......Too far away to get a 100% lock down classification, and too shallow to launch a missle torp cause I tried that once and the missle (yes the one with the torp that goes active on impact with the water) released the torp, but must have just gone right down into the mud because the water was too shallow??????? Does that happen?

So whatta you do?

Honestly? Let him go. Why risk trading an Akula for a smoke boat by playing on his turf?

If you have to kill him, then do an end-around attack, positioning yourself in deep water where he's going to come out of the shallows. And if that's not an option, then you could just let him pull away until he runs out of space (shallow water implies there's a coast around) and then catch him when he can't run anymore.

Come to think of it, 20kyd isn't that far away. If 19knots is the best he can do, in theory you could get a torp to him as far out as 26kyd.

And one last one..........I had a submerged / hostile/ fired apon it. I felt like I had set the torp accurately as far as ceiling/floor,,,,etc....
It went active, found the sub, and promptly began doing circles around it.
TWICE it even went RIGHT THRU THE HULL of the sub as if the sub wasn't even there. Like a graphics glitch we all get from time to time in any video game. You know what I'm talking about. It was weird.

Please advise.

Was that with the same wakehomer you snapshot at a submarine? If it is, I'm a little surprised that it didn't just completely ignore the target, but I'm not at all surprised that it didn't work out the way it was supposed to.