[REL] Dark Waters

[KaleunMarco]

We were headed out to our patrol zone when we met up with a "convoy" of B-24's. 5 or 6 or 7 of them bombed the crap out of a piece of the Atlantic, killed a lot of fish. Oddly, the first two B-24's crashed and burned. i have a screen shot of the wreckage. Never saw that kind of behaviour before.



i also discovered that the Objective fulfillment logic is really wonky.
i modified the mission requirements to have two levels of tonnage goals.
the lower one was 5000 tons. when/if that is completed, a second objective appears for another 5000 tons.
while on patrol, we run into a convoy and have our way with it. beau coup tankers and large freighters are sunk, totaling more than 10,000 tons.
however, only the first 5000-ton-goal is marked as completed. the second-5000-ton goal spawned but is still incomplete.
draw your own conclusions.

[propbeanie]

That is one of several things left as-is in Dark Waters from the OpMonsun original, and that is the CrewRating used by the Units, as well as how many attack. There is a good bit of SH3 campaign copied and converted from SH3 to SH4 in OpMonsun, hence the larger, basically inappropriate groupings of planes, plus if you're near an AirBase and planes spawn automatically, there will be multiples of the same Class that come after you. My guess is that you probably encountered the Navy blue B-24 Liberator, which was a PB4Y-1 in Navy nomenclature. In SH4, they can carry rockets later, as well as carry enough bombs to empty a square mile of ocean of its fishies... At least two of those planes were probably set to Level 3, or Competent at best, and as such, they do not fly very well, especially in the attack and egress phases, hence the crashes. If you feel adventurous and don't have anything better to do, you could go through and look for Groups of B-24 Liberators and make them no more than 2 planes in each group, unless they are the LevelBomber variety on their way to Berlin... AirBase AirGroups should also be limited to no more than 2 of such planes. The screen grabs will prove quite entertaining, I'm sure.

As for the tonnage Objectives in SH4... this is ~another~ frustrating aspect of the game. You sail from home port with orders to "Proceed immediately to area X and standby for further orders". That "objective" is associated with a MapZone, which upon completion then generates the "Sink all ships found" kind of thang. While you can generate the same thing from a completed objective, the game basically wants you to re-create the whole thing again with the MapZone, "proceed to the MapZone Area" and then generate the Tonnage "sink" mission... Seems to me that it can be rather frustrating still to get it to properly complete... I would have to pull out my notes, that are hidden so well that even I cannot find them... sigh - However, you can create one with a "Patrol" objective, but it still requires that separate MapZone, reaching it, and then generating the "sink" tonnage objective... If I am not mistaken, I have done that with a 2nd MapZone inside the first, and that worked for my "sink" trip... maybe... Remember though, there is NO "logic" in the game, so a person cannot think logically and have it function as expected... - if you ever wonder "why?" on some aspects of the game, it is "because"...