No contacts in a long time! Why?

[letterboy1]

Thanks guys, going back to Pearl then for some tail. And to upgrade T Maru.

[Packerton]

I guess noone got my Dragon quest joke

[GT182]

Transfer to the Asiatic Fleet and you'll see more targets. All around Luzon is good, just check the map for the enemy's shipping lanes. You might not see as many convoys as SHIII, but they are there along with single and double targets. And when you run into a Task Force, be very very careful.

[letterboy1]

Thanks GT182, but what gets me is that suddenly there were simply no more contacts or contact reports . . . as if the ship spawning stopped happening. I even got a fax traffic mesage that there was a heavy naval engagement in the Midway area. I was right by Midway getting a refit when I got that message and yet I got no contact reports. I took my boat all around Midway and saw nothing.

Oh well, I'm about to start a patrol out of Australia . . . we'll see how it goes.

[tater]

Did you not read my post?

. . . as if the ship spawning stopped happening.

The ship spawning DID STOP HAPPENING!

You start a patrol, and the game loads all the background stuff (ports, airbases, etc) because it always does. They persist the entire war.

Then the game loads the mission layers as defined in campaign.cfg based upon the dtate you start your patrol. So it might load all the 42a_ layers. 42a_Jap_TaskForces.mis, 42a_US_taskforces.mis, etc, ad nauseum. Those mission iles each contatin traffic that spawns between 1 March, 1942, and 31 August, 1942. If you remain on patrol til 31 March, there is still traffic all over the map. As you get into September, all that traffic that might have spawned as late as 11:59 on the 31st starts going back into port. When it does, thats it. No more traffic.

The FOX traffic stuff is scripted, it gets broadcast all the time, the contact reports are generated by the game---no ships, no contact reports.

tater

[-Pv-]

Lots of good reasons to use the refit bases for what they were intended for- to top off your fuel on the way to-from your patrol.

By returning to base between emptying your weapons loadout, you benefit from crew upgrades (get rid of those dead beats) and boat upgrades (keep up with the enemy's advancing technology) and keep up the crew moral. Treking through those storms at high compression also takes it's toll on the boat making it less responsive and restricting depth.

Add to that what Tater says and you also benefit from more interesting and challenging contacts created specifically to emulate typical traffic of the period (including some battle events) rather than chasing the last dregs of storm-depleated convoys trying to pull into their destination.

The Midway spawning can be very frustrating because again as Tater said, it happens or not depending on when you leave base but the battle message from HQ gets sent regardless.

By continually refitting through the entire war, you miss out on some of the richness of the game making it more tiresome and repetitious. It also causes what some people lable as "bugs" when they are completely avoidable when the game is played as intended (repeat missions, early retirement, contact voids, sub becomes more vulnerable, crew tires quickly and often, poor visual contact sightings, reduced patrol range, etc.)

-Pv-

[tater]

True. The bottom line is that the game loads the war in layers to minimize overhead, and frankly, it's a great system for being able to work on the campaign in small bites instead of a single impossible to look at monster file.

So if you "refit" (very very poor word choice on the part of the devs, it's really "refuel/rearm") enough times, that's it, no traffic.

tater