I give up.

[9th_cow]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

When did he write this? February of 2007? What is the purpose of the post? Display of knowledge of antique subsims? Sounds like you need to buy yourself an Apple ][+ and knock yourself out with an original copy of Silent Service.

Personally, on the Kraken, it is stupid to fight planes as they have all the advantage, DDs attack with ferocity that usually means you have to fight them before you get to the convoy. Often a convoy battle devolves into a night of repeated hit and runs attempting to get the escorts on one side while I attack the other.

The amount of air cover is not unrealistic. Reading the real mission reports reveals air cover by radar equipped Japanese planes in coordination with radar equipped escorts that turned our subs from hunter into hunted. Only in comparison with antique games does SH4 have "too much air cover." Fluckey's logs reveal that diving a dozen times a day was not unusual. Even in stock SH4 I have not see planes come from nowhere. You also forget aircraft carriers as sources of planes.

Convoys often scattered when attacked in Japanese waters. Continuing to operate as a unit was the exception, not the rule. Sometimes that also happens in SH4. There is a plausible range of convoy reactions.

In hundreds of save games under all conditions I have not had ships or convoys vanish. I have never lost a save. The sun comes up on schedule every day. Your chart wouldn't help without doing the math to find local time sunrise anyway. The antique games didn't take local time into account. You miss their defects, not their reality.

Weather reports are available on demand from your crew.

I could go on and on, but I won't. I so wanted to respond to an intelligent and focused post by someone looking for the way to make this superior new sim work well. I spent twice as many words on this nonsense as I usually do responding to real problems. If my kid didn't find you amusing you would be on eBay right now.:rotfl:

I hope others enjoy the game as much as I do. I'm here to see if I can make that happen. For many, I've been able to make a difference. For some, nothing can help.

ok sorry but i cant see the original post.. black on grey and my old eyes

you mentioned here that you never saw planes "apear from nowhere" this i find hard to beleive ( and im not having a go!) its just that, they do apear from nowhere, and they do so often. now i know when theyre carrier based, they operate in groups of 3, wich is fun when you see 4 groups of 3 that was some task force..
however, i often see swarms of them, in 1s and 2s pop out of thin air, heading straight for me, often with me not having been on the surface for more than 20 seconds, and not having been sighted by anything ( because ive just set out, no engagements made soo.....)

thats just "my" experience of shiv, so i would back up the OP on that bit

as for convoy reactions, ok stock has issues (1.4) but the only reaction ive seen is that they all zig zag for a bit, then rejoin and continue..im ussually taken aback by the fact they start zig zaggin in the first place as im sat still and got in unnoticed. they have some sharp eyed lookouts at times..

i never saw a straggler even, a KONGO who has a severe list, having soaked up 5-7 torps, can make 9 knots.. made comical by the fact that a further 2 fish hit the screws, bounced back , powered into the screw again, and the exploded, without harming the screws or the rudder...

i am aware of many mods that fix most if not all of these but as the op was talking about stock, i see his point here.

some weird things happen in shiv.
but like i said in my experience, aircraft will swarm you the moment you break surface, wich is very far fetched, and the convoys only have a single reaction, wich is zig zag, and rejoin...

I love SHIV !! so you dont need to defend it im just curious as to how your experience seems to differ to mine so vastly.
ive nothing against planes being in the area if that is what happened in R/L! however, scope breaks surface... immediatly 2 planes head directly for me.. every time >? that isnt realistic..

and just once i would like to see a ship fall behind its friends in the convoy.. short of taking the screws of this wont happen, even a ship with the sea washing over its entire body, will maintain speed with its undamaged friends most of the time, it seems to have the "swarm meantality" of erm...battle of britain ? sheesh i forget the name right now, but it was one of the first flight sims to have groups of up to 100 aircraft in the sky at any one time, however due to limitations in that, it meant you didnt get stragglers, even if they were flying on one engine.
i have the same experience in shiv..


well thats my 2 cents

my advice to the op is to check out the mods mentioned here, both shiv and shiii are great games, but its incredbly rare for any unmodded game to provide for eveyone these days.

[Red Devil]

Originally Posted by Hylander_1314

Red Devil,

Have you added Vista SP1 yet? It does help with stability issues that Vista was having. Also, Ihave SH4 set to run in XP with SP2 compatability mode. I did this before SP1 came out, and have just left it there as it has been working fine, with very few CTD's. Probably around 1 to 2 every 50 to 100 hours of gameplay. Only thing is, that when I do get one it is always at the least opportune times.

I did have a merchant run a destoyer over after I hit a couple ships in the convoy, and they zig-zagged. The destroyer stopped in merchants path in heavy fog, and whammo! The merchant shoved him down by the stern, and disabled him, and the ocean did the rest, which left me clear to pick off the merchants at will. It was a 12 hour run of sneak in, zap one ship, race out of sight, use the radar, and move along with them until they straightened out, then back to the carnage boys. We stared the aatack right after sundown, and finished just after sunup.

Yes Vista SP1 locked and loaded!

[Rockin Robbins]

Hint for impossible to read text: select it with your mouse and it will invert to become readable!

Maybe I didn't make myself clear when I said the planes don't appear from nowhere. Of course they appear on your radar suddenly. But they came from a place, an airbase or a carrier. You can usually tell by the direction they came from what airbase is sending them. There used to be an airbases mod that showed the airbases on your mod map. It bacame part of Reflections on the Water and now seems to have vanished. It was very helpful in avoiding aircraft.

Rule #1 of aircraft: don't be seen! Once you are, lots of their little buddies are dispatched to your area and yup, every time you surface they will be there with cake and ice cream. In order for that to stop you have to be unsighted by any enemy for a secret length of time.

My whole stategy is not to be sighted. That's why I don't see as many aircraft and am not bothered by them every time I surface.

The strategy is called yo-yoing. You remain on the surface every possible instant, submerging quickly enough that when a plane enters a 5 mile perimeter you are below periscope depth. I let five minutes elapse and come to radar depth. It takes a couple of minutes to come to radar depth. On the all-clear I surface and continue as before. My batteries are always fully charged. I am always ready for extended underwater combat.Yo-yoing was invented by Barb skipper Eugene Fluckey.

[9th_cow]

that is my issue with the planes, i probably wasn't clear either

say its night, i speed across the surface, however during daylight if i surface for any reason then i run decks awash. as it immensely reduces dive times.

the thing is, that makes it "strange" lets say i have just come up on the surface, its not a case of if, there will be planes, but how few minutes will pass before they appear.
and its not a case of them looking for me, because i haven't done anything, and i haven't been spotted yet, by anyone or anything.

what doesn't help is that they aren't "patrolling" they aren't to my east, or way to the south, they are headed straight for me. they may pass to the left, or may go past my rear, but they follow the same pattern, if at times they changed they're approach it would be better it think. then i could believe they were flying a patrol, as it is i feel like they know im there, rather than finding me during they're patrol
that said, in certain areas, they don't trouble me, so i guess your right in saying they come from airbases in the area. should i ever encounter planes in open ocean, long way from land, i know a carrier is in the area.

what makes its a little difficult to stomach at times though is that they appear so rapidly after i do surface. perhaps they really did have that many in the sky, but for me i would have found it more believable if instead of knowing there will be planes, maybe once or twice, they wont appear for 10 minutes or 20 minutes..
after diving and believing i wasn't spotted, ive gone deep, altered course, waited around 20 minutes to an hour, and gone to periscope depth. and rightly enough, they're headed straight for me they will not spot me, but the fact they're course alters to mimic mine, drives me up the wall.

however. the aircraft in stock are cannon fodder for my gunners. except of course for that one time, once in a blue moon hehe. im sure thats why half of them throw they're lives away, so that one sneaky pilot can get in and kill me. lulling me into a false sense of security when faced with planes.
if they were half as scary as the ones in SHIII i would be spamming C the second i got a radar signal.

i am however going to stick to staying submerged during daylight hours, and ill see what happens.