Weird RUB encounter with "Large Cargo"

[BladeHeart]

Two pennies worth.

I have coversed with Sergbutto and apparently the vulnerable spots for this ship are the same as the commerce raider, including the magazines (think of it as carrying explosives).

After having occasion to reset my game, I have now altered the large merchant to have a tonnage of 9,600 and a renown reward of 270. This is a personal choice, but I just found it too big at even the reduced 11K+

[ming]

Sank my first one with the last two torps I had off northern England in a Type IIa. I was very happy to see the large weight...thanks to a lot of patience I managed two C2's on the same patrol

[Beery]

I've taken a pretty radical step in reducing the Large Cargo to 7300 and the Transport to 8000 in the next version of RUb. The huge tonnage values were unbalancing the game because these ships tend to appear too frequently. Now the ships fall within the ranges of tonnage that are already in the game. I don't want to lose Sergbuto's great models, but some balancing had to be done in my opinion.

[Wulfmann]

Tonnage has become my latest thing as well. I have added the 1940 tonnage mod but reduced the small tanker to 3500 and will now reduce the medium tanker down to about 6,000 from 9K. I will add the Serg converted armed merchant cruiser as frieghter but make it about 4500 tons and add that to the convoy RND.
No matter how hard I try I am still sinking too much tonnage compared to the top aces. I feel reaching Kretscmer's 266K at 44 ships for 16 patrols should be as good as we can do. Just my personal view. By scaling back medal and renown so that remains the same ergo if the tonnage is halfed so is the renown requirement so you still get the rewards.
Even with all the reductions I score 56K last night and had 4 defective fish!!!!!

My goal is to have 30K be the patrol of a career and 20K unusually high with 10-12K a very good patrol.
I want RUB in the tonnage war :rotfl:

Wulfmann

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by Beery

I've taken a pretty radical step in reducing the Large Cargo to 7300 and the Transport to 8000 in the next version of RUb. The huge tonnage values were unbalancing the game because these ships tend to appear too frequently. Now the ships fall within the ranges of tonnage that are already in the game. I don't want to lose Sergbuto's great models, but some balancing had to be done in my opinion.

Good decision. For my installation the transport's 12000 and the cargo ship's 5800. These values are incorrect considering the models' size but this all goes back to SH3's lack of enough medium sized cargo ships. I have several cloned merchant ships and a motorized barge of less than 5000 tons in the "R&D" phase right now. Maybe once I create enough of them it will be possible to raise the tonnages back to the correct figures, since the likelihood that any given merchant you encounter is a large cargo will decrease substantially.

[Beery]

The other alternative was to make the game treat these ships as tankers - tankers are fairly rare. But I wasn't sure if it would work.

[AG124]

I reduced my Large Cargo to 8000 tons (originally I chose 11,600 tons), but left the Transport tonnage as it was.

The one thing I really miss about Aces of the Deep which was never included in any of the Silent Hunter games was the good tonnage variation. Even though there weren't any more merchant classes than in SH3, the tonnage variation meant that you could encounter freighters of any tonnage from 2000-10000 tons, and 1000 tons (for some reason there weren't any freighters between 1000-2000 tons, such as 1516). Tankers were similar in tonnage, but I believe the maximum tonnage was 12,000 - I might be wrong. Tonnage could overlap in classes too - for example a "Medium Merchant" could be 5000 tons and a "Heavy Merchant" could be 4000 tons. Here are the ships and their tonnages, if I can remember correctly (some of these might be wrong, esp. tankers):

Light Merchant: 1000, 2000-4000.
Medium Merchant: 2000-4000.
Heavy Merchant: 2000-5000.
Medium Freighter: 5000-7000.
Heavy Freighter: 6000-10000.

Tanker*: 1000-4000.
Light Tanker*: 2000-5000.
Medium Tanker: 7000-10000.
Heavy Tanker: 8000-12000.

Troop Transport*: 9000-14000 (?).
Troop Transport*: 15000(?) - 20000.

*There were two tanker classes which were almost identical - "Tanker" and Coastal Tanker - I think one may have been included by accident as it seemed pointless to have two alike. They looked a lot like lake ships to me. Also, no distinction was made between the two transports names.

Except for 6000 ton tankers (?) you could have almost any tonnage of merchant. And if you sank one and it appeared in your log, it would appear as "merchant" or "tanker" not "medium freighter" or "heavy tanker" - which to me is a good thing, as I would rather general merchants than designated classes.

This was a really good way to handle ship tonnages, and if there was any way, modders should use this model, IMO. If Ubisoft has any representatives reading this, then maybe they should consider it.

PS - I never liked the Medium Tanker, as it had two funnels. Most tankers seemed to have one, and I kind of preceived it as unrealistic. Could someone post a screenshot or two - maybe someone could mod a couple of AOD ships someday in the future when more important ones have already been made. I should put Windows 95 on one of my older computers and have a look at it again someday, but for now I should probably stop rambling...

[iambecomelife]

I also loved the AOD variation in tonnage - like a real uboat commander, you were often unable to tell exactly how much a ship weighed. The only problems with AOD tonnage was an overabundance of high-value targets - big tankers, troopships, and those eight-derrick freighters of 8000 tons or more. Still, I loved wasting two or three 10000 tonners with one salvo - .

The tanker with two funnels always looked weird - all two-funneled tankers I know of were converted whalers with the funnels abreast, not in-line. The producers apparently realized it, since "Command Aces of the Deep" featured this tanker's 3d model with no funnels. Apparently they tried to correct the error but ran out of time.

I'm currently trying to create a million and one merchants at once with sansal's cloning tool . I have a whale factory ship ingame now, but without the necessary changes to the model - still working on that. I also have the LST as a rare superstructure-aft freighter (yes, a few of them existed back then). One interesting feature I discovered is that it's possible to have more than one cargo texture for the LST model, so I'm also adapting it as a German river barge with a cargo of Opel trucks and panzers instead of the allied vehicles you see most of the time.

[Beery]

SH3 Commander features random tonnage variation. The plan is to update this feature. When I do that, I'll bear this discussion in mind.

[AG124]

Looking forward to those merchants you are making. Sansal's tool is really making progress.

PS - Did CAOD drop one of the small tankers from AOD too? I never understood why there were two that were almost alike. There was one of the same design in Silent Hunter 1, as well.

[Wulfmann]

Well, I stuck those back in yesterday but changed the tonnage to 5800 for the ex-raider and 3800 for the transport. (I now reduced the ex-raider again to 4600 as it spawns more often as a 102)I also reduced the T2 to 5800 and the small tanker to 3500. Look at how much bigger the T3 is to the T2. I must be twice the size. When you look down a row at 6X the T3 is double the beam..
Of course my motive is to make it very hard to equal the 15K average of Kretschmer, the top scoring sub of WWII but I am still sinking over twice the ships at 50% higher tonnage.
I spent yesterday adding these merchants to the RND file in convoys and added more escorts. Early 1941, 2 DDs a Frigate and 3 corvettes all 3 and 4 rated and that helped keep things hard, worst score in recent memory, 13.5K and only one from the convoy.
Again, I adjusted the renown and medals to give me the same levels as before but mistakenly upped the Iron Cross, 2nd class instead of the badge so in 6 patrols my entire crew has the 2nd class, LOL
IMO, the ex-raider would be better as a101 (Tanker class) so it would not appear so much. The transport I simply added by type to the RND so it appears a few times as there are no single 103 in the RND.
Ironically, the only 3 ships sunk on this patrol was 2 transports and a cargo. I have had an unusual amount of defective torpedoes the last few patrols. I blame the French!!! Where’s my Luger???, I need to pay a visit to the fish factory!!!

Wulfmann

[AG124]

Someone should resize the Large Cargo to make it about the size of a C2, or slightly smaller. No changes need to be made to the model itself. You could also rename it a whale factory (with or without resizing), and consider it as a type of tanker. I believe iambecomelife said that some whale factories looked similar to freighters.

[Farside]

Originally Posted by Kalach

I think the 'tonnage randomiser' is in either SH3com or RuB, but I'm sure it's very subtle (less than 5-10% varience, not 13k tons).
I encounter these often and always get ~17k tons, so maybe it was a bug or such.

was it neutral?