Frustration...

[GreenTea]

First of all, let me say that a lot of undocumented features & workarounds with this game have been discovered by many users, so hopefully someone will be able to help me out with these issues that I'm having.

I've been playing the game now for a week, and loving it while being incredibly frustrated by the endless number of bugs I've encountered. I decided to stop playing entirely until 1.2 came out, and after playing that for a couple of days, I'm on the cusp of waiting for 1.3 to cut down on my frustration.

I started stalking this one convoy that I'd been tracking on passive sonar for a day or two. I finally managed to drive around a small island at flank speed to position myself in wait ahead of the approaching convoy. I line up the ships in my periscope, check the draft readings for the ships, add a foot or two to the torpedo depth for max effectiveness, and then launch the salvo.

I watch using free camera as each torpedo glides underneath the boats without detonation... because the depth in the ship recognition manual (and hardcopy manual with the game) is completely off from reality... usually by 10' or so.

So I reload the game and begin to experiment to determine the perfect torpedo depth for each ship I'm attacking, and adding it to a list I'm keeping next to my mouse.

When I finally determine the *true* depths for the torpedoes, I reload the game and try again. It works well, but I notice that some seem to still go under without detonating, even when it only seems to be inches.

Since there are dud torpedoes in the game, I saved my progress and did further testing/reloading/testing/reloading. There appears to be a bit of randomness as to whether the torpedoes detonate successfully at the same set depth each time.

Then I notice that several of the ships that I had critically disabled with torpedo attacks from a point before the savegame were now running. Before, the merchants had huge holes in their sides, were listing and had no propulsion... but now, after I reloaded the saved game, the same ships were undamaged (visually), and were steaming off at full speed to get away from my ship. Further, the destroyers that were previously unaware of my position (since I was periscope-submerged and drifting) were now furiously driving towards me and I could hear active sonar pinging in the distance.

I reloaded the original save file before damaging the ships, and tested this all out again:

a) no ships damaged, I'm undetected
b) I launch several torpedoes and critically damage four merchants, sinking one.
c) I save the game
d) I reload the game
e) All merchants are repaired, the one I sunk is on the bottom of the ocean, and they're all scattering away from my position. *Now* the destroyers are searching for me.

So I chalk this up to a fairly huge bug. I redo the whole scenario from scratch, sink about five ships, and head to port with no torpedoes.

I arrive near port and the game asks, "refit, end patrol, or postpone?"

I choose "refit", and all my torpedoes are resupplied-- except the tubes are still empty. I figure that maybe I have to refit twice-- refit once, reload the tubes, then refit again to replace the missing reserve torpedoes. But I can't even get that far... my torpedo crew sections aren't reloading anything. It's as if they're filled, but the program has a bug where it thinks that they are filled... yet I can't fire anything because it also thinks that the tubes are entirely empty.

So now, I my attack submarine has turned into an underwater time bomb.

Anyone have any ideas or answers?

Thanks---

[Avatar]

Here read this:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=112524

Dont trust the save game features

[GreenTea]

Originally Posted by Avatar

Here read this:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=112524

Dont trust the save game features

Thanks for the link. What's frustrating is it isn't a feature... at what point should failures of the game be deemed critical bugs? If you save the game and upon return it's a completely random roll of the dice what you'll get, I consider that a pretty major bug that should have been squashed in Alpha.

Also, apologies to everyone on the forum. This really should be posted under the 1.2 bugs thread, but I don't even know if this is a bug unique to 1.2...

SH4 has no "critial bugs", just "undocumented features". Anyone that says otherwise is a nagging troll.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Grunt

SH4 has no "critial bugs", just "undocumented features". Anyone that says otherwise is a nagging troll.

This theme is getting old, Grunt.