How does crew rating affect Merchants ships
 

Does crew rating impact only the visual sensors of merchants ships or is their something more like staying in line with a convoy?. I would like to change merchant crew ratings to poor in the convoy so surface night attacks would be more viable. Would poor rating affect more than just merchant spotting ability?

The CrewRating setting affects all aspects of the ship, from visual to ship and gun handling. The collision detection however, is not. Ship spacing in-convoy is the easiest way to control that. There was little single mission tutorial around somewhere a while back, and it spoke to the spacing of the ships, giving examples of the bigger ships being say 250m long, and putting two of those one behind the other would result in them having already collided as they enter the game if the spacing is 300m, center-to-center. Even at 500m, the would be in contact with each other. When it comes to a "turn", the ships seem to change their configuration as they turn, so you basically need good spacing side-to-side also. We have found with FotRSU that 800m on convoys is not enough spacing usually. A bunch of small ships should not have that issue. Also, going back to the visual aspect of the Poor rating just means that instead of the setting of say 30 seconds for them to see your boat, it is now 45 seconds instead. They do still see you, just not as quickly, and it will take them longer to train their weapons on you. Doing the light factor in the cfg files (sensor & sim) is a better way to go, but you have to be careful not to "blind" the ships. Dawn and dusk times can be a bit strange also.

Generally, when lower the skill level on a unit, it has a effect on all sensors and behaviors of the vessel. With merchants set to poor, they will be practically blind, so will have trouble spotting your sub and other vessels, avoiding torpedoes, taking intelligent actions when detecting a threat. If armed, gunnery will be quite poor as well.

For night surface attacks, it depends heavily on the environment (darkness, moonlight, fog) and some sensors settings, type of visual sensor the merchant is equipped with. So even at poor, they may still spot you. In fact high likely to if in stock and pretty much any mod.

Are you running stock? FOTRS ? etc In TMO 2.5 Update BH, I have made night surface attacks possible to conduct in a historically accurate/realistic manner but all escorts are set to Vet or elite and merchants vary from Competent to Elite. Even with these skill level settings, can get inside the large convoys between the columns (when have large convoys in 1944) and attack from within without being shot to pieces. This was accomplished by a tiring process over a couple of months of tweaking the visual sensors and how the interact with the darker nights mod.

I am making my own modpack KSD II Ace edition (U-boats) you can check it out in my signature.

Okay, well if want to make night surface attacks possible, and not nerf the enemy AI to unrealistic levels, you will need darker nights. Lets face it, the nights in SH 4 and pretty much every mod I can think of, are far too light, even when no moon is out. This is a crucial element if want to be able to perform historically accurate night surface attacks in u boats, especially getting inside the convoys. There is a darker nights mod, it should work fine. Once have the nights dark, it is a matter of adjusting factors in sim.cfg such as light, fog, wave, enemy speed, etc. to get the results desired. Of course the settings in .sim file for visual of the different vessels come into play as well. A lot of testing involved, but worth it.

I have actually considered trying to work this aspect of my TMO update into FOTRS as well as OM, would be great to have it for U boats. Really does change the sim up.

perhaps you have link for the darker nights mod? Or tell me what values to change in exisitng scene.dat file to make nights darker

Link to Darker Nights Mod

https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/dow...o=file&id=5748