Pet Peeve
 

Not terribly happy about the kinds of merchant groups that the game generates... in my opinion, WAY too many helpless mini-convoys with 2-4 unescorted merchants.

In real life, if several ships straggled at once the Allies would often dispatch at least one Corvette, Trawler, or other small ship to defend them. Even if they had to weaken the main convoy's escort.

It's worse because many ship classes seem to be unarmed - usually only the C3 and Liberties have guns in my experience. Thus you can sink these mini convoys on the surface. Historically, almost all big British & American ships were armed by late 1942.

It's kind of fun but a more realistic challenge would be nice. My experience is with pre 129 (and watching various streamers) - does anyone know if 129 or any mods have improved this?

Aside from that an excellent game in many ways.

Take into account that in the current build there are really only a hand full of merchants and escorts/warships. And that many of these are probably even placeholders.

there are a lot of features on the dev wishlist that are in progress. In time we will be forced to square off with Q ships, there will be more aircraft added, sub pens, i believe even an abandon ship feature is in the works for the uboat crew.

also of note is that there really are no other kriegsmarine surface units in the game at this time. That too will change.

Im not aware of any mods that add more ships to the game right now, but with enough patience we will see the ocean come alive - much like GWX - with fishing trawlers, kriegsmarine destroyers escorting us to sea, vast and variable convoys, lone Q-ships, and many other AI unit additions and improvements.

I understand. :up:bAlthough my issue's really more with how the game keeps spawning these small groups of unescorted merchants...2-4 ships with no guns. Not so much with the variety or type of ships in the roster. Thing is, once most merchants were armed it was suicide to attack on the surface, because subs can't risk a single 4" or 5" hit to the pressure hull.

Once I stupidly attacked an unescorted Japanese tanker surfaced in SH2: Pacific Aces and died after about 2-3 hits. That's how it should be. Served me right for a badly planned attack, given that the Japanese were sticklers for arming merchants.:yep:

There's an account on Uboat.net where 3 armed tankers stuck together and the U-Boat damaged one with its last torpedo but could do no more, because the tankers stayed in formation covering each other with their deck guns - a surface gun attack on 3 ships - even merchant ships - would have been dangerous.

Plus, I don't think the allies were in the habit of dispatching little groups of 3-4 unescorted gun-less merchants - based on my reading ships either traveled alone or in escorted convoys. Lone merchants were often faster and well -armed (with exceptions of course).

Although stock SH3/4 get a bad rap I appreciate that Ubisoft made sure most merchants were armed especially late in the war - more armed merchants = more torpedoes used & less tonnage inflation. Of course a turkey shoot's fun but only once in a while lol.:haha:

Don't mean to knock Uboat at all; over all I adore the game.

There are WIP mods that look promising like "U-boat Expanded"

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...?id=2114304535

Summary: "Uboat Expanded seeks to recreate a historically accurate representation of all the maritime activity during World War II using real data from
http://www.uboat.net and http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/ "

B129 preview 21 (B129 also was pushed to the stable live build of the game yesterday) has the following patch note.

"Fix: Merchant ships are now much less likely to travel in groups, when they don't have any escort."

I haven't played in a while but from what I have read, the unescorted mini-convoy's were either removed completely or are extremely rare.

Personally I felt they should have stayed at their old frequency, but they become more and more rare as the war goes on.

Welcome aboard!