Can't shake the Tommies!
 

Hey guys, I'm relatively new to Subsim games (100hrs on UBOAT, 80hrs on SH3), and I'm having a hell of a time shaking destroyers on SH3 GWXOneAlex edition. July 1941. I hit a convoy, two kills, dived, silent run, 50RPM, 120 meters, and I begin to be pursued by 1 destroyer. Calm seas, but should be no problem. I evade his attacks rather well, until he runs out of charges. He tracks me perfectly, no amount of evading seems to work. He goes over me, I evade, then a minute later, "Enemy is pinging us, sir!" This repeats. He has been following me for 8 hours, and probably hasn't dropped a depth charge in 7 hours. Now the weather has gone sour and I've long since lost the convoy and he still won't quit. During another convoy attack, I was chased for 12 hours by a destroyer that had somehow caught on fire. Same thing, no charges, tracked me perfectly. What's odd is, that time I was chased for 12 hours, I became convinced the game was bugged, so I reloaded a save, and he left almost instantly. Was that a fluke or is there something to be done about these relentless brits?

-Der Junge Kapitän

P.S

This is my first post, but this community is great. I'm a college student, getting my history degree soon, and I grew up on films like Das Boot, so the Atlantic War has always been one of my favorite parts of history. It's been great to find these games and this community of like minded people. Good hunting!

Deja vu again
 

Evading depth charges is a matter of speeding up when the escort starts its run (ASDIC pings stop and escort speed increases). In GWX changing depth by 20m or so also works (this is not realistic). SH3 escorts drop charges at the last known position even if they have no contact (in real life the chances of a hit in these circumstances were close to zero so it would only be done for scare effect to keep a boat down).

Game escorts go away after about 20-40 minutes of no contact. You need to work out when they actually have contact and whether you need to evade. Unfortunately GWX escorts rely primarily on passive sensors and only use ASDIC just before they attack. Every time you speed up you are likely to restart the clock.


Go deep. 200m should be fine in an undamaged boat but I find 160m is enough.

Be quiet. Silent running, 1 knot. If being loudly pinged you may as well speed up until the pinging stops in order to change your position but don't go above 1/3 ahead or you may pull other escorts in.

Against active sonar/ASDIC point bow or stern at the escort.
Do not make any noise again until the escort is at long range.



Watch Tonci87 or Wolfpack345 on Youtube for examples.



In real life late war escorts that could not get a kill directly would hang around for 24 hours until the boat's air ran out. Watch the film "The Cruel Sea"!

Welcome aboard!
 

Life choices
 

Agreed. Valuable drinking time can be lost to gaming.

Burning escorts is a classic, well-known bug, alternately frustrating or hilarious depending on how immersed you are in the simulation. I've seen it in multiple mods, and it probably happens in vanilla too. I can't speak on it too authoritatively, but my understanding is that it can happen to any small ship that's damaged by heavy seas. If large enough waves swamp the ship, it takes flooding damage, which is why it generally happens to only small escorts and little steamers.

Chalk it up to the enemy's poor seamanship :Kaleun_Wink:

There are other similar ship self-destruct issues you'll run into. Don't be too surprised if that troublesome 20k ton "Modern Passenger Liner" spontaneously scuttles itself, which can even happen in calm seas. Sometimes subchasers and armed trawlers can spectacularly blow themselves up with their own bombs, if they're trying to hit a target at a shallow depth, since their top speed is lower than that of an ocean-going escort.

Welcome to the party btw!

Burning ships
 

The waves can be a bit too destructive in many mods. Flower Class corvettes are particularly vulnerable, when IRL they were horribly uncomfortable but also very seaworthy. I've found that it is helpful to look at the wave height settings in SH3 Commander and set the waves to be as small as possible.
GWX includes Uboats in some convoys that will attack as soon as the convoy spawns (around 30km away). Given the stupidity of the SH3 AI these boats often attack on the surface with their deck guns, even in daylight, leading to masses of wild firing from all sides that damages many ships. All this usually occurs out of sight of your boat and is over by the time you arrive.
OneAlex seems to be very keen on air attacks on convoys. An air attack leads to lots of damage, both from the aircraft and from stray rounds as above.
It's all a bit mad; best not to use the external view and just pretend that there's some more rational explanation.

Thank you for your reply. I've got the hang of dodging depth charges for the most part. I actually just escaped 3 destroyers that were taking turns attacking me in dead calm seas. However, my main problem persists. After that engagement, I got back into contact with the convoy I've been chasing, and sure enough, I have had a corvette on my case for not 8, not 12, but 20+ hours now. If you didn't guess, I don't have co2 management on, lol. I'm at 200m, 50rpm, silent running, trying my best to evade, turn into him, turn away from him, go silent after he passes over me. Its probably been 18 hours since a depth charge has been dropped on me. I even reloaded a save (a massive pain because of the long load times) with no luck. What's more, I just tried some more evasive maneuvers, and then it just worked. He quit I had a good laugh at how irritated I was, and at the idea of that Corvette's CO reporting to his boss only to say, "yeah, I chased a Uboat for 24 hours, but I lost contact for 20 minutes so I gave up."

Good game vs realism
 

"yeah, I chased a Uboat for 24 hours, but I lost contact for 20 minutes so I gave up."
It was probably "I had the b*****d pinned down but YOU ordered me back to the convoy!".
There are a couple of different ways of simulating the boat's oxygen supplies; the simple one in the base game and the "enhanced" one in the H.Sie hard coded fixes. I find the H.Sie version a bit too severe, I've read elsewhere that a type VII should last 18 hours before resorting to potash cartridges and bottled oxygen.
I've not played OneAlex, but I have never had problems shaking escorts with older GWX (until 1944...). I guess our Ukrainian friend has added some tweaks. The settings for the various detection methods are very tricky to set up and critical for the game balance and realism. In addition there's only so much that can be done to work around the limitations of the base game. Maybe in this case he's got the settings a bit too realistic :-?
I play NYGM these days. I find the escorts a bit less "laser guided" when using passive hydrophones. Maybe you could give Fifi's enhanced hardcore NYGM a try.