Quote:
Originally Posted by Kos_K
Hello, kind ship killers.
Need a couple of hints, if you may:
- How one can surface without blowing a tanks? Say, if at periscope depth, and want to take a sip of oxygen?
- How one can keep hatches shut? U can close it, but next sailor will leave it open (maybe it's only my discipline problem, idk)
Please provide some guidance, if it possible to do in a current build (B118).
Many ty
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Been a while, so some of this may have changed since you posted, but:
"Decks awash" will put you at the surface without blowing the tanks, and your watch officer(s) will continue to use the periscopes instead of climbing onto the deck. The hatch will still remain closed by default, but you can open it manually (may have to wait until a wave isn't crashing over it) and get sips of oxygen. Just be careful to watch the bilge level, because you'll take on water if doing this under high sea states.
You can also now research the snorkel, which — when extended, via the switch next to the navigation station — both feed air to the engines and also supply air to the sub.
Finally, you can use potassium absorbers in the ventilation system (turned on) to just filter air that way. (Generally, it only takes 2 or 3 of them to replenish the entire sub's air, so you may want to only put that many in, in case you forget to turn it off.) And you can pick up new potassium absorbers from base once you complete the appropriate HQ mission.
The hatch now seems to stay closed by default, so I can't comment on the latter issue.
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My own tips:
Beware that some of these are pretty cheesy (unrealistic) tips, i.e. oversights or questionable balance decisions in the game right now. Pick and choose which ones you're willing to (ab)use, and which ones you'll ignore for the sake of realism and/or difficulty.
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Your hydrophone has two uses: Picking up distant ships ("propeller noise"), and pinpointing ships within the blue "bubble" marked around your ship.
And I do mean pinpoint — a hydrophone sighting may as well be a visual sighting.
You can have your hydrophone operator target a ship, just like a watch officer, and calculate a torpedo course. As such, you can actually target convoys from deep underwater, basically like a nuclear submarine might. (Or, you can use the hydrophone to supplement your watch officers' targeting, particularly if only part of the convoy is in visual range.)
You can use the observation periscope to target — potentially allowing you to target three things at once — but it's
incredibly slow at doing so. I often use it on low-value targets so I'll have a head start when I finally point the main periscope at them ... or I'll use the main periscope to get something up to an acceptable solution (e.g. 90%) and then use the observation periscope to refine that while I work on something else.
You can get a ship identification pretty fast, I think around when you have 30% of a targeting solution. That's helpful when HQ wants you to take out a particular ship and you want to know which one to concentrate on.
It seems like the accuracy of your torpedo solution never decreases, even if you stop targeting and the target changes course or speed. So you can get the entire convoy figured out, launch your first volley, then just continue firing torpedoes at them even once they're running scared. So long as they don't successfully weave away between when you fire and when you hit, you'll continue to score hits.
It seems like transports (at least unescorted ones) will not actually change course or speed until they detect
your sub directly — even if their buddies are blowing up around them left and right. So as long as you stay hidden, you can continue to torpedo them with impunity.
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Torpedoes can sometimes take out a ship in one shot, but more often, your radioman will call out "minimal damage" and the HP bar will only decrease very slightly. This might happen several times in a row, so
never count on taking out multiple targets with one torpedo each.
However, it does seem like there's some cumulative effects on damage, such that further torpedoes or deck gun shots will more easily lead to fires and/or flooding. It's rare that it takes more than two torpedoes to take out a standard large freighter.
Ships will abandon when they reach 50% HP. However, they will
not automatically sink, and will
not be counted as kills until sunk. Of course, an abandoned ship is a prime deck gun target, since they won't shoot back — but small arms fire from transports seems to be something you can largely ignore anyway.
You can collect crates from wrecks by getting them in visual range and clicking on them in first person. You can also move one crate (or pontoon or etc) to the rear deck of the U-boat, either to collect items from it, or just to get it out of the way so you can more easily spot other crates. (It seems to stay there until replaced, even if you submerge.) This allows your crew to collect items from it and move them to the sub's own storage. The most common items I've found are foodstuffs, so killing transports can help you stay well fed at sea.
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Flooding seems to be your main enemy in this game. The game models buoyancy, so flooding can rapidly become a runaway situation, where more flooding = less buoyancy = sinking faster = faster flooding, slower bilge pumping.
The moment you have any leaks, pause the game and assess. You may have to make hard decisions, like sealing compartments with wounded people inside, or surfacing the boat and facing whatever danger put holes in your hull in the first place.
Don't forget that you can have an officer block a leak (reducing the flow by 90%) while a mechanic works on repairing it (or is busy repairing others).
The threat model in UBOAT is, in my experience, quite different than that of Silent Hunter. At least in the several patrols I've run so far, escorts seem largely ineffective, since you can hit convoys quietly and from afar (potentially, without even using your periscope), then slink away and catch up and try again if needed. The few times they've come after me, I've generally had little trouble being silent and escaping.
On the other hand, airplanes are a far greater danger, since they jump you without warning and can put holes in your hull just at the worst possible time — when you're trying to dive to avoid them, putting you at risk of flooding and an uncontrolled dive if they score a hit. Unless you have plenty of warning from your Radar Detector, or you're running "Decks Awash" when a plane shows up, consider staying on the surface and gunning them down — it may ultimately be safer.
All of this might change as the war goes on (or as the game is rebalanced closer to launch), of course.
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Radar detectors are currently rather wonky. The tier 1 "Metox" system has a range of ~13nmi, but supposedly it emits signals the Allies can home in on. (Of course, this is just accurately modelling the misinformation the Allies fed the Germans! In reality, they had cracked Enigma, and they claimed they could detect Metox in order to throw the Germans off.)
Tier 2 "Borkum" claims to solve this problem, but sacrifices nearly 40% range to do so. Tier 3 "Naxos" is garbage — 2 nmi! You can see further than that! Tier 4 "Tunis" is finally back to the same range as "Metox". So don't bother researching or installing T2 detection until you're ready to go all the way to T4. (I've filed this as a bug, since 2 nmi is ridiculous.)
Caveat: I have so far not actually ever gotten a successful detection with my radar detector — but neither have I had any planes slip through. I've only run a few patrols with a radar detector equipped, though. I've heard some speculation that the radar detector is actually modeled as a "reduce chances of air intercept" tool rather than "detect air intercepts from far away" tool — in which case, the range is irrelevant, and higher tiers are presumably always better.
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The snorkel can be researched right from the start of the game (with an engineer and the appropriate time in HQ). It's a really useful piece of tech, since it does a bunch of things all at once:
- gives you some protection from planes (smaller radar contact, faster dive times)
- lets you get closer to convoys before going to internal air + e-motor
- you can still use the radio and receive orders from HQ
- lets you use the hydrophone — very important for finding contacts
That last one is important. Unless you want to dive the sub a lot to check (which is quite time-costly due to "open seas" time acceleration) or rely entirely on "please destroy this ship" orders from HQ, you'll want to stay underwater for long durations in order to detect "propeller noise" signals and head towards them.
The main downsides of the snorkel are just the disadvantages of being submerged — your speed is reduced, your visual range is reduced, you can no longer use the radar detector, and it may cause a lot of switching to the e-motor if high seas mean waves are crashing over the snorkel head.
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Overall, the radar detector and the snorkel (in either order) are probably your two most important early research targets. But you should also pick up type 3 torpedoes relatively early, because the type 2's (early electric) are awful.
For your first mission or two, you can get away with just using type 1 (steam) torpedoes. (So far, the visible bubble trail has not been a problem for me.)
Your sub will come with some type 2's, but you can generally replace these by ...
- buying ONE type 1 torpedo (to clear up a spot in HQ inventory)
- using the "off duty" time skip to load the torpedo
- selling your type 2 (using the HQ slot you just freed up)
- go to step 1 and repeat
If you buy more than one torpedo at a time, you increase the risk that the HQ stock resets and you have nowhere to offload your type 2.
As a bonus, the superior T1 torpedoes are worth $800 while the ****ty T2 torpedoes are worth $900, so you actually get more credits to spend.
Alas, this eventually stops working, because HQ stops stocking type 1s altogether. So research type 3 before this happens.
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Buy every
officer ($750 cost) you can from the recruitment officer at base. They come with random traits, and some can be very useful, even just for HQ missions. If you don't want to make hard staffing choices — like leaving behind one of your critical officers to do a particular HQ mission — just continue grabbing officers until you either get the officer you want ... or you get one with the trait that lets them assume any role (for the purpose of HQ missions).
Once you have either the radar detector and/or the snorkel, get a second radioman (even if you have to sacrifice an engineer). Assign one (or both!) to "technician officer" so they prioritise the listening station. You'll want them on that non-stop, while the other radioman sends and receives messages (or takes over listening while the technician sleeps).
Even if you only have one radioman, consider setting them to "technician officer", so they prefer the hydrophone over the radar when you're at periscope depth.
"Doubling up" officers is often a good strategy. While travelling, I often like to have two Chief Engineers, so one is resting while the other works on engines. You don't need your torpedoes warmed all the time! (In fact, it can be better to warm them at the start of an encounter, so they don't un-warm right when you need them.) Just remember to switch one (or both) of them back to Mechanic (or manually warm torpedoes) at the first sign of enemies. I also often like having two Technician Officers, since radar detector and hydrophone are almost always more important than radio. And once I'm in a combat situation, the Chief Boatswain is useless, so I usually assign him to be a Watch Officer as well.
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Money becomes pretty much pointless after your first decent patrol. Spend freely. I'm currently carrying around a full stack of 40 small arms in my weapons locker — $280,000 in value! — just because I can.
Similarly, fuel is dirt cheap. Don't worry about wasting it, unless you have good reason to worry that you won't have enough to make it home. With crew helping the engineer and navigator, you can pretty much just zoom around everywhere at Flank Speed — especially if you start at La Rochelle, the best port for Atlantic operations
by far.
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Vacations are great, and cheap. My favourite is the one that gives you +25% XP for the last patrol, and +100% (i.e. double) speed HQ missions. Since most missions are 12 days, and the vacation is 14 days, you can get at least two projects done in that time — or four, if you have the "2 projects at a time" HQ upgrade.
You can cheese base time in various ways, such as buying and selling goods (particularly torpedoes), or swapping upgrades (takes several days to install). This can allow you to e.g. wait until a particular HQ mission is complete before setting out — or if you
really want to cheese, you can use this to sit out the 7 day cooldown between vacations, and take
another one. (Just be careful delaying your departure too much, since if you delay too many days and then leave without vacationing, your crew will have a
constant drain on their discipline due to "fatigued".)
I used to think that if a project finished while you were at sea or on vacation, you only had one chance (via the "project complete" beaker icon) to pick your next project. But no, turns out you can access the HQ at any time, via the top right menu — the beaker is just a shortcut. (Same goes for radio orders, etc.)
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If you're close to enemies, and your crew discipline is a problem, consider adopting an "ostrich" approach. Deliberately blind yourself — unassign hydrophone, and either lower periscopes or go too deep for them — so you can't see the enemy any more. What you can't see
can hurt you, of course ... but as long as your crew doesn't know that, they'll eventually fall out of "alert" mode and back into normal mode, where things like "varied meals", "cooking" (officer with appropriate talent), and "music" (radioman) will replenish their discipline.
If you try to go deep while surfaced, I believe it's considered an automatic crash dive, which means "alarm" status, and draining discipline for a while. To avoid this, go to periscope depth first.
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The Gyrocompass takes a constant -2 energy, which can actually be more than the electrical engines at flank speed! (if you have officers helping to reduce the drain) Turn it off if you need to save power (or reduce noise). Keep it on while travelling ("open seas") to reduce the risk of getting lost, but it's pointless when you're in any kind of combat / shore map. (If your Chief Boatswain is not automatically using the navigation console when on duty, then you can't get lost, and you don't need the Gyrocompass.)
Another common source of noise is the electric steering. Turn that off by right clicking on the dive station (while submerged). I assume it has some effect on depth keeping (or maybe the rudder), but it doesn't seem to use power.
Blue lighting ("silent running") does not seem to have any effect on the noise you make. It does, however, cause your crew to use up the air 15% slower. If you think you'll be underwater for a while, go blue early, to maximise the benefit.
I haven't measured the effect personally, but according to a loading screen tip, red lighting is supposed to help increase your crew's visual range at night — and (for you, the player) make the night visibly brighter.
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I have not found any use for the diving suit, beyond the tutorial mission. It's worth $9000, which is
a lot of money at the start of the game — more than your entire starting budget. You may want to consider selling it if you can't afford the gear you want. However, HQ doesn't normally carry another one in stock, so if it ever disappears, good luck finding another one.
Having said that — it seems like items don't ever actually disappear from HQ at the moment. For this reason, you'll want to make sure you sell items on the correct HQ tab, e.g. selling food on the "food" tab, selling ammo on the "ammunition" tab, etc. Otherwise, you may find your "equipment" section is clogged up with food and ammo, etc.
The easiest way to buy and sell items is to
right click. Dragging items into empty slots works fine for buying, but you can have trouble selling items that way — e.g. dragging your potatoes onto HQ's potatoes won't work, and there often won't be any empty slots in the "food" tab that you can drag to. (This is how I ended up clogging my "equipment" section with food items I didn't want, until I learned about right click.)
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