no enemies encountered

[pickler]

i have been playing steam ver sh3 with gwx on win7 64bit and other mods:

gwx 16km atmosphere
gwx integrated orders
gwx merged campaign
open hatch
sh5 water
sh4 effects
eax sounds
rbs enhanced explosions
rbs water steams
rbs dual smoke
torpedo damage final v2
type ix skin
type vi skin
war radio broadcast
sh3 commander
4gb ram patch installed seperately


my problem is i have not encountered any enemy ships or planes. just friendly and neutral units. i came in contact with a friendly submarine in the middle of atlantic but no enemy vessels. i started new careers at different dates like 1942 to no avail. anyone knows why i got no enemies? running sh3 vanilla i get lots of radar warnings and enemy aircrafts and tonnea of convoys.

[Feuer Frei!]

As others have reported, you can go for days without seeing any enemy units.
Or complete your objective(ie patrol grid for 24 hours) and then sail home to refit without seeing a single enemy unit.
Thank god for dynamic campaigns
It is not unusual to experience what you are experiencing.
How long have you patrolled in these instances?
If you want enemy units at a great amount, i suggest starting a 1944 or 1945 campaign, i guarantee you you will have your enemy units then

[pickler]

Originally Posted by Feuer Frei!

As others have reported, you can go for days without seeing any enemy units.
Or complete your objective(ie patrol grid for 24 hours) and then sail home to refit without seeing a single enemy unit.
Thank god for dynamic campaigns
It is not unusual to experience what you are experiencing.
How long have you patrolled in these instances?
If you want enemy units at a great amount, i suggest starting a 1944 or 1945 campaign, i guarantee you you will have your enemy units then

thanks for the response, i finished about 3 patrols. one to kingston jamaica with no sightings. on the return home i spotted a single british cargo ship which i sunk with guns. other than that nothing else seen or sunk. i have tried following the convoy paths outlined in gwx map with no luck. each patrol is about 6 hours. im thinking of reinstalling the game.

[Feuer Frei!]

Originally Posted by pickler

each patrol is about 6 hours. im thinking of reinstalling the game.

6 Hours? Be patient

Can take a lot longer to encounter enemy units than 6 hours gameplay.

Like i said, can take days.

No need to re-install the game, the re-install won't add more enemies in a shorter amount of time.

Good luck.

[Gustav Schiebert]

Originally Posted by pickler

...i came in contact with a friendly submarine in the middle of atlantic but no enemy vessels .... i get lots of radar warnings and enemy aircrafts and tonnea of convoys.

You're not on U-96 with Jurgen Prochnow are you? Don't think they even see a ship until about an hour in, and they managed to bump into Thompsen.

It's frustrating at times but perseverance is the key. Try:

• Hanging around the big convoy lanes - http://etnies.muskatli.hu/sh/faq/SH3_MAP.jpg
• If you can spare the time, dropping the TC, as you'll miss fewer of the radio reports
• If you have a decent hydrophone man, do more searches underwater. Best possible visibility is about 12km, hydrophones can hear much further than that

Other than that, it's just patience and perseverence! I'm doing a DID campaign on full realism at the moment which (so far) is going very well with 75,000 GRT sunk in about 5 months. But even on the successful patrols, 7, 8 even 9 days with no sightings at all are common.

Good hunting!

[HW3]

If you want convoys, hang out in BE64 for a week or two from 1942 on, you'll find convoys there.

[mookiemookie]

AM52!!!!!

[Johnfb]

Originally Posted by Gustav Schiebert

[*]If you can spare the time, dropping the TC, as you'll miss fewer of the radio reports[*]If you have a decent hydrophone man, do more searches underwater. Best possible visibility is about 12km, hydrophones can hear much further than that

Both very important points for you and worth remembering.
I usually run TC at no more than 64 but standard for me is 32.

[Marcello]

Originally Posted by pickler

thanks for the response, i finished about 3 patrols. one to kingston jamaica with no sightings. on the return home i spotted a single british cargo ship which i sunk with guns. other than that nothing else seen or sunk. i have tried following the convoy paths outlined in gwx map with no luck. each patrol is about 6 hours. im thinking of reinstalling the game.

That's what convoys were for in real life: turning normally busy sea lanes into a desert where u-boats would burn fuel for weeks before they could make a contact, if at all. That's part of the reason the KM estimated before the war that something in the ballpark of a thousands of u-boats would be needed to rapidly win the war, as covering all the possible approaches in sufficient strenght required huge numbers. That the Luftwaffe could never provide a meaningful number of properly equipped long range patrol planes with suitably trained crews only made matters worse. And thanks to allied code breaking efforts traffic would be actively re-routed around the u-boats (though british codes being in turn compromised the germans were sometimes able to repay in kind).
You can patrol choke points where trafic converge but it is a risk, at least in 1944 even raising a snorkel for few minutes is playing russian roulette in AM52, and you still have to be prepared to spend quite a bit of time there.

[scudder]

One thing this game teaches you pretty quickly is that there is A LOT of ocean out there, and one tiny u-boat just can't cover all that much area. As folks have mentioned, there are of course sea lanes that we can patrol around/through, but a lot of things have to go right to run into a convoy. Remember too that, at best, you can cover about 12 nautical miles/hr. To put that in perspective, the English Channel is about 300 nautical miles, or just over a day's travel, on the surface, at full speed.

[pickler]

thanks for the responses. I will be heading to AM52 and other coordinates as suggested. my other problem is also the never ending storms. I have read some threads here on them but i have had no luck including a mod I downloaded to resolve this. Either way after about a week of patrolling the weather gets severe and the storms never stop. I have started a career in mid 1943 now so hopefully i will see more enemies.

[Johnfb]

Its worth remembering that SH is not a shoot em up, its a game that allows you to experience the uboat in all its boring glory with moments of excitement and panic.
Thats what makes it so great.
Thats why the radio mods are so important...for listening while you patrol for hours without a sniff of a ship....enigma codes are another boredom breaker.

Real uboat life.

[Pisces]

I'd like to re-emphasize: stay low on the time compression. Higher than say 256 and you risk having them hyperjump invisible through your 3d-environment bubble. And in the worst case they (a nice convoy with 6 DDs) materialize when at point blank range, with you little to no time to dive and evade.

Well, atleast you are assured you weren't alone.

[iambecomelife]

Have you tried the Western Approaches and the area South of the Irish Sea? You say you have a GWX setup. When I had GWX installed there was usually quite a bit of traffic in those areas.

Of course, many contacts turned out to be patrol craft or small vessels. For the most part I was satisfied with GWX's traffic level - if anything the oceangoing traffic in GWX may be heavier than real life.

[CherryHarbey]

Originally Posted by pickler

thanks for the responses. I will be heading to AM52 and other coordinates as suggested. my other problem is also the never ending storms. I have read some threads here on them but i have had no luck including a mod I downloaded to resolve this. Either way after about a week of patrolling the weather gets severe and the storms never stop. I have started a career in mid 1943 now so hopefully i will see more enemies.

you talk of sightings in an earlier post and now storms.....
are you diving for a listen on the hydrophones every few hours?
you can hear further than you can see, especial when your visibility is reduced by storms.