I've been noticing lately that if I detect one sub of a group, within a minute or so, I'll detect the other. At first I thought that was fine, they're pretty close together.

 

But, then I looked at the detection. I was playing a scenario with two surface ASW groups patrolling about 150 miles apart north/south from each other. A submarine was detected by a north group sonobuoy, about 15 miles north of the group, so about 165 miles from the south group. ~1 min later, its groupmate was detected...by CZ contact from the south group? What? You mean it was loud enough for the south group to see it 165 miles away, but the Spruance at 5 knots 10 miles from it never got a sniff?

 

Seems like the game is giving something away here? Or is it just my imagination? This happens all the time, too, with grouped AI subs and detections. The above is just one example.

It shouldn't happen, it does happen. Myself and others have added code to reduce severity and occurence but have never achieved total success.

 

One scenario design tenet has been to only make single submarine groups.

It shouldn't happen, it does happen. Myself and others have added code to reduce severity and occurence but have never achieved total success.

 

One scenario design tenet has been to only make single submarine groups.

 

Which makes good sense. Just annoying in the scenarios not made that way. Sure, I could split them all up, but, I guess the annoyance is less than the work to do that.

 

At least if you lose the contact, the plane doesn't automatically set course to right on top of the sub anymore. That behavior's gone.

Yes, group sub behavior has been less than satisfactory for a long time now.

 

And as Tony has said, we've encouraged folks not to use groups of submarines for the AI when writing scenarios, as they typically lead to unsatisfactory results.

The bad thing about this is that when you want to create a minefield, you have to set it up as separate groups as well or you have the same problem. And having all those extra groups can get resource intensive, ideally it would be better if you could use groups.

The bad thing about this is that when you want to create a minefield, you have to set it up as separate groups as well or you have the same problem. And having all those extra groups can get resource intensive, ideally it would be better if you could use groups.

 

The same behaviour with mines doesn't bother me too much, as it will be rare to encounter a single mine. If you find a mine, instantly one thinks mine "field"! Getting contacts from there forward on multiple mines probably eliminates a lot of player frustration (albeit, I admit, frustration is the name of the game when dealing with mines).

I have considered operating submarines singly (instead of in groups) more of an operating doctrine as well.