Back in the water!

[MarkShot]

Okay, I am going to dive again and try the SLMM attack approach.

I probably only have a few more dives left.

I have to restart the scenario, since I wasn't loaded out with SLMMs.

[MarkShot]

The SLMM attack didn't work out so well. However, I believe it has merit, but requires more development.

I played about 90 minutes of AOD today. Just screwing around, since I've forgotten quite a few details. What a great game AOD is!

1940, I attacked a convoy in a Type VII boat. It was 23:00 and I slipped between the escorts on the surface and made it into the convoy. I attacked about 5 merchants, but due to torpedo failures I only sank three.

I was planning to reload over 30 minutes, and see if I could remain clear of the escorts. Sloppy handling led to a collision with one of the sinking merchants. The next hour was touch and go as the crew got the flooding under control while we ran the batteries down at flank to keep from sinking too deep. Finally, we were able surface. Once again planning to use our speed and low profile to get away.

But by now, the escorts had converged on us. We were shelled and a lucky hit caused more leaking. Then, a destroyer making 28kts to our 17kts joined the hunters. We were forced under. We were able to avoid any serious depth charge damage. However, flooding kept dragging us deeper.

After much nail biting creaking, the hull finally gave way.

AOD - what a great game. Maybe it will go back on my laptop which can easily run it before departing.

[MarkShot]

A war patrol to remember.



I am Otto Kretschmer in command of U-99 and the date is 10/18/40.



It's 22:00 and have reports of a convoy to the North West.



The watch picks up the dirty smoke of coal fired steamers.



The approach begins.  I turn towards the convoy and bring the diesels up to 18KTS.





I run for 15 minutes as the light begins to fade.





At roughly quarter hours intervals I order periscope depth so that the hydrophones can get a fix on the convoy.  Then, we surface and resume our approach.





Night closes in.  The watch crew will have to be on their toes.



Finally, as we take another sounding, we know are about to penatrate the convoy.  We hear the high speed screws of escorts to the North East and the low rumbling of merchant screws to our West.



The watch spots our first target.



We close to 500 meters at hit her a midships.



Our first kill of this patrol!



The crew gets busy reloading.



There will be another seven kills during this Night of the Long Knives.  We can hear occassional futile depth charge runs in the distance.  But we concentrate our attacks on by working forward in the convoy.  The escorts are always searching behind us based on the most recent kills.  We will not see them for the rest of the night.

After almost 4 hours, we break contact.



We are back and we are heros.  I am decorated.

[MarkShot]

Some of the most exciting attacks in AOD involve:

Performing an end run and getting in front of the convoy in the late day.

Diving deep near crush depth to get under the escort screen.

Coming to periscope depth once you are in the center of the convoy and shooting at 3-4 merchants at once.

Then, diving deep and trying to slip out the back of the convoy.  Depending on the time period and whether not night has fallen, you might try surfacing and make a dash for it on the surface.

You most likely won't sink more than three ships by doing this, but of course, you can attack again the next day.  Just keep chipping away.

Then, there is the time when wolf packs form.  What you want to do is attack from a quadrant which is empty and attack relatively late.  By that time, most of the escorts will have been drawn off elsewhere and you will have a quite a bit of freedom to prosecute your attack.

Well, I am glad I installed AOD on my laptop, but this may not bode well for finally playing:  RSR, HCCE, and H363.  Sorry, Herman!

[Nefaro]

When you do get to the Harpoon series, I recommend starting with HCCE since the interface is less infuriating.  I have always had problems clicking on the old pre-Win95 interface buttons, especially when running it at a high resolution.   :-\   

There has always been a certain amount of noticeable bugs in the Harpoon3 series, even though a beginner probably wouldn't notice them until getting settled in;  the trade-off being that H3 has more detailed control of numerous things.    I realize you enjoy those deep rabbit holes with lots of details, too, but if you're new to Harpoon, and notably modern naval warfare on a large scale, then it's the best place to start IMO.   There is still a lot to learn with Harpoon Classic, and the feature set is enough to keep me happy for the most part.

IIRC, I have quite a few user-created scenarios for HCCE separated into theater-specific folders somewhere, which makes it easier to identify when loading them in HC.  If you ever get around to firing it up, I'll dig around and try to find them.  It would save you a lot of time downloading and organizing (quite varied zip folder layouts meant I had to do a good amount of cut & paste to get them in the same folder).  I believe Herman has packed up the user-created ones for the H3s into mega-pack(s), so that's the way to go about grabbing those once you're done messing with stock ones.  Make sure you read your Red Storm Rising novel before starting for a quick primer.  ;)

[MarkShot]

I watched 20 minutes of Das Boot auf Deustch tonight.

I definitely need to find some time to go back out on patrol. Chess may build the intellect, but the U-boat is for wirklich mensch!

[MarkShot]

The only thing longer than an AOD war patrol is watching an uncut version of Das Boot!

This is definitely a two night movie.

[Herman Hum]

I recommend starting with HCCE since the interface is less infuriating.

HCCE is working hard to be as infuriating as ANW.  How do you deal with that incessant 'B*tching Betty' function which whines at you constantly to turn your radar on even when it is already active?!

IIRC, I have quite a few user-created scenarios for HCCE separated into theater-specific folders somewhere, which makes it easier to identify when loading them in HC.  If you ever get around to firing it up, I'll dig around and try to find them.  It would save you a lot of time downloading and organizing (quite varied zip folder layouts meant I had to do a good amount of cut & paste to get them in the same folder).  I believe Herman has packed up the user-created ones for the H3s into mega-pack(s), so that's the way to go about grabbing those once you're done messing with stock ones.

I've tried to tell the clowns in the HCCE support group about combining the scenarios into installation packages for ease of use by the players, but it has fallen upon deaf ears.  I guess they think it is smart and convenient to have each and every player hunt down the thousand or so individual scenarios to DL and place in an appropriate folder.  Go figure.  Typical Harpoon mentality.

[Nefaro]

I recommend starting with HCCE since the interface is less infuriating.

HCCE is working hard to be as infuriating as ANW.  How do you deal with that incessant 'B*tching Betty' function which whines at you constantly to turn your radar on even when it is already active?!

There's an option to turn off the Crew Recommendations IIRC.  I never have to deal with those pop-ups after I threaten Betty with a box knife.

IIRC, I have quite a few user-created scenarios for HCCE separated into theater-specific folders somewhere, which makes it easier to identify when loading them in HC.  If you ever get around to firing it up, I'll dig around and try to find them.  It would save you a lot of time downloading and organizing (quite varied zip folder layouts meant I had to do a good amount of cut & paste to get them in the same folder).  I believe Herman has packed up the user-created ones for the H3s into mega-pack(s), so that's the way to go about grabbing those once you're done messing with stock ones.

I've tried to tell the clowns in the HCCE support group about combining the scenarios into installation packages for ease of use by the players, but it has fallen upon deaf ears.  I guess they think it is smart and convenient to have each and every player hunt down the thousand or so individual scenarios to DL and place in an appropriate folder.  Go figure.  Typical Harpoon mentality.

Nobody probably wanted to spend all the time doing it.  It did take awhile clicking each scenario link and then unzipping them into a properly uniform folder structure.  I hope I didn't lose the file with all those zipped up in it.   :-\   I'm still quite positive that I missed a lot of them and I didn't get numerous ones requiring various databases, too.  There was just so many and it was a damn mess.

[Herman Hum]

There's an option to turn off the Crew Recommendations IIRC.  I never have to deal with those pop-ups after I threaten Betty with a box knife.

I've looked under both the Staff Options and Game Options.  No such feature exists to turn off B*tching Betty.  If you found one, please tell me where and how to activate it.

Nobody probably wanted to spend all the time doing it.  It did take awhile clicking each scenario link and then unzipping them into a properly uniform folder structure.  I hope I didn't lose the file with all those zipped up in it.   :-\   I'm still quite positive that I missed a lot of them and I didn't get numerous ones requiring various databases, too.  There was just so many and it was a damn mess.

I offered and you can already guess the response.  Now, everyone has to spend countless hours doing the exact same process to DL and install scenarios instead of clicking once and grabbing 1000 scenarios instantly.

One of the support guys even agreed that most users likely ignore third-party scenarios altogether because of the silly/arduous process of getting them to work.  The PlayersDB recognized this and tried to make everything as easy to use as humanly possible for Harpoon3.  Because of our work on behalf of the players, the PlayersDB is the most successful, widely used, and accepted database. 

AND, it could be made even better and easier for the players.  We've offered to help the publishers distribute thousands of scenarios alongside their game patch updates so that users could get new scenarios at same time they update their games.  One click to grab absolutely EVERYTHING.  You need only one guess as to the response from Matrix.  :)

[MarkShot]

Death is on the prowl:

[Nefaro]

There's an option to turn off the Crew Recommendations IIRC.  I never have to deal with those pop-ups after I threaten Betty with a box knife.

I've looked under both the Staff Options and Game Options.  No such feature exists to turn off B*tching Betty.  If you found one, please tell me where and how to activate it.

Been awhile since I played, so I had to fire it up to see.  It's also freshly installed on my system, so I got the pop-up. 

Here's where you go to turn them off, once you've started a game:
Settings->Staff Options

Then check the boxes "Ignore New Contacts" and "Ignore Lost Contacts" for starters.  There are a few other triggers there you can also choose to ignore, but they happen much more rarely and are more important warnings like Running Aground and Subs Diving Too Deep.  The two "Ignore Contacts" options are the biggies;  the ones that pop up all the damn time.  Should be pretty smooth sailing after that.

While in the 'Staff Options' page, I also turn off the bottom two:  "Show Pulsing Radars" and "Show Formation Grid".  They just clutter up the maps with needless extra junk and ditching those two options clears up the map some.

I still prefer playing HCE over H3.  The interface is just so much more friendly, especially at high resolutions.  I think it looks better too.   It's too bad the H3/ANW interface has always been so torturous.   :-\    Attempting to close windows in H3, at 1280x1024 resolution is an exercise in button-mashing frustration for me.  As I said before, though, that if I ever decide to make some more Harpoon scenarios, it'll have to be for H3 because I just don't feel like bothering to load up WinXP 32bit on a separate hard drive partition just for using HCE's scenario editor.  ;)  I'd probably just rather play HCE & H3, though, when I get the next itch and see if the creative juices start oozing again.

I also dunno if I'll ever buy the latest version at Matrix because when these old Harpoon (and other) games get re-released every few years, I sometimes get caught paying full price for one and then get stuck with yet another re-release happening in the next year or so after that purchase.  At this point it would probably be wise just to wait another couple years when AGS decides they want to charge for another re-release again.  Best to buy these re-re-releases when they're fresh, amiright?  :P

[MarkShot]

The thing I found with H3 variants on my PC is that before the UI processes a Window's system action, the mouse needs to move, at least, 1 pixel.  So, for me, it is click and twitch.

[Herman Hum]

Here's where you go to turn them off, once you've started a game:
Settings->Staff Options

Then check the boxes "Ignore New Contacts" and "Ignore Lost Contacts" for starters.  There are a few other triggers there you can also choose to ignore, but they happen much more rarely and are more important warnings like Running Aground and Subs Diving Too Deep.  The two "Ignore Contacts" options are the biggies;  the ones that pop up all the damn time.  Should be pretty smooth sailing after that.

Yup.  Got all of those options turned down as far as possible. They aren't the problem.  The problem is when AI Staff incessantly warn me to turn on my radar because I am detected.  Even when I turn it on, the warnings continue unabated.  The same goes with the "Enemy is in range of your weapons" warnings.  You just can't turn this stuff off.

It's too bad the H3/ANW interface has always been so torturous.   :-\    Attempting to close windows in H3, at 1280x1024 resolution is an exercise in button-mashing frustration for me.

I think you are in error regarding the high resolution problems.  Certainly, closing windows should not take more than a single click but, when you zoom in tightly with HCCE, it is nearly impossible to make small adjustments in courses or map positions.  With H3, you can get nearly pixel-precise control for your orders.

I also dunno if I'll ever buy the latest version at Matrix because when these old Harpoon (and other) games get re-released every few years, I sometimes get caught paying full price for one and then get stuck with yet another re-release happening in the next year or so after that purchase.  At this point it would probably be wise just to wait another couple years when AGS decides they want to charge for another re-release again.  Best to buy these re-re-releases when they're fresh, amiright?  :P

Once you have H3, you don't need the later versions unless you have a fervent desire for multi-player battles.

[Herman Hum]

The thing I found with H3 variants on my PC is that before the UI processes a Window's system action, the mouse needs to move, at least, 1 pixel.  So, for me, it is click and twitch.

This is very true.  The map re-draw does not refresh itself without a slight movement.  However, I think that the game calculations, etc. DO continue with or without any required mouse movement.