[Sailor Steve]

Since my recent problems with a reload killing all my careers, I've been having fun just playing with different files to see what would happen, and I think I may have hit on the ultimate in realism, at least as far as map contacts go.

For anyone who hasn't used different mods, I'll give a little history.

If you're using stock SHIII the Nav map shows every ship your crew can see, colored blue for friendly, red for enemy and green for neutral. On top of this any radio contact concerning a convoy or single ship also automatically shows which side he's on.

The first mods I remember for this were Pentallion's 20/20 mod, which reduced single merchants to 20% of the original, and also reduced contact reports on those ships to 20%; frustrating for those who just like to see thing blow up, but very welcome to those of us looking for realism over gameplay. The other was Myros' Nocolor Mod, which turned all contacts and visible ship markers gray, so you couldn't tell the side except by looking at the ship's flag yourself.

The came Real U-Boat. It also had the gray markers, but the tails were gone so you didn't automatically know the direction it was travelling. Also, if you clicked on a marker, it didn't identify it, it just said "Unknown", unless you had previously identified it in the UZO or Periscope. Better than that, RUB replaced the sonar tracks with a dashed line, so you still knew the direction of the contacts but could no longer tell the range by just measuring the line, which always ends right where the ship is.

Well, I'm using Grey Wolves for a lot of things, including the SCR campaign map which has the latest, greatest Harbour Traffic mod installed, but I'm using the Not Your Grandmother's Tonnage War RND map because I like the speed changes at convoy waypoints. Sort of my own homemade Combined Mod. The thing I discovered from NYGM was the actual map files. Using this one I found that visual contacts don't show up on the map at all...unless you pass the cursor over them, and even then they still only say "Unknown" unless you've already identified them. This means that no ships show up on the Nav map-you actually have to look at them to make attack decisions.

This is probably pretty awful for casual players, or people who set waypoints and leave port at high Time Compression; but me, I'm lovin' it.

[andy_311]

It happens in all the time because the weather changed or your just out of range when you went out of TC get closer to your target.