AI U-boats

There'll be a -lot- more u-boat activity in the North Sea (and when France falls, in the eastern Atlantic).

In 1939/40, the u-boats don't even have the range to get to Canada yet.

The other factor is that the player is always going to be much better at dealing with submarines than the AI is, since the AI loves sending its naval units piecemeal and its transports alone and unescorted. In most of my UK campaigns, I'm always able to essentially eliminate the u-boat menace by setting destroyers on ASW patrol in the North Sea and Channel (and the Bay of Biscay sort of area when France falls).

The U-boat AI is a lot better than it was - and still far below anything a human can do.

The main problem is that Germany places a 80 sub fleet in Wilhelmshaven and never uses it. This is down from a 140 sub fleet and cost me about 3 weeks of intensive modding to achieve.

We will revisit this at some time in the future, maybe the magic 1.08 patch will bring some hard-coded improvements, if it ever arrives.

I've never see the 80 subs or 140 subs in Wilhelmshaven - at least not for long. They tended to send out five or ten a day, alone, to get smashed by my ASW destroyer patrol, so after a month or two they had no subs left.

This observation may fit with the explanation we are currently developing in the Beta Test forum at Terranova.

We need to saturate the admiral AI with target sea zones. It will then move its units out to cover them or at least assign fleets for these sea zones. If a human player kills the limited number of subs assigned to the target zones the ai will move out more ....