I see the original poster never responded.I have just begun my first mission on a sub campaign and after about 30 attempts to avoid getting depth charged by those destroyers, I am becoming convinced, I am doing something wrong.
I have tried varying depths, speed, direction, even stopped and still they get me before I can get off a spread. What's the secret?
I just went through this recently in the first USN sub campaign mission, taking command of the Lionfish. That's the one where you have to sink an oiler but two corvettes start heading right at you. I also played this mission over and over. I got so frustrated that I almost ate the CD.
Here's how I succesffully sunk the corvettes the first time but still lost the mission.
It's easier to bait the corvettes by pivoting at flank speed and then lowering throttle to 1/3 and letting them chase you from behind. Then fire your rear tubes at the one on your tail when it's close enough to launch hedgehogs at you.
The second corvette is always verring off and patrolling nearby. I had no problems turning up the engines to flank, head right towards her and fire 2 fish into it.
The problem with this method is that whoever designed the mission at TAG didn't allow the player enough time to turn back and chase after the oiler. I got a message that we've lost sight of the oiler (or similar), though I could see it in my scope and its blip was on the TAC.
Not fair, TAG!
So I had to start over again. I understood that there's no way I can disable the mission's time limit. That meant heading towards the oiler and confronting the corvetes head-on.
To do so, I set engine to 1/3, went to periscope depth and align head-on with the distant but approaching corvette.
Again, once it fired its hedgehogs at me (lowered hull by about 1/3) I fired 2 fish straight at the bow's center. One hit but the other missed.
The corvette had vered to its port after the first hit and tried coming back starboard at me. I throttled to flank, vering hard to my port. As the corvette came very close and parallel to me, I held course, changed my periscope view to aft and pivoted to follow it. When the crosshairs pointed ahead enough of its bow, I fired one fish and the corvette was no more!
I then took out the 2nd corvette as in the previous attempt decribed above. Since I had been heading all this time in the oiler's direction, I had enough time to target and sink it to complete the mission successfully. enigma!:
There's a lot to learn from this first mission but I would suggest the following to TAG:
1. Remove the time limit. Replace it with an out of range limit between the player and the oiler.
2. I saw it's already been mentioned but the game needs to be supplemented with a startegy guide to train players what tactics to perform. I am not referring to a "walkthrough" but something that mentions the procedures needed under certain circumstances.
OK, I'm finished now.