Well I just finished my third battle with Russian subs and twice they have kicked my butt. Playing as the U.S.
I am playing Ruges mod with FOW turned off to speed up the game. Subs are clearly visible - so far.
I had asked the other guys on the Ruges mod thread if they had seens subs move in U7:
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=12816&p=109276&hilit=subs+move#p109276I had read peoples's reports that they did, but I had not see it yet.
The first time I shot ASROCs at two Russian subs off the West coast of Korea and sank them. They fired missiles at me but did not move until they were badly damaged.
This second time I spotted two coastal Russian subs off the coast of Mancheria near Nakhodka. I loaded up three Oliver H. Perry-class frigates with ASROCs and went after them. The ASROCS have a range of 100 km. As I was closing with the subs one opened fire at me with missiles at about 160 km. It turned out that there were not two but three Russian subs and one of them did move towards me as it attacked. I managed to fire a couple of ASROCs at them but they sank two of my Frigates. I only wounded two of them.
The third time about five Russia subs at the Komsomolsk-na-Amure base moved East along the Amure river in response to my invasion of the Russian Sakhalin island and its oil platforms. They moved one at a time. I was successfully blockading the river with about eight of my captured Chinese subs. My subs took some hits, but when the Russian would get real close my subs would kill it.
During this battle I moved some of my Chinese DDs with ASROCs closer to the Northern end of Sakhalin island. The next sub that moved towards the mouth of the river opened fire on my valuable destroyers and sank two or three of them before they could get away. My sub-pack then killed that Russian too.
This pissed me off so I sent back to CONUS for help. I deployed two P-3 Orions and three S-3B Viking aircraft. The Orions got there first and I had them attack the next to the last Russian sub.
In two passes the Orions bearly dented the sub, but the sub tore them up badly - Russian subs have AA you see.
This is when I gave up, decided to cut my losses and let the remaining subs live. The Vikings were late to the battlle and did not get used.
There are some surprising and alarming things about this:
1) As Ruges said - some of these subs are nasty. They can throw missiles at you and you can't touch them. And of course the Russian ones are the worst.
2) The P-3 Orion has so few supplies - just 9 tons between six aircraft. Two shots at the sub and they were done. Other Figher/Bombers carry about five times as many supplies.
3) My modded ASROCs have insufficient range to launch from ships against these nasty targets.
4) I don't have any air-dropped ASW missiles. I modded and used some in previous games, but now I can't find the design anywhere. I think that it was an air-launched Sea Lance...
The Viking has even less supply per aircraft than the Orion. Maybe I better split/merge both units types to build them up more.