Article by: Lurker hlb3

“Run Silent, Run Deep, the Campaign” (RSRDC) is a major rewrite of the campaign layers of SH4 and is designed to overcome the following major “stock” campaign problems:

`The various stock “battle” layers (i.e. BurmaJawa.mis, BattleOfMidway.mis, BattleofGuadalcanal.mis, etc) are sub-standard, not only from a ship content point of view but also from a track generation point of view and in my view completely un-reliable from a game play point of view. The reason for this is that these layers are written in a “Scripted” format that is completely unreliable when playing in “Career” mode.
`The various Taskforce, Convoy, and Merchant layers that are total devoid of reality.
`The mission objectives are sub-standard and need a major rewrite
`The Special missions are also sub-standard and need work.

To solve these problems RSRDC does the following:

Item1: All “battle” layers have been rewritten from scratch, using ‘Pseudo Random track’ generation. A ‘Pseudo Random tracks is a “random generated” track file that is generates only “once” and along with “hand edited” changes that are not supported by the SH4MissionEditor, will ensure no matter when you start a campaign, the tracks will generate where and when they are supposes to.

Now for the downside of this format, you can’t set the formation to the historically correct layout.

During all the testing I have conducted using this format, the reliability of correct track generation when and where they are historically suppose to be, far out weighs the fact that there isn’t a plane guard “DD” 2000 yards astern of the carrier.

Item2: Using the ‘SH4 Batch Mission Editor v0.4’ and custom script files, ships within the various layers have been recreated and the routes they travel have been change to have zigzags and various speeds. One of the key item is there is virtually nothing left of the stock layers The recreation of the ships within each layer is more realistic for that time of the war, i.e. your not going to see 4 Yamato in the same TF in
1943.

Item3: Every Patrol and Sink Objective file has been rewritten from scratch and now provides more detail information to execute the mission.

Item4: All Stock Special Ops missions have been disabled. New special operations missions are based of actual patrol logs.

Since a rewrite of this size will take months to complete, RSRDC will be released in Phases, the current release ( Phase I ) will cover 7 Dec 1941 to 30 June 1942 in the central Pacific, 7 Dec 1941 to 30 Sept 1943 in the North Pacific, and 7 Dec 1941 to 1 March 1943 in the South Pacific.
Phase II will upgrade the Center Pacific to 7 Dec 1941 to 1 June 1944, and South Pacific 7 Dec 1941 to 1 June 1944.

Phase III will upgrade all theaters to the end of the War.

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