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since the location is busy, you always have something on approach so you can easily intercept.
few missions away from the rank 2 tonnage blueprint you can use to switch into the IID which eliminates the fuel issues ..for the most part.
You could also try the coastline between Hartlepool and London
Even managd to get the 40k+ award with the II-A there. Had enough luck that the two ships that you can gun down without fear where docked british tanker. So I used the AA-Gun to sink the 20000 tons. Used 3 Eels to sink three docked british freighters and then on my way out of the harbour with 2 Eels left I ran into an incomming convoi with 1 tanker and some freighters. Used my last two Eels to sink the tanker and one freighter. Sunk ~42000 tons.
First thing you should do is:
Every time you get a message from another sub about a ship/convoy sighting immediately go to your map and put a pin in the square that it mentioned, the more precise the better, but just putting it in the general vicinity is fine.
Within the next 30 minutes to an hour go ahead and draw lines connecting your various pins keeping in mind that they had to have left from a port and that their final destination is also a port.
This will allow you to have a very visual and visceral sense of exactly where the highways are that the merchant traffic travels on. Just like aircraft, they don't freeball it, they're either on an established road or they aren't there at all.
Next, to help you in finding some prey I can tell you right off the bat the best place to find convoys and targets in general is along Britain's eastern coast (if you are between 1939 and the point in 1940 when Germany takes all of France (signified by your team controlling Brest and Lorient ports).
The moment you can switch to those ports, go ahead and do so. From that point on, continue always marking contact locations radioed to you and rather than the east coast you can spend most of your time instead on the following patrol:
just west of the the entrance to the english channel (known to the brits as the "Western Approaches" and patrol between there as your southernmost waypoint and the entirety of the water between ireland and GB, stop as you get to the open water at the northern most bit and turn around and head back down to western approaches. There are constantly convoys traveling that passage both to go to destinations on the western coast and as a short cut on their way to the Channel.
Plus, the water being so penned in there makes it almost impossible for you to miss any convoys when they are present.
Finally, remember, at all times to be using a dive schedule for your boat. you should be diving for 6 hours at a time, surfacing for 2-3 and doing that continuously. This will maximize your chances of picking up distant hydrophone contacts and can be set to be automated via the dive schedule.
Make sure if youre using that sort of more intense dive schedule that you keep your speed set to third one down from the highest. if you don't, your batteries will never charge sufficiently and you could accidentally end up with everyone dead from hypoxia.
I guarantee if you do the above you will never worry about finding targets again. And it's not a gameish exploit, those routes and paths are historically true to real life. As the war goes on, that second route will start to be too heavily patrolled by aircraft with radar and you'll likely want to change it instead to be along irelands west coast instead.
But at around the time you'll find yourself having to do that, brit convoys have also decided that that waterway is just too heavily patrolled by uboats and they will be making the same change to irelands west coast as you. So you'll basically just be following your prey like a tuna fisherman.
North Sea for me is full of merchant traffic, but it is a larger area to keep a eye on so things will easily slip by.
For 1939, I tend to focus around the western side of the North Sea and work down along south Eastern coast of the Britain, typically come back from each patrol with 4-5 freighter/tanker kills, depending if I had to launch a extra torpedo at something or not.
I'm not sure if it's tied to the game month or something that gets forced by the tonnage war campaign milestone progression but I've noticed by November 1939 with the tonnage war campaign at phase 3, a lot more merchants are now functioning in convoys.
Which on one hand makes it even easier to spot them at a distance using the hydrophone but also means picking off juicy targets isn't so straight forward as it was earlier on.
One thing I will suggest if you're finding it hard to identify targets, stop trying to find targets with visual spotting. Perhaps it improves later on, I don't know, but early on visual spotting of targets when on patrol is utterly pointless.
Set your boat on a dive schedule of 2-3 hours dived, then 3-4 hours on surface, and schedule your radio operator around that dive schedule so they're on watch for part of the dive and part of the surfaced period, then give your radio operator higher priority on hydrophone than radio.
Once you're on your desired patrol route, this then allows you to just set your dive orders to 'schedule' mode, and as you cruise along your patrol route your boat will automatically dive, spend a few hours searching on hydrophone and then surface at which point your radio operator will automatically switch to the radio to decrypt any pending radio transmissions, then take a short nap and come back on duty whilst you're in the process of your next dive and immediately resume hydrophone detection.
Following this setup, I find freighters pretty frequently, especially once my radio operator has a few levels and has improved hydrophone range and detection skills, as at that point they are able to listen for targets across a entire grid cell no matter the weather conditions.
The only time I use visual spotting is when I've already tracked a target, closed in on a intercept course and now know I'm within 5-10km of the target and want to make visual contact to start plotting my target calculations in preparation for my strike.
For using visual spotting for actually finding targets in the vast empty void that is the ocean.... I would say you're better off just launching torpedoes blindly in any direction lol.
My dive routine is done at night time as a result since visual ID is impractical in the dark. Two 5 hours of diving with an hour of surfacing in between
Because this game is at the end of the day.... a game.
It has it own rules and figures for the actual functionality of systems that are based on hardcoded math calculations that simply weren't the case in real life.
For example, in real life I would imagine hydrophone detection was as much operator interpretation as it was based on the actual source of the sound and the environmental conditions themselves.
Give a room full of operators the same input and you'd likely get variance in what was actually being reported, with a few fringe way out there interpretations that drastically differed.
In this game, every operator interprets things the same and has the same base range effectiveness, which can just get a prefixed % improvement through skills.
Each sound also has a set absolute value for its probability of being detected.
Those two sides then just get run through a computer algorithm to decide how things roll with each check.
The book(s) you read were likely making that suggestion because they were fully aware of the human element of it and that leaving things up to personal interpretation luck wasn't a good approach that would return a higher average of positive results.
But there isn't that human element in this game when it comes to the hydrophone and your crew doing detection. They're absolute value robots always going through the exact same algorithm calculations with every detection check.
The game doesn't explain this very clearly, but you only have to dip once into the patrol sector to start the mission, after that it's up to you which path to victory.
True, though it becomes pretty clear when the main patrol objective is flagged as completed regardless to the distance you've actually covered once you meet the tonnage sunk secondary objective.
On a side note though, I would still say if you're having a hard time finding a single target whilst patrolling 2,000km within the assigned region, then that's a indication of something up with the approach being used to find targets.
Which circles back to my post of a basic approach to use for detecting merchants along a patrol route that works at least in the early years: https://steamcommunity.com/app/494840/discussions/0/4509877684742090018/#c4509877893258469422
I don't think I've ever gone a entire 2,000km patrol regardless of if the patrol region is the North Sea or closer to the British coastline and not detected at least 2 merchant ships, let alone 1.