Through almost 900 hours of playing Cold Waters, almost all of it with DotMod, here are a few things they don't tell you about Cold Waters w/ DotMod

Launching a torpedo adds roughly a 20 db spike to your noise profile.

If enemy sub does not have you on their sonar, but they are at -15, and you launch a torpedo, they would have detected you because your 20 db spike puts you temporarily at +5, which means they detected your "launch transient", but not you directly. However, they do now have your bearing.

Note that the 20 db figure is only a "rule of thumb" and should not be taken as an exact number as it is highly dependent on context and conditions.

This can be used to help you decide whether to shoot now, wait some more, or open some distance between you and the contact.

When you play a campaign, you will be given a LOT of missions by the HQ. What they don't tell you, is you only need to destroy 50% of the targets, when it comes to hitting an enemy fleet or convoy.

WARNING: Does NOT apply to TLAM strike, or commando Insertion. (Originally I stated it doesn't apply to final SSBN mission, but one player in the comments here stated that it *does* work... He needed to kill 2 boomers, he managed to kill 1, and still got mission successful. )

For example, let's say you are tasked with stopping an American convoy heading to UK. There are four freighters and three escorts.

You only need to sink TWO of the freighters (and none of the escorts) for HQ to consider your mission a success.

If there were three freighters than you need to sink two as well. Remember, you have to meet or beat 50%.

Escorts do NOT count toward that goal. They do add to your tonnage total, which may be important for your medals and rank promotions.

SPECIAL NOTE WHEN TARGETING ENEMY BATTLEGROUP: You can just damage the biggest ship in the battlegroup, whether it's the Nimitz-class carrier or the Kirov-class battlecruiser, instead of sinking half of the ships. This is confirmed. I was able to put a 65-73 into the Nimitz. Didn't sink her, but she ended as "damaged" (sank a couple of her escorts, mostly by accident) and ran out of torpedoes. GLAVCOM was happy, so even damage counts as destroyed for land war purposes.

While playing a campaign, you sometimes get orders to go back to base to rearm. You ONLY get that order if your total number of weapons and decoys onboard is fewer than your torpedo tubes.

For example, if you have 10 torpedo tubes (like Soviet Foxtrot-class) and you have 10 or more torpedoes and decoys onboard (4 antiship, 4 antisub, 2 decoys), you will be issued a different mission, rather than go home and get more torpedoes, never mind you don't have NEARLY enough to do the job. But if you only have 9 or fewer torpedoes and decoys... you will be ordered to go home, get more weapons, then be issued a mission upon your arrival.

The weapon count *does* include cruise missiles like the TLAM and TASM for the NATO, and Granit for the PACT forces. Therefore, I personally never carry missiles unless I have been assigned a Strike mission (or the Soviet equivalent), then I run home, get the missiles and go back out again.

So if you are right on the edge of going home, you *may* want to consider expending a few more weapons to bring you below the "go home" threshold, rather than be sent on another mission with a difficult or impossible situation.

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This brings up an interesting discussion... Is it better, for the NATO 2000 Campaign, to take the Seawolf (8 tubes, but no VLS) vs Los Angeles Flight III (4 tubes, but with VLS?)

For the purpose of the equation above, VLS tubes are not counted as "torpedo tubes"

IMHO, I would take the Seawolf, because on the TLAM strike missions, they will give you time to go back to base, get the missiles, then go back out. Having TLAMs onboard, IMHO, is NOT an advantage, due to low time pressure for the TLAM missions. It just means you carry 8 fewer torpedoes.

NOTE: TLAM strike missions WILL eventually expire, so don't dawdle either.

Let's say you're in a campaign, and in your way are like 6 red contacts and you don't have enough weapons to destroy all of them. If you turn the other way, you'll probably miss the mission window. What will you do?

You may want to take a chance on being able to disengage very early, esp. if you chose to meet the contact at maximum distance of 25km AND you are using DotMod and added another 7k to 8k yards to the spawn distance (under options).

Often, you are just so far from the nearest contact, you can hit ESC immediately and disengage, and thus never having to fight it, or spent a lot of time trying to disengage.

And once you escape from that contact, it disappears from the map, and you don't have to worry about it ever again.

In Cold Waters with DotMod's Soviet 1984 Campaign, you not only have to accumulate prestige to afford a better submarine (or ship), you also need promotions to qualify for certain submarines, but the promotion criteria was not explained.

Turns out all you need are medals. Below are the ranks, and the medals required to get them.

Kapitan-Leytenant (0)
Kapitan 3rd rank (2)
Kapitan 2nd rank (5)
Kapitan 1st Rank (8)
Kontr-Admiral (16)

So how do you get the medals? Three ways:

By "Patrol Tonnage" (tonnage you scored between port visits), specifically, at 10K tons, 25K tons, 50K tons, 75K tons, 100K tons, 125k tons, 150k tons, and 200k tons.

By "Cumulative Tonnage" (total tonnage you've sunk in this campaign), 100k tons, 250k tons, 500k tons, 750k tons, 1 million tons.

By number of missions you've survived: 3, 6, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 45

The cumulative tonnage and mission survived are combined into a single set of 9 medals. You get the first three by simply surviving the required number of missions, but the later ones require both missions survived and the matching cumulative tonnage.

The patrol tonnage has its own set of 8 medals.

To summarize: kill enemy ships, the bigger the better. Freighters are best: they are big, and they don't shoot back.

If you are relatively conservative in your tactics, you may not achieve a lot of kills, and thus, not received some of the tonnage medals

If you've played the Soviet 1984 Campaign, you probably experienced what I call "free roam mission", where you're told you can go anywhere, just kill convoys and big warships anywhere you want.

What they don't tell you is they actually have a very special target in mind. This is a special American freighter that is so special, it's NOT ESCORTED. It's the super-fast 30 kt cruising Algol-class FSS (Fast Sealift Ship) The ship is capable of even faster, possibly in excess of 33 kt in an emergency. In Cold Waters, it cruises at 30 kt which makes interception almost impossible.

One of these is spawned when you get the mission, and it will arrive west of England in a couple days game time, heading straight to Portsmouth.

You'd have special bragging rights when you managed to intercept one of these.

The Mk 48 torpedo has a range of almost 40/50 km in game, making it one of the longest ranged torpedoes. The Soviet 65-73 wakehomer is the only torpedo with longer range, not counting flying torpedoes like the Vodopad, Vjuga, or Vjuga-65.

With a Mk 48 torpedo, you should launch from as far as possible, with as long of a dogleg turn as possible, to reduce any retaliatory torpedo's chance of coming at you directly, to take advantage of its almost ridiculously long range (if left in transit mode). You can conduct torpedo attacks at distance of 20-30 km, giving enemies no chance of shooting back.

In fact, you can often shoot before you achieve 95% solution, as long as you reach 95% before the torpedo reaches the target area to start final homing.

And remember, the torpedo has its own sonar, which links back to you via the wire. So you can use it as a remote sensor. A very expensive one, but one that may prevent you from getting torpedoed.

I've been told by a trusted source that I was wrong: killing whales is NOT a war crime.

So if they show up in your scenarios, feel free to use them as a meat shield.

I hope you find these "secrets" of Cold Waters (with DotMod) interesting and perhaps, useful for your next sortie. Keep on sailing!

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