The most basic problem most people have with entering into the '68 campaign is simply recognizing that different equipment necessitates different tactics to take advantage of your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses.

In '68, you are much less capable of detecting the enemy, and your weapons are far less capable of hitting the enemy, while at the same time, your enemies will be deaf. This means that you need to play a far more "aggressive" game than you ever could in the '84 campaign.

In '84, you're perfectly capable of detecting every ship in an enemy fleet from 15 KYDs away, and launching attacks from outside detection range, sinking them all without them ever knowing you were there, but getting closer than 7 KYDs is incredibly dangerous. You need to make as little sound as possible unless very far from the enemy.

In '68, both you and the enemy have no towed arrays (and the enemy almost never has aircraft or weapons on surface ship ASW with greater range than RBU 2500s), so you detect enemies much closer to you, and your weapons require you be much closer. Ranges in the game overall just get cut by half (if not a third), with "knife-fights" being the order of the day.

(Note how, in this image, the "Signature" panel says I'm still not being picked up on passive sonar by the most advanced submarine you'll commonly encounter, even at 1.2 KYDs. I'd be totally obvious in active, but he doesn't go active until AFTER I fire my first torpedo.)

(He did get a shot off on me, though, so that was a close one.)

In short, you're in far less danger in '68 than you would be at the same range in '84, but you need to do things that would be suicidal in '84 to succeed in '68.

This isn't the same as "recklessness", however. I suggest you make very heavy use of the "Signatures" panel, and keep an eye glued to what signiture the enemy is picking up. (And make sure you identify all enemy ships manually unless you're spotting them with the periscope so you get the data about enemy listening capacity.)

In fact, after I became comfortable with '68, I could go several missions in a row taking seemingly absurdly risky maneuvers without ever being fired upon at all. I was definitely detected, but I could prevent the enemy from ever being capable of firing back, since they are permanently stuck on evasive maneuvers.

By far the biggest complaint that people have about the '68 campaign is that the Mk. 37 is difficult to use. They expect it to behave like the Mk. 48, and that they can simply fire it in the general direction of an enemy from a great distance away, let the wire break, completely forget about it, and get notified ten minutes later that an enemy just exploded.

That doesn't happen with the Mk. 37.

So now, repeat after me:

The first rule of Mk. 37 club is that you keep your wires.

The second rule of Mk. 37 club is that YOU KEEP YOUR WIRES!

The Mk 37 will not outrun and overtake any non-merchant surface ship, and even Novembers can outrun them. You will not sink ships just relying upon your torpedoes to outrun them, you must use tactics and cunning to force the enemy ships into a bad position where they aren't capable of using their greater speed to simply outrun the torpedo.

This sounds difficult, but it isn't. It takes practice, but with a little experience in learning the quirks of the enemy AI, you will learn how to consistently trick enemy ships into sailing directly into your torpedoes.

To do this, you need your wires so that you can maneuver your torpedoes manually. Wireless torpedoes are dumb torpedoes, and Mk 37s are also slow torpedoes. Slow, dumb torpedoes are torpedoes that will never get a kill. Consider any torpedo to be a miss as soon as you lose the wire. (Even a miss has its uses, however, as we'll discuss later.)

The most basic strategy for scoring hits with a torpedo slower than your enemy is the "pincer attack".



What you want to do is make an enemy aware of at least one torpedo, which they will steer to avoid, only to run into another torpedo they didn't realize was already on their other side. This is, again, why you need wires to manually control your torpedo.

In a more realistic setting, an easy way to make the enemy aware of one "chaser" torpedo, but not another, is to set the "chaser" to active homing, and activate the "chaser" torpedo while the other "trap" torpedo is set to passive homing and kept inactive until after the target has steered directly into the path of the "trap" torpedo.

In the image above, you see three torpedoes are used in the pincer maneuver against the Moskva. I had fired three torpedoes off to the right of the Moskva, set to run shallow and active. (Good thing, too, because my second torpedo had its wire break at launch, so I had a third as a spare.) After launch, I then changed the settings on the two torpedoes whose wires I kept to be passive homing, and changed their activation point.

If you are unaware of the mechanics of inactive torpedoes, you can alter their activation point: After selecting a still-inactive torpedo, left-click on its activation square to be able to move the activation point, then right-click where you want to reset it. Be aware that you cannot change torpedo depth until after activation - if you're firing upon surface targets from down deep, you need to activate a torpedo far enough away to give it a chance to climb up to the surface.


Ideally, you can cause an enemy to be coming directly at you, with torpedoes bracketing it from the right and left, so that there is no direction they can turn without ramming into one torpedo or the other. Deliberately throwing one torpedo off to the side (which will be a miss) like in this example can trigger the AI to go into its "sail away from the torpedo at full speed" routine, which is actually fairly predictable, meaning that if you control when it sees your torpedo, you can control where it runs after seeing it.

Fortunately, controlling when it sees your torpedo is easy, thanks to the fact that the AI cheats.

At least so far as 1.06 goes, the AI seems preternaturally aware of when your torpedo activates, and can detect a passive torpedo even within its baffles at ranges outside where it will detect a still-inactive torpedo in front of it, completely regardless of the speed or sonar capabilities of the ship in question. This, incidentally, means that "stalking" a ship and firing torpedoes into its baffles is useless, because the AI will cheat and hear that, anyway.

(Note, this detects torpedo activation, not just active homing on a torpedo. Even a passive homing torpedo is instantly detected the instant it activates and starts searching, as evidenced by the almost immediate switching on of active sonar and going to flank, even when a torpedo activates in its baffles.)

Therefore, the trick to using your torpedoes effectively is to let your "trap" run on ahead quietly while guiding it before it activates by clicking and moving its activation box. When you have your two torpedoes positioned on opposite ends of an enemy, you let one activate (or do it manually - default key "4") so that the enemy reacts and turns to run in the opposite direction of where your torpedo is headed... and once that happens, you activate your "trap" torpedo.

Two at a time, "Chasers" behind, "Traps" ahead, nowhere to run.

Also, keep in mind that keeping your wires requires paying careful attention to keeping your ship pointed in the proper direction. In v1.06, there was almost nothing that matters so far as keeping your wires past the actual launch besides keeping the wires within a 60 degree arc of your bow, but from 1.07 onward, speed actually will alter the wire break chances. (In 1.06, you can actually "chase" your torpedoes, running along after them towards the enemy to keep pace with an enemy trying to escape.)

As of v1.15, you can generally keep your wires no matter what direction your bow is pointing, so long as you keep your submarine level and refrain from going above 10 knots. To do this, if you are changing depth, do so manually by using the ballast keys, not using the set depth function, as these will dive using the planes, which will cut your wires. If you are targetted by attack (that is an actual threat), do evade torpedoes first, and worry about kills later, but submarine skippers should keep their cool and recognize when threats are sailing well above them.

One last thing: A torpedo with a lost wire when you shoot it is usually a miss, but if you can get a torpedo on a wire to force a fast surface ship into an evasion circle, feel free to cut the wire (if firing upon two ships at once) and leave it circling that target (they have 20 minutes of battery life), and launch another torpedo at that same target, hoping to pincer the target with a second torpedo.


The setup - shooting two torpedoes wide (this also diverts return fire away from me).

You've activated my trap torpedo.

Wire-guide these in. Torpedoes normally aim for the propeller, not the bow, so manually control them to aim for where they'll be, not where they are.

Damage to ships slows them down significantly...

So that the chaser torpedoes you aren't controlling can hit.

Next, we'll cover the most important skill for survival: Preventing the enemy from firing back accurately.

Perhaps even more than the previous section, this is a matter of understanding and exploiting the quirks of the enemy AI to maximum advantage.

You see, enemy AI will put self-preservation over all else. [s]If an active torpedo is close and heading their way, they will not even attempt to fire back, instead being taken over by their "torpedo evasion" AI routine.[/s] As of v1.15, this is no longer the case, and the enemy will launch a "panic shot" down the approach vector of a detected torpedo. This complicates things, but not by too much.

On the other hand, Mk. 37s are weak. It takes two torpedoes to kill almost anything but a Whiskey or Poti, and it takes three or even more on cruisers. As soon as those torpedoes disappear (by hitting them), their normal AI takes back over, and if they care capable of hearing you, they WILL launch a revenge torpedo on you, even if they're a mere Echo-class that normally does nothing but try to run and hide.

This means the key to survival is keeping fish in the water to keep them distracted and running noisy. Also, since enemy panic shots are fired on the bearing of the torpedo, not you, and are often fired without regard for depth (especially amusing when fired from surface ships), you can easily evade return fire by setting up your shots a little beforehand.

You kept the wires, right? RIGHT?

One simple way of evading fire is if you are fighting in deep water like the open Atlantic - get on the depth of your target, fire torpedoes while still unheard, then drop to 950 feet (through ballast alone - planes cut wires) so that return fire swim above you. (Do use the set course tool, however.
It's easy to forget to reset the rudder and swim in circles. Just pay attention to messages of "now passing ___ feet" so you don't pass crush depth.) Torpedoes have a limited search band, so staying low enough means never being detected no matter if they were fired accurately. Calmly sip your beverage of choice as the enemy torpedoes sail well overhead.

Note that while I'm manually aiming the Mk37 to get ahead of the circling Poti, the return torpedo (in the sonar map on the bottom left) sails well above my submarine that is down deep.

The other tactic is to simply "dog-leg" your torpedoes (you kept the wires, right?) by clicking the box that shows where they activate, repositioning it, and right clicking. Change the angle of attack, and enemies will fire return fire in the wrong direction. (Make sure you're changing course and changing depth after firing, as well.)


Here, I was extra-safe, because I dog-legged the torpedoes, changed course to head more northwardly, and ran deep. Most of the panic torpedoes are well south of my position, and even the one that comes close is far enough away that steering north gets me out of range, and I'm fairly sure I'm below it's search band, as well.

Here's a good example of letting the enemy have a breather (even of a few seconds) between shots: Hitting an Echo, and having it fire back at a range where I can barely manage to dodge at all.
Give them an inch,
and they launch a torpedo through it.
Keep up the offense, and they will stay on defense.

Keep in mind, even panicking Krestas and Moskvas can still hear you down deep with their active sonars while making flank if they sail directly overhead, and RBUs don't require slowing down, and WILL ruin your day. (I've actually sunk about three times more often to RBUs from nearby capital ships than torpedoes.)

As a continuation of this point, reload your torpedo tubes with another Mk. 37 immediately after it no longer has a wire. Any time you are in danger, you will be tossing around torpedoes like party favors, so make sure you are always reloading until those tubes are full. (Note: reloading tubes cancels ultra-quiet, and ultra-quiet pauses reloads. Sometimes, it can pay to stay quiet, but generally, reloading quickly is better. Just watch the signatures screen to see if the closest enemies have anything close to a positive number.)

This is proper procedure for when you're not sure if you'll get a kill: Have a torpedo ready to launch the moment you get a hit. Don't give the enemy the chance to slow down and fire back, keep them worried about the second volley the instant the first one hits.

This, in turn, leads to the next big point:

The objective is not to sink everything. The objective is to sink your target. (In fact, you only seem to need to sink most of your targets, as it counts as a "success" if you let one merchant out of three get away, they say it was "good enough" and give you credit for a win!) In '68, since it often takes three torpedoes to sink even a single target, and you can, depending upon ship, only carry about 20 torpedoes, you need to choose your targets.

This is why it's perfectly fine to fire a torpedo to miss, so long as it neutralizes the threat of a target.

In this situation, I'm hunting three convoy ships to the east. I've sunk two escorts, and scared the third off... and that's all I need to do. You don't really need to sink escorts, you just need to chase them off. A ship with a Mk. 37 on its tail will run for 10-15 minutes at flank speed directly away from that torpedo, and that will take it miles away from your ship, so that by the time it returns (and it will spend the rest of the mission circling where you were when you fired the torpedo that scared it off), you're miles away, sinking your actual target.

Sink escorts with pincer attacks for fun, alone. Your job in attacks on surface ships (which nearly always means "sink a merchant ship convoy") is to get as close as possible before anyone knows you're there, sink or scare off the guard dogs, then hunt down the hens before they have a chance to get very far.

Surface hunts can basically be broken up into four parts:
1. Identify the targets as soon as you start. Always start by closing to 10 KYDs, rig for ultra-quiet. and get to periscope depth immediately. Raise ESM and Periscope, and when you get a contact, be sure to select the target, and find it on your periscope.

Unmarked targets will not show up on your periscope outside of 15 KYDs, but you can still "mark" them, and get data on them. (The actual range is based upon weather status, but I find 15 KYD is a general ballpark cutoff point.) Marking them will cause them to pop into existence after a few seconds. Merchants do not have radar to give ESM data to you, so you'll likely need to blindly use the "mark" button on your periscope in the area between the escorts until you find them.

To know where to look, just get ESM data on the bearings of the escorts, mark them, and you'll find they form a triangle or square around the convoy they protect, so you'll know the search area. Merchants tend to be evenly spaced, and there are typically 3 or 4 in a convoy for amphibious assaults, while "sink the tender" missions are 1 or 2 target ships.

2. Get as close as possible without being heard. I keep my eye on the "Signature" page. That, and a check at the ambient noise in the "Conditions" page are your indicators for how close you can get before the action starts.

You want the enemy sailing towards you while you sit nice and quiet as they swim straight into your waiting torpedoes. If the enemy starts on the other side of you, you can either sail deep and fast and far away to get ahead of them (which means being patient before the battle starts), or you can start the battle letting the merchants get a head start on you (which means being patient chasing them down after the action's over).

3. The action phase. The better you are at setting this up, the less action there actually is. If you do it properly, nobody should fire a weapon at you, and it's over in one salvo of torpedoes.

Here, I was within 3 KYDs of the escort before I open fire, scattering the flock. Note I'm never in danger of being RBU'd, even with him getting within 2 KYDs, because he's too busy running.

Switching my torpedoes around, whether I hit the Riga or not (I don't) doesn't matter, I've scared it off.

4. The Wolfpack in the Henhouse: Now I'm free to run the merchants down with impunity, as even cavitating at periscope depth, nobody's around to hear me.

That last part is important: Don't waste time on stealth when it isn't needed. Once the guard dogs are scared, just make flank and cavitate away! Speed is more important than stealth, and you don't want to waste time coming back up to periscope depth carefully each time you need to reassess the position of the targets.

Likewise, feel free to stick up your radar mast once you're over 20 KYDs away from the point where the action phase took place. Merchants don't give off ESM signatures, so you'll likely need it once they get too far away. The closer you got, and the faster the action phase was over with, the less time the merchants have to get away.

Merchants will basically always travel in a straight line at maximum speed once spooked. If you get any data on them after they've set their course, you can just look at their heading from the last time you spotted them, and take a look at the relative speed to figure out about where they should be on the map. If you've just sunk one merchant, and are looking for the next, and know it was on a heading about 10 degrees further south, and travels at about 90% of the speed of the merchant you just sank, you can triangulate in an estimate of where that ship should be.

Note, however, that merchant ships will "bounce off" land, and when they get to shallow water, they turn around and head off in an unpredictable locaiton, so try to look ahead on the map and head off those that might run into an island and turn around first so you don't completely lose them.

As a final note: Go for the Komsomols first. They're much faster than the other merchants, and will be by far the biggest nuissance in running down, so make sure you get them before they can open up too much of a lead on you.

Due to the weaker sonar and lack of towed arrays, in '68, ambient noise is far more important than in '84.

Always, always, always make your second act (after "rig for ultra-quiet") in a mission to check your "Conditions" page.

Ambient noise, listed in the top-center of the page, is one of the most significant modifiers on how easily you will be detected or detect your enemies, right after your speed or emissions.

Ambient noise ranges from a low of 70 dBs (hear a pin drop a mile away) to 115 dBs (sitting under a jet aircraft engine).

At 100+ dBs, passive sonar is almost totally useless, and you will need to rely entirely upon periscope or - even more dangerously - active sonar against submarines.

Here, in a monstrous 114 dB storm, I can't hear a noisy merchant, even at 4 KYDs, but even going fast and shallow is inconsequential, because nobody will ever hear me, either. I can only hunt by periscope (and radar), but I'm also nearly immune to detection.

Conversely, at 75 dBs or less, your sounds carry a far greater distance, and you might need to behave more like an '84 mission. It will be far harder to get your torpedoes close to the enemy without them hearing them, first, so extra trickery will be necessary.

The essential mechanic is that your own ship emits a noise of 130-140 dBs (when you are running quiet), but this dissipates (subtracts) a dB every few dozen yards you are from anyone who might hear you. So long as you are far enough away that this dissipation drops the audible noise of your submarine below the ambient noise, you're impossible to hear above the noise of the ocean, itself.

Because of this, every dB of ambient noise is basically a few more dozen yards you can get closer to your target without being heard, but at the same time, it's a few more dozen yards you have to get closer to hear your target.

This is further modified by the sound of your own, and your enemy's movement. Sailing faster causes more water to wash over the surface of your bow, creating more noise that interferes with your passive sonar, and the same problem afflicts enemy subs. Moving faster makes you noisier and deafer at the same time, altering the balance of who will hear whom first.

Here, at 99 dBs, I didn't hear a slow-moving Victor I on passive until it was within 2 KYDs!

A key point to remember is that, when looking at their signature page, the enemy will only actually detect you (and you will only detect an enemy) when they get a SNR of +10 on the signature page. However, once detected, you and they can keep tracking a target until the SNR drops to 0 or less. You can take advantage of this by nursing your speed and depth while chasing a target to keep it just barely in the single-digits when you try to close in on a target, as you'll keep your solution on a target so long as that SNR stays positive. Likewise, feel free to ignore the active pings of the enemy until they get up to +8 before feeling you need to fire torpedoes upon them.

Speaking of active sonar, its effectiveness depends upon the angle of the target ship relative to the pinging ship. Therefore, always keep your nose pointed towards any nearby active pinging ships to keep their returns small enough that you blend into the ambient. (It'll also help you keep your wires when you get close enough that you need to start shooting.)

The layer is a difference in ocean water temperature and salinity caused by the fact that, like air, hot water rises over cold water, but unlike air, which is warmed by being near the sun-baked ground below, the water is warmed near the surface, so water stays stratified. The differences in temperature and salinity caused by the layer alter the way that sound travels, bending sound like a prism. Also like a prism, if the top half of the layer is bending light upwards and the bottom half of the layer is bending it downwards, there's a wedge of space between what you see in the prism that becomes invisible to you. This is called the 'Shadow Zone', and it is the best place to hide from other ships on the other side of the layer. When facing surface ships, getting just under the layer is your best protection, and you can get absurdly close to targets while going ultra-quiet just under the layer. (Keep in mind, your displayed depth is depth of the bottom of the keel, so "just under" means at least 25 feet under since your sub is not 2-dimensional.) Against submarines, this depends on whether they are above or below the layer.

Inversely, the best places to hear others is periscope depth or as deep as you dare dive (test depth and ocean floor depth permitting), as the layer bends sound to those locations. This also makes you easier to hear in return, however.

While you can "rack up score" by taking on unnecessary targets, there's little incentive to do so. (Rigas are only 560 tons, anyway, so they hardly impact your tonnage sunk, regardless.) Contrary to popular belief, there's no need to actually fight with enemy patrols. The easiest way to handle such encounters is to simply go to ultra-quiet, (pop up the periscope if being hunted by surface ships), figure out which direction the enemy patrol is going, and just turn around and leave.

Even against actual objectives, you can save yourself a lot of trouble just getting close, sussing out the enemy fleet composition, and firing upon your actual target first so any merchants or SSGs can't get away. Try to get torpedoes close by keeping them unactivated, and launching them from just under or over the layer, as well. Remember that you might want to dive deep after launching (using ballast, not planes) after launching torpedoes to evade return-fire, provided you aren't in danger of being heard and RBU'd.


Sitting just 50' below the layer,

~50' below the layer, I am -18 dBs Active and -31 dBs Passive to the Poti

~100' below the layer, I am -11 dBs Active and -24 dBs Passive to the Poti

300 or more feet below the layer, I am -5 dBs Active and -18 dBs Passive to the Poti

(Note the images are in reverse order, so it was further away when I was deeper, meaning the differences in sound are actually slightly better than this shows.)

Keep in mind that an enemy ship needs at least 10 dBs to actually identify your ship, while it can keep tracking you after identifying you as long as you have positive dBs to them. If they're only barely hearing you, and you weren't already, try just going ultra-quiet before doing anything else to screw up their lock on you.

Active sonar is dependent upon your facing at/away or perpindicular to the target. Either point directly at or away from an enemy to avoid active sonar if they are getting close to pinging you. Also, if things are close, you don't have to go 5 knots (there's no towed array to screw up by stopping), so feel free to stop or even go in reverse. (Remember: Set Course doesn't work properly when going in reverse.) If you're so close you can't afford to turn around, just throw it in reverse, and manually control the rudder to keep pointing at the enemy (like in the images above) - just remember that going in reverse means the rudder works backwards, so turn it right to go left.

If you're facing something that isn't your target, or have already sunk your target, there's no requirement to fight anything else there, and you can feel free to just turn around and leave under cover of the layer. Don't be too afraid of an enemy 6-10 KYDs out to just spin around and make 10 knots away from them, and if you're further away, do 15 knots if you're deep enough not to cavitate.

You don't always need to carefully set up pincer attacks to get a good shot on a target. All you really need is to have the enemy come at you head-on, and it becomes vastly more difficult for them to dodge or outrun a torpedo.

Just take advantage of how they're much less likely to hear an unactivated torpedo, and keep it in front of the ship, and they have no chance to use their capacity to outrun your torpedo.

Another trick is to get them into an evasion circle. A torpedo they don't notice until it's too close will trigger a tight circle maneuver. This is unusual, since they can easily outrun the torpedo, but the torpedo can easily out-turn them, and if you actually get a Mk. 37 close enough that it triggers the turning maneuver, they are almost guaranteed to be hit.

If you're close to enemy submarines, this is a common AI loop they'll get stuck in. Just be careful to keep them pressured by torpedoes so they don't fire back.

Likewise, just because you don't get to pincer one ship (like the first/northern Kresta, here) doesn't mean that you can't reuse your weapons to keep attacking a different enemy:
Note that I keep firing torpedoes as that northern Kresta comes back around to re-engage. The best defense is an unrelenting offense! Keep firing torpedoes, and don't give them a chance to retaliate!

Ironically, having an enemy turn around and outrun your torpedoes is a great way to make them incapable of dodging your next torpedo, because their AI tells them to turn around and make flank speed directly back for where they last heard you after shaking off your torpedo... which also makes them quite deaf to the next torpedo heading straight at them.

Just remember that your torpedo might still miss, and have another one ready. This pair of images illustrates the situation quite well:
Take advantage of the enemy's haste and plant a weapon where he won't notice it until it's difficult to dodge... but if he dodges, anyway, just fire again. Remember: The best defense is an unrelenting offense!

Here, the noise from that first fight attracted a second November to come charging at me head-on, forcing another torpedo straight down their throat.

This leads to the next major point that makes '68 different from '84:

It's OK to use your active sonar if you know what you're doing!

When you use your active sonar, it functionally causes you to give off a tremendous amount of noise, like you're cavitating, but only for as long as you stay on active sonar. Since targeting solutions are based upon accumulation over time, and active sonar is easy to quickly turn on and off, this actually makes it viable for a strategy of luring in the enemy in a way that they'll be far less likely to actually find you, and instead come charging in on you too loud to hear you like the two Novembers above did.

All you need to do is give one ping only.

This gives off a bearing, but not enough data for the enemy to feel comfortable firing (at least, unless they were very close, already, but you should try to catch those on passive before trying active), so they'll come charging directly on your bearing so noisy they won't be able to pick up anything except on their active sonar. This means that if you are going slow after giving off that ping, you can hear them coming far further away than they'll hear you. Yes, they'll be coming straight at you to start launching torpedoes at you, but again, if you launch that torpedo and get it close enough to threaten them before they are ready to fire upon you, they'll go into their "torpedo evasion" AI routine before they can fire, and will not attempt to fire again after entering that routine until after your torpedo is no longer a threat.

The same goes for radar: Lure in surface ships by flashing your radar, and even Sverdlovs (which normally flee you, since they lack ASW) will come running.

Yes, it's a risk, but remember, the best defense is an unrelenting offense; bait them into giving away their position by giving away your position, then keep them too busy dodging torpedoes to actually fire upon you.

Even so, this is a strategy of last resort, for hunting down fleeing Echos or Yankees, or baiting a Victor I you just can't find on passive because of high ambient noise. You are going to need to be ready to dodge some surprise torpedoes taking up this strategy.

In some ways harder than convoy-hunting missions, hunting missile submarines can be quite difficult, especially with high ambient noise.

First up, when starting an engagement, make sure to check that bearing where you got a sonar contact at the top of the page. In '68, I ALWAYS close to 10 KYDs, because finding the enemy is hard without doing so. (You'll need to be close to engage them, anyway.)

Once again, as soon as battle starts, rig for ultra-quiet, then check your conditions page. Look at "Ambient Noise" in the top center of the page. 90+ dBs of ambient noise mean you will have a VERY hard time hearing the enemy, and you might need to take extreme measures like using active sonar frequently. At less than 80 dBs of ambient noise, both you and the enemy will hear each other easily, so make sure to stay quiet.

Point directly at the enemy - you have no towed array that will help you, here. You might as well be moving in their direction, and you'll provide the lowest profile for active sonar to bounce off of.

The best places to hear the enemy if there is a layer are either at periscope depth (50 ft) or just above the ocean floor. (Well, as close as is safe to the ocean floor, so about 50 ft above it.) Without a layer, then all depths are basically equal, but being deep lets you get to speed without cavitating, so I prefer to stay deep.

Keep in mind that the faster that you go, the less you are capable of hearing. Go 5 knots for a while, see if you can hear anything (and circle to clear your baffles), and then pick up speed to reposition, realizing you will be deaf while going at speed. (Unless you go active, but going active at flank is just BEGGING for someone to shoot at you, so only do it when hunting down something like a Juliet, which will almost never actually fire upon you.)

In recent patches, the enemy boomers in this era will be protected by 3 or so diesel-electric subs. They're toothless and incapable of dodging, but surprisingly less deaf than their more modern counterparts. Getting close will be difficult without giving yourself away, as they tend to go 8 knots at all times, often away from you unless you're really lucky, and going 10 knots will likely get you heard before you can suss out the Yankee. Try to get as close as you dare without spooking anything off, and then wait at Ultra-quiet to see if you can suss out the Yankee's position. FIRE ON THE YANKEE FIRST it has a 24 knot top speed, which isn't enough to outrun your torpedoes, but you won't find it again while making flank in its direction unless you've hit it at least once. Yankees run deep, so be sure you're searching below the layer, and keep in mind, it takes 3 Mk 37s to sink a Yankee.

Targets that want to stay hidden - like SSBNs and SSGs - will not hunt you down, and will stay hidden. Assume that they will turn and run directly away from you when you go active, like surface merchants run when you spook them. In very noisy conditions, you might need to run down the direction of where you last heard them, or the bearing given to you on the mission start briefing while going active after killing all their escorts to try to find them.

Just remember - those Whiskeys are pathetic, and you can generally just toss a torpedo in their direction and assume it went well. If you're deep enough, they rarely actually send a torpedo down to your level unless they really got a good ping off you, so basically just ignore them and keep your eyes on the prize.

If it's noisy, and you have to use active sonar, keep in mind that the Yankee is going to run the instant it hears you, so you're going to have a very long chase on your hands. Do not waste time with the escorts, you need to get after that Yankee, because it's nearly as fast as you are, and it's going to sail flank speed away from you, so you will never find it again if you stop to play with the distractions.

Again, the best bet is to assume that they fled directly away from you the first time they heard you (they tend to be along the direction of that initial bearing at the encounter briefing), so run along deep at flank speed on time compression, then rig for ultra-quiet and active ping for a while, zig-zagging along the general direction of where you think they may be until you get a contact.

Especially if you are going active sonar, you're going to eventually need to dodge a torpedo.

Brygun has a good comprehensive guide on how to successfully evade torpedoes generally, so for a general guide, you should be sure to read his evasion guide.

Just for the sake of completeness, however, here's a basic crash-course on torpedo evasion that is useful regardless of the time period:

Noisemakers are basically bubble-blowing machines. The bubbles will confuse active homing torpedoes because they block the active sonar, which hides you if you are behind the bubbles, while they confuse passive sonar if it's between you and the torpedo because it's something that makes noise, and passive torpedoes home on noise. Active torpedoes are more easily fooled with noisemakers than passive ones, so if you have trouble with noisemakers defeating your torpedoes, you may want to switch to passive ones. I frequently stick with passive torpedoes just because they're sneakier, but if a passive torpedo ever comes back on you, it's a much larger pain to evade.

First rule of torpedo-dodging club is you keep your propeller facing the torpedo.

Second rule of torpedo-dodging club is YOU KEEP YOUR PROPELLER FACING THE TORPEDO!

Just as the previous sections have demonstrated, a sub facing its torpedo is a dead sub. You cannot outmaneuver the torpedo, so if you're running towards it, you're screwed.

Another key to staying alive is keeping your speed up. If you're making 25 knots and the torpedo only goes 35 knots (like a SET-65), then the battle is basically going at only 10 knots. If you're only doing 5 knots, then the battle is going at 30 knots. You want as much time as possible to bring your giant tubs around. If a torpedo threatens you, you make flank. They probably already could hear you and know where you were when they launched an accurate attack, anyway

Drop your noisemaker when the torpeodes are between a submarine-length and three submarine-lengths from you. Any closer, and they might just swim right through it. Any further away, and they won't immediately go into their countermeasure homing routines, which can limit the effectiveness of the noisemaker.

The noisemaker marker on the minimap happened to blink off right when I took this screenshot, but it's right where the torpedo changes course.

To actually make the noisemaker anything more than a temporary reprieve, you want to get either above or below the search band of a torpedo.

To do this you want the enemy torpedo on your depth (and right behind you) before dropping the noisemaker. This will happen naturally so long as you're making flank away from the enemy torpedo, so don't worry too much about this.

Torpedoes can only "see" somewhere between 400 and 600 feet above or below them. What you want to do is use a noisemaker to confuse the torpedo and force it to swim out to the side to clear the effective area of the noisemaker, at which point you either go full dive or climb to put yourself outside that search depth band by the time it's ready to start looking for you, again. (In the image above, I was deep, evaded shallow, was picked up again because they were passive and I was cavitating, and so dropped another noisemaker and dove to 1000 feet.)

You should also try turning away from the direction the torpedo tries to turn to clear your noisemaker. This is because the torpedo will try circling around your noisemaker to see if it reacquires you. Turning away from the torpedo gives you a few more seconds of diving or climbing to get out of that search depth band.

If you get reacquired, anyway, don't worry, just do the same trick again, but go again deep if you're now shallow, and go shallow if you're now deep. Because you cavitate when going flank shallow, it's not uncommon for a passive torpedo to reacquire when you go shallow to evade.

In '68 in particular, however, you have another great tactic at your disposal against enemy torpedoes. Enemy torpeodes will nearly always be active homing torpedoes.

Passive homing torpedoes home in on noise. Noise depends upon distance, but when a passive torpedo has a choice between targets, it will go for the louder (moving faster/cavitating/closer) target.

Active homing torpedoes home in on the sonar bounce off of metal. When given a choice between targets, they will home in on the broadest chunk of metal they can find. (Like with active sonar from enemy submarines, a broadside provides the largest surface for sonar reflection.)


This means that you can evade enemy torpedoes simply by swimming near a wreck.

Thanks to the typically knife-fight ranges you get into brawls in this game (especially if you lure in several Novembers to the sounds of a single battle or active ping), you typically will fight battles very near enemy wrecks. Just swim right over a wreck or spin around one as close as you dare.

Just be careful - this doesn't work on passive torpedoes. (At least, unless you can trick them into physically slamming into the husk, itself.)

Also note that in shallow water (500 foot depth or shallower), climbing and diving is invalid. All you can do is buy time until you run the torpedo out of battery (or can find a way to make something else eat the torpedo for you).

In anything faster than a Sturgeon, you can make knuckles. Knuckles form when you're going at high speed and slam full rudder one direction or the other. In a Sturgeon, you need to actually go full rudder one direction, then full rudder the other direction to swing around fast enough to actually form a knuckle... and of course, you need to be going flank speed to make a knuckle.

Knuckles are bubbles created by making a void in the water when you push your ship sideways with drastic rudder motion at high speed which then form into a small whirlpool. This functions like a very short-lived noisemaker that you can create for free. (You're limited to 20 noisemakers, but have infinite capacity for knuckles.) Be aware that since knuckles are short-lived, you have to be very careful about the range the enemy torpedo is from you before you create a knuckle. Knuckling has an artificial "cool down" period, so you can only make one every 15 seconds or so, which means that with poor timing, you might make one just barely too far away, and not have enough time to "reload" your knuckle before it's too close to be effective. Try to knuckle only when one to two submarine-lengths away.

If you're pursued by a torpedo in shallow water, the best course of action (besides guiding the torpedo to a wreck) is to make flank away from the torpedo, and knuckle every time the torpedo comes close, forcing it into going around your knuckle, and buying you a little more distance and time to set up the next knuckle. Just keep at it until the torpedo runs out of battery.

An interesting note is that if you form a knuckle close enough, then an active torpedo can become so confused by the knuckle that it thinks it's hitting a ship when it hits the knuckle, and it will detonate right there. That said, I don't think this happens reliably enough to risk letting torpedoes get close enough to try, since if it fails, you risk a torpedo swimming right through your knuckle and hitting you.

As made famous in The Hunt for Red October, and as has happened at least once to nearly every player, it is entirely possible for the torpedoes a submarine launches to circle back and sink them.

As a general rule, I don't recommend going into an engagement deliberately intending to "save torpedoes" by turning the enemy's own torpedoes back on them. Not only does it not work against surface ships at all, but it also goes against the general principle of "unrelenting offense" that keeps your ship safe. A Victor that has a solution upon your ship won't just fire one torpedo, then sit back and see what happens. That Victor will keep firing more and more torpedoes at you. If you were taking your time leading the torpedo around back onto the Victor, he's going to be turning and firing a new torpedo directly at you, causing you to be caught in a pincer attack, with a nearly undodgable torpedo fired at point-blank range directly in your face.

As previously mentioned, luring active torpedoes into other targets is a good idea... so long as they're not capable of actually launching more torpedoes at you while you set it up.

The safest way to turn an enemy's torpedo back on them is to fire a torpedo at them before trying, so that they are too busy dodging that first torpedo to launch the second one that catches you in a pincer. (Remember - you need to be at 5 knots to fire a Mk 37! Don't blow yourself up launching one at 10 knots!)

The actual act of getting a torpedo to home back in on your enemy runs on a similar principle to basic torpedo evasion, but instead of always swimming directly away from a chasing torpedo, you try to guide it to the depth of your opponent, and try to gradually curve the chase back towards the attacker as much as possible. When you get within the detection range of the torpedo (about 1 KYD for '68 Soviet torpedoes), you do your typical drop of a noisemaker and get off the depth band so that when the torpedo searches to reacquire you, it finds your enemy, instead. (In the image above, I fired a torpedo at him and he fired at me at the same time. My torpedo is about to hit and sink him -I already landed two hits- but his will circle back upon him.)

At least as of v1.15, RBU-bearing surface targets seem not to have gotten the memo that they're the targets, and should be running in terror of you, and have the audacity to charge straight at you, outrunning torpedoes and launching RBUs directly on you. The nerve!

Notable is that Krestas and other larger ships will generally have much better sonar and radar than their smaller escorts. They will often hear you before a Poti half the distance from you will. They will also have helicopters to annoy you. You do NOT want to be heard by dipping sonar while within RBU range. "RBU" might as well stand for "Rectum Blasting Unit", and getting caught by one will nearly always result in losing your ship. (They may not kill you in one blast, but once you are caught by one, it's never going to be JUST one RBU heading your way.)

Generally speaking, this means you should take on missions involving Krestas or Moskvas much more defensively. Unlike merchants, you don't need to chase them down, they'll come running to you. Take advantage by staying far away from the big, scary ships with the rockets of death.


Note I'm going in reverse. They primarily rely upon active sonar, so just keep your noise pointed their way, and go in reverse. (Note: A bug means that "set course" doesn't pay attention to the fact that steering is reversed while going backwards. Control the rudder manually.)

Keep tossing out torpedoes to keep most of the enemy running away from you. If you kept your wires, and scare a small, fast ship like a Poti off, redirect that torpedo towards the next target rather than letting it run all the way away. That Poti isn't coming back any time soon. (They're much less brave than the targets they escort...)

Make sure you catch capital ships in pincers - you'll need at least two torpedoes to bring them down, anyway.

The best way to get those annoying fast ships doing donuts around your torpedoes is to use one on the wire to just go counter-clockwise if the target and other torpedo is going clockwise.

If you are hit with active pings by a surface ship (this is represented by an icon on the top right and a very loud pinging), and the enemy is within range, they will fire RBUs on you. As previously discussed, this is probably the leading cause of loss of submarines in '68. If the event camera is turned on, this will cause the camera to snap to the ship firing RBUs, and even in the tactical map, you'll hear the rockets.

This is your cue to fire desperate panic torpedoes in the direction of the enemies targetting you in the hopes they will at least make the enemy ships not chase you, hit flank speed, set course away from the enemy ships, and either max or minimum ballast and planes.

RBUs have ludicrously pinpoint accuracy in this game, but that's also a silver lining as it means that if you clear the target zone, you have a chance of surviving THIS round of RBUs. Travelling horizontally will not cut it, but getting above or below the explosions will give you a shot at evading damage. This basically means making a roller coaster ride out of your sub.



Dive deep and climb shallow until the RBUs end. You did scare off the enemy with torpedoes, right? Because the RBUs don't stop if they aren't gone. Yeah, they will park their ass right on top of you and RBU until the cows come home if you didn't.

If you are in shallow water while being RBU'd, your best bet is to immediately hit escape, and "Abandon Ship" so you at least get first dibs on the good life raft.

Aircraft can be a massive annoyance, being as they're one of the few things in the game that you can't sink, and they will take advantage of this fact to fearlessly and relentlessly harass you when you just want to kill all their friends in peace.

Fortunately, aircraft are rarely much of a threat on their own; They only carry two torpedoes each, those torpedoes have poor range and tracking, and they don't reload during missions. That said, they're fantastic at tailing you and keeping your position revealed to all surface ships, as well as just not letting you finish a mission because "aircraft are nearby" for 15 minutes after you've sunk everything else.

The best way to deal with aircraft is to simply not be anywhere near them so you don't have to otherwise deal with them. When starting a mission, hit F4 to see if there are any aircraft in the area. (Hit it more than once if there are, sometimes you have both the airplane and the helicopter in the area.) This usually isn't going to help much, however, as that simply tells you that there are aircraft. If you've gotten to periscope depth and tagged some other ships, however, you can (completely unrealistic cheese) swivel the camera around to use those ships as landmarks to see where the aircraft is in relation to the ships.


Here, I'm just south of the wrecks, but the helo (the Hormone A) is some distance to the east of them. To keep away (and exit the mission), I break westward.

Aircraft tend to focus on either the immediate vicinity of their escorts at first, where they first detected a torpedo, or wherever they last spotted you if they have. Hence, it's best to reposition after firing your first torpedoes, and staying away from that area thereafter. Aircraft sufficiently preoccupied with previous torpedoes are generally never going to find you if you don't go back to that specific location.

If you are spotted by aircraft, expect any surface ships in the area to start carpet-bombing your location with stand-off weapons (I sure hope you aren't in RBU range). Launch whatever weapons you can get off in the general direction of threats, and it's time to take off running.

There is unfortunately only one good way to shake off aircraft pursuit, and that is to go fast and deep (or fast and cavitating if in shallow water). Helicopters need to stop to dip their sonar, so just run fast, let them hear you moving in a certain direction, and when they pull their sonar back up to reposition, change directions to hopefully send them off a ways from your position. The airplanes like (always the Illyushin in '68) are harder to shake, and will drop a seemingly limitless (they have 98 of the things!) supply of sonarbouys on you. Again, just make flank as far from existing bouys as possible while zig-zagging when you've put some distance behind you to make it miss with a couple of bouys to finally get some breathing room.

Generally speaking, don't use Mk. 16s. They are only going to be effective against submarines in total fluke situations. Any armed ASW escort is going to move too eratically for them to be effective at any range that isn't courting death by RBU.

Mk. 16s are for one purpose, only: They are about twice as powerful as a Mk. 37, so they save you a torpedo when sinking merchant ships or the odd Sverdlov.

Against merchants, just try to get up to parallel with the merchant, slow down, and launch slightly (1 pixel) ahead of the center of the targetting circle. (The circle is a measurement of if the torpedo swam in a straight line from the center of your ship to the enemy ship. Because the torpedo comes out the side of your ship, then changes course, it will be a couple seconds behind where the circle predicts, especially the more it has to turn from the sideways launch angle.)

Also note that the targetting circle only really works if parallel to the target, and doesn't really calculate differences in leading the target if it is moving towards or away from you - this can result in a targetting circle that is actually on the other side of your ship!

Against any other target, you need to launch a spread to have any real prayer of hitting, and a spread is not saving torpedoes. You might as well fire a spread of Mk. 37s that can catch the target in a pincer.

In the vanilla '68 game, you have three choices for submarines. Unlike with the '84 campaign, where two submarines are obviously superior to the others, the three '68 models can't be so easily ranked into tiers. The different models force somewhat different playstyles, but there is a reason to prefer any of your three options.

The Skipjack is the oldest American submarine available in the game. It is both the fastest and has the most torpedo tubes, but it is also the noisiest. The Skipjack also carries one extra torpedo in its racks than the other two options.

Critically for my purposes, however, it can only maintain one wire. This means many of the tricks involving pincer attacks became far more difficult, and you're down to simply using the much more situational tactic of trying to launch a torpedo head-on and keeping it hidden from the enemy until it is too late to evade.

Worse, you have a significantly shorter-range sonar system than the other two options, further forcing players into a more reactionary situation, as the enemy will be much more likely to hear you before you hear them.

Many people prefer the Skipjack for its speed, alone. Because you will be heard from further away, and have less capacity to get hits with your torpedoes, this will enforce a playstyle where the player must make noise and lure the enemy into head-on combat where the player will then have to evade many torpedoes or even try to bring them back on a live enemy. While potentially viable, it's a very wild ride where the player is constantly on the defensive. If you're not going to reload saves when things turn sour, expect not to complete too many campaigns unless you've completely mastered torpedo evasion.

Also, the Skipjack has the shallowest test depth, with only 700 feet to work with. (Crush depth starts around 1000 feet at 100% hull, and damage makes that shallower.)

These are the most recent class of submarine in '68. (In fact, only three of them were actually completed by the end of '68, and those were just a couple months old!) The Sturgeon class is as much the opposite of the Skipjack-class as is available. It is quieter but slower, has 2/3rds the tubes but twice the wires, and can dive nearly twice as far down. (Test depth of 1320, crush depth of about 2000 to 2500 feet at 100% hull.)

The Sturgeon is not only a full 8 knots slower (a roughly 25% reduction in speed), but its turning speed is 2/3rds that of the Skipjack, and it changes depth at 5/6ths the speed.

A full 10 dBs quieter than the Skipjack, even when moving at the same speed, the Skipjack can get much closer to the enemy without being detected. Sturgeons also have two wires with which to guide torpedoes. This combination means that you have a much better chance to play a (relatively) stealthy game where you focus upon trapping enemies within pincer attacks while denying the enemy the chance to fire back.

At the same time, the low speed of the Sturgeon forces these heavily offense-focused tactics; torpedo evasion in this time period isn't particularly difficult if you detect torpedoes from behind you, but a major problem can be having the enemy surprise you with SET-65 torpedoes fired in your face from close range due to the close ranges that the Sturgeon will often fight. Nearly every hit I took was because I had a torpedo launched so close to me I had no room to turn and get up to flank before it was crashing into my bow. Ensuring that the enemy never fires back because you pressure them with constant torpedoes whenever they are close is your ticket to surival.

As you can tell from the screenshots, this is my prefered submarine in the period, and many of my tactics capitalize upon its strengths. When you are experienced with this ship, you should be able to go several missions in a row without letting the enemy launch a single weapon against you, and what weapons are launched will nearly always be the easily-fooled UMGT-1, so simply keeping the enemy from firing SET-65s when you are close and facing them is key to survival.

The middle submarine in nearly every regard (although it is much closer to the Sturgeon), the Permit-(AKA Thresher-)class gives players a blend of the capabilities of both. You still have two wires and four tubes like a Sturgeon, but go 3 knots faster than a Sturgeon, althought that's still 5 knots slower than a Skipjack. Meanwhile, you are 6 dBs noisier than a Sturgeon, but 4 dBs quieter than a Skipjack.

Most other aspects of the Permit are identical to the Sturgeon, including the turning rate, sonar, and even (oddly) precisely the same test depth.

As a choice, the Permit-class is a compromise for slightly better speed (and the ability to better form knuckles or dodge torpedoes) that limit a few of the weaknesses of the Sturgeon, while not quite having the same quietness. This means it can do most of what a Sturgeon does, but the noise will mean you need to take more risks with being heard as you set up your attack, and you might need to use that speed to evade torpedoes more often. To someone who needs a little more help evading torpedoes, however, it may be preferable to need to evade more shots while having more capacity to do that evasion.

A major notable difference in the '68 campaign from the '84 campaign is just how frequently you need to return to base to reload torpedoes. With only 23 or 24 torpedoes to fire, and a single ship often taking 2-3 torpedoes to kill, a convoy battle can easily take up 12-16 torpedoes, forcing returns to base after every one or maybe two battles. (I've certainly disengaged from a mission with a few surviving surface ships simply due to running out of torpedoes to keep sinking them...)

Because of this, it can pay to plan ahead and try to set up a chance to return to Holy Loch between missions. Try to wait for enemy targets to come as far southwest as possible before engaging them so you're closer to Holy Loch when you engage them, and cause the spawning of the next mission target. If you just took a trip to Holy Loch, this will probably be done for you, since you'll be scrambling at full speed to catch up to the enemy before it gets to its target. The '68 campaign can easily become a full-speed zig-zag between Holy Loch and the latest target.

You face no disciplinary action for wasting torpedoes, so a sneaky way to ensure you aren't immediately assigned a new campaign mission is to deliberately fire away your torpedoes down to the threshold value for your next mission being to simply return to Holy Loch for more torpedoes. (I am not sure of the exact mechanics, but it seems if you have less remaining torpedoes than tubes, you will be called back.)

Just be careful, as after gaining enough "Campaign Points" through successful missions that you trigger the final mission, you will not be given the "return to base" mission. (That said, the enemy boomer pack will pass almost directly past Holy Loch when trying to break out into the Atlantic, so you can generally make a quick pit stop in Holy Loch and pop back out right in front of the Yankee, regardless.)

The '68 campaign is a much more close-range and brutal campaign, which feels less like the "polite, professional with a plan to kill everyone you meet" sniper style of the '84 campaign, and more the spy's style of patiently getting close and then stabbing everyone in a panicked flurry of activity at close range. I find overcoming the limitations of your weapons makes it a much more enjoyable campaign than the '84 one. (Plus, it also doesn't have the TLAM missions!)

Have fun, happy hunting, and feel free to suggest things to add in the comments!