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WARNING: spoilers ahead, don’t read if you haven’t played "Damn the torpedos" scenario from Northern Inferno.

I’ve recently finished the „Damn the torpedos” scenario and, oh well, it was the most annoying scenario I played so far in CMANO/CMO. I think I easily spent 30-40 hours on it (first CMANO, then in CMO), re-started it a dozen of times and it wasn’t fun to say the least… There are a couple of problems with it: you need to stay undetected as much as possible, but you will inevitably occasionally get detected - it’s crucial to seek any enemy subs that not only shoot torpedos at you, but also give your position away; surely you have an ASW patrol around your task force (with all capable units doing ASW) but whether you detect enemy subs fast enough is very random of course. You will never know for sure if your tankers were detected until attacked by wave(s) of TU-22s some time later - and those TU-22s are very hard to intercept with only a handful of Skyhawks and Sidewinders at your disposal. You can easily spend 3 hours in the scenario thinking things are going exceptionally well, only to face a sudden huge wave of TU-22s approaching your TF while your all six Skyhawks are still grounded and getting re-armed after a previous wave an hour ago (that you successfully intercepted thinking it couldn’t get any worse, haha); then your tankers get decimated by a dozen of TU22 missiles and in a blink of an eye your promising game score plummets down to „Major defeat”. Also, this scenario is very very long (7 days of game time). In my final playthrough, sometime half-way through it I got to the point where I sunk all enemy subs and surface vessels, TU22s gave up and stopped pestering me, I had a clear way east to the Safe Heaven and it became apparent there are no threats anymore, yet it took another 2 hrs in fast-forward mode just to transit there - I literally left CMO running unattended with the highest time acceleration (one step above 5x in CMO, meaning CPU is the only limit) to finish this scenario…

With all that, I thought I’d share some tips and observations about this scenario and what eventually worked for me, perhaps it helps someone else struggling with it. I finished the scenario with score 1050 (minor victory) and 3 days left to go; I think the score could be higher because there were 2 or 3 tankers still in transit, but for some reason CMO decided it’s time to end it. With all the gripes I had with it, I was happy to take any score, as long as it’s a pass!

So, here are my tips:

- As advised by mission briefing, perform aggressive ASW around the task force, as well as in the area of English Channel where the task force is heading.
- Investigate any subsurface and surface contacts and deal with them as quickly as possible. I think they give away the position of your main task force and may result in a few waves of TU22Ms bombers approaching from Iceland. You can stop 2-3 waves of attacks (with your Skyhawks re-armed in-between), but they eventually become impossible to stop with just 6 Skyhawks at hand. The only way of limiting or stopping these attacks is to seek and destroy enemy vessels around your TF as soon as possible whenever spotted.
- Related to that: you only have a few aircraft with missiles valid against surface targets (ships) - make sure you know who they are and use them to investigate any SKUNKs - i.e. do not assign them all to ASW, but keep them for a Sea Patrol mission.
- Have a permanent AEW support mission far north, close to Iceland (south of Reykjavik) to detect any TU-22Ms taking off from Reykjavik.
- Do not waste time of your precious Skyhawks for any air patrols in the hope of detecting TU-22Ms - just rely on the above AEW to detect them early.
- Radars of naval units should be off.
- Create Air Intercept mission for Skyhawks whenever any bogeys taking off from Reykjavik are detected. Plan at least 1 Skyhawk per 1 bogey, but more is recommended.
- TU-22Ms have long bombing range and need to be intercepted as soon as possible, therefore Skyhawks should take off soon after you detect they leave Reykjavik, but not too soon so they don’t reach Bingo fuel before intercepting the enemy. Beware that TU-22Ms are very fast and hard to intercept with Skywinders (and that’s the only weapon you have).
- Modify the route of your task force to move south first, before going straight east to the Safe Heaven. This slightly increases your distance from TU-22s incoming from north, and it’s never a bad thing.
- It’s hard to avoid losses, so expect to loose some of the escorted tankers (2-3 is probably ok to pass the scenario). Don’t give up if that happens. You may have a low score for good chunk of the scenario time, but then it goes up significantly with every tanker that reaches Safe Heaven. Enemy loses and your loses (except for tankers) play marginal role for the overall score, most important are the tankers.
- Frequent and separate saves are recommended if you want to avoid starting from scratch every time things go wrong late in the scenario.

I disagree entirely that Damn the Torpedoes is annoying. It is certainly difficult and a challenge, one that requires attention to the details and a thorough knowledge of your capabilities, limitations and those of the Soviet forces. Also ASW situations do often unfold slowly and time compression is usually not your friend when you're on the hunt. Your observations actually contain little that should not automatically be SOP for anybody attempting to protect a convoy with limited resources using 1970's assets.

You're ranting about the game play and yet claim that it absorbed 30-40 hours of your life, which sets up an obvious dichotomy in your narrative. Cold War era scenarios frequently demand significantly different approaches than those of modern scenarios with massive EW support, smart weapons, high kill probabilities and all-seeing sensors. For example, the use of the A4 Skyhawk for fleet air defence was definitely USN doctrine for ASW carrier air groups during this period. However, the planes were few in number and I would have dearly loved one or two cruisers armed with the SM-2-ER to take out the ASM's and keep the Skyhawks back to deal with leakers. The best defence is to shoot the archer not the arrow although here NATO lacks the means to do this. But all you have are the few medium-range Standards and you need to adjust expectations and responses accordingly.

Should you spend more CMO time using CWDB units you have undoubtedly learned valuable lessons that are fully transferable to other scenarios and situations. One can argue that is something that should not be annoying, at least in my opinion anyway.

-C

Not enjoying a scenario is of course very subjective. The "annoying" bit for me was the random factor in this scenario (i.e. how fast ASW units manage to detect subs), with tens of patrolling units assigned to ASW Patrol area this aspect is entirely controlled by the AI + randomness. And the punishment comes with a large delay. You can of course argue this reflects real life, fair enough. This was approximately 10th scenario I played in CMANO/CMO and I truly enojoy the game, some scenarios I enjoyed more than the others and again, this is subjective. The reason I spent so many hours on it is simply because it's part of Northern Inferno, and I'd like to experience the entire campaign.

I still consider myself a beginner in the game (150hrs I spent in the game according to steam feels like nothing); I agree a study of CWDB is very important and I never said this aspect is annoying, however applying this knowledge to the game is a completely different matter and as far I can say, comes with experience.

This mission is hard as balls. After several tries I still can't get anyone in the task group to the finish line. Once those Backfires takeoff it's game over.

Ok I had to pull a Kirk- Kobayashi Maru and separate the civilian cargo convoy from the Lexington's task group. I sent the civilians down south leaving the Lexington to loiter in the North Sea to act as bait for the Backfires. Sadly the Lexington and her escorts where wiped out but the convoy made it home safely.

yes, it is hard
because AI is cheating in this scenario.

Tcao's right. The USS Pharris, one of your escorts, is marked as auto-detectable. This means the Soviets have a rough location of your convoy at all times. In order to make this scenario more enjoyable, I recommend either letting the Pharris die very quickly (there's a Charlie that's happy to oblige) or editing the scenario in the editor and unchecking the auto-detect property on the Pharris.

This turns the scenario into a game of "don't get spotted". The Backfires can't launch unless they get a track through either a recon plane or a spy ship. So. just use your Skyhawks and MPAs to hit those before they can get a fix to disrupt the Soviet kill chain.