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I'm playing the game for the first time and am having trouble with the automatic convoys. It's 12/27/41. I have 11 18kTK at San Fran along with 55 7kAK. Similiar numbers for Karachi. Auto convoy is "on", the ships are marked "Auto Convoy: Yes", all areas are human control. Wellington, PH, and Midway are in the auto convoy system and have only 1.5x the needed supply or less. No convoys are forming. What am I missing?

I don't use the Auto convoys because 'when' it works, it waits until the supplies are needed before it builds a convoy to load than transport the supplies. by the time the supplies get there, the supplies have run out. This is providing the supplies make it...[:D]

ORIGINAL: frnfn1

I'm playing the game for the first time and am having trouble with the automatic convoys. It's 12/27/41. I have 11 18kTK at San Fran along with 55 7kAK. Similiar numbers for Karachi. Auto convoy is "on", the ships are marked "Auto Convoy: Yes", all areas are human control. Wellington, PH, and Midway are in the auto convoy system and have only 1.5x the needed supply or less. No convoys are forming. What am I missing?

Create a convoy to run between, say San Francisco and Pearl Harbor. Follow these steps:

1. Create the convoy in San Francisco - number and types of ships, etc
2. Set the task force to load supplies or fuel
3. Set the leader (if you want)
4. Set the destination to Pearl Harbor
5. Change from human control to CS

What this will do is automatically go to Pearl Harbor to unload then come back to San Francisco to reload and head back to Pearl Harbor.

what dereck says and search these forum's for other questions which will come up[:D]

Also another convoy tip that someone mentioned many moons ago on the forum was to not mix TK and AK ships together. Keep them in their own convoys. Supposidely (I've never checked this even though I do this) they load faster if they only have to load fuel or supplies instead of loading both.

Hmmm.....interesting. I don't mix fuel fleets with supply fleets, but I do mix resource/oil fleets because I only want to protect one big TF. I've only noticed that the AKs fill up faster than the TKs, which I would expect as the TKs are bigger.

ORIGINAL: frnfn1

I'm playing the game for the first time and am having trouble with the automatic convoys. It's 12/27/41. I have 11 18kTK at San Fran along with 55 7kAK. Similiar numbers for Karachi. Auto convoy is "on", the ships are marked "Auto Convoy: Yes", all areas are human control. Wellington, PH, and Midway are in the auto convoy system and have only 1.5x the needed supply or less. No convoys are forming. What am I missing?

your supply levels aren't low enough at those bases. The auto-convoy system is really just to send supplies to backwater bases. You will be better off using the system Dereck adivses for you major supply bases. Also, if you use auto-convoy early in the war WATCH OUT. The navigation routine isn't very smart and it routes your ships on the shortest path, even if it's through the heart of the enemies territory. Manually manage your supply levels early in the war. As things progress you can start setting computer controlled convoys like Dereck suggested. Later still you can use Auto-convoy for the out of the way places where you are certain the ships path will be safe.

I mix them sometimes for escort purposes. No point in doubleing the amount of escort ships needed. I'll pay the extra cost of a couple days at each end to load if I can free up some extra DDs. I actually had to delay an invasion the other day because all my msw were tied up on escort duty.

Thanks for the explanation. Dereck, thanks for the idea of not mixing AK and TK. I usually mix them because I like defending 1 big convoy than a multitude of small ones.

In one version of the game the auto convoy system was completely broken, v1.5 I think. This was fixed in v1.6.