I tried the Naval artillery training exercise and went around hitting various targets but none are sinking.
I read somewhere that messages would tell me where to fire (waterline, deck, etc) but no messages appear.
What would the problem be?

Shoot the waterline. If you do it right, you will see a splash followed by an explosion on the ship's hull. If you shoot above water, it will never sink.

The messages, YOU can tell the crew where to shoot. Click on the chief officer (make sure he is on his post) and there should be deck gun orders there.

But aiming manually is better, cause the crew are quite useless

I like to get in close if I can when using the deck gun, to make every shot count. I find the best method for me is to get the shot to penetrate the sea surface close to the target hull. You can get an eye for it with practice. It's very satisfying to see a gout of water from your shell entering the water and then a hit below the waterline.

In stock game all you have to do is hit a vessel with enough damage points to sink it. You can repeatedly hit the bridge and when you have X number of points she magically sinks. In real life, ships sank because they were flooded out, which was caused by holes from torpedoes, bombs and shells. In a supermod such as Grey Wolves, you must sink a vessel by causing it to flood. In other words, make holes in it. Hammering artillery shells into the radio shed just won't cut it. You have to punch holes into the hull or cause a devestating explosion in a fuel or ammo storage. I really appreciate the way modders have changed the damage model in this game.

Thanks for advice.
Other things I found odd were
(1) ships being sunk that I was not even in the vicinity of.
(2) when checking the report screen it would say I still had a ship or two to destroy but found no other ships other than the 4 that were shown as sunk.

quote:

(1) ships being sunk that I was not even in the vicinity of.

There can be two reasons for this. German aircraft have come and bombed it. Dont know that this would happen in training, but it certainly does in a campaign. If you contact a convoy and report it and then follow in real time, you may well see an air attack.
#2 The ship ran itself aground or collided with another ship and sank. The AI isnt perfect.

I have a question, then, Kaleun.
Getting in close, the deck gun will not aim low enough to get a shot at the waterline (unless farther away).
Does it have to do with the range selected (short medium, long)?

You can manually drop the barrel. Don't worry about the range markings on the gunsight; just aim your reticle below the waterline [hold your mouse button down to drag the barrel] and fire. Play with it and you'll get good at it.

quote:

Don't worry about the range markings on the gunsight; just aim your reticle below the waterline [hold your mouse button down to drag the barrel] and fire.

I think what Kaleun is saying (but Im not sure) is if you are really close, don't use the gun sight.

I'll give that one more try but I am ready to delete the game.
When I play the artillery Naval exercise, it says that I still have two more ships to go after, after 4 have been sunk (some not even by me).
But there are never two more ships anywhere, even after zooming back out to wide area.
I can imagine what other glitches I might come across at Career level, Single player level.
I realize that any game may have bugs but it is discouraging to see them so early in the game.
This game was downloaded from Steam and I found and tried running a patch specified for Internet downloaded games (not DVD version patch) but it never executed.
I tried this patch from two different web sites with no luck.

So, probably on to something else.

Holding the mouse button down on the gun barrel and pulling it downward did not move it at all.
I guess that's it for this game.

Try Career mode anyway. Trust me, an unpatched game is very much playable, unlike SH4, from what I've heard about that one..