I don't hate U-Boats but have no particular fascination with them. They were a weapon inappropriate for the war they were used in. Actually they alone were sufficient to account for the defeat of Germany.

On second thought, I may just LOVE U-Boats. Copying the techniques of German U-Boat captains made victory possible for the US in the war where submarines WERE appropriate.

International Open-Beta starts today ... when they are done with the server maintenance :ping:

Excited.

How do you know?

I managed to work my way through the German beta without knowing a word of German. It actually looked (and felt) like it could actually be not too bad a game!

It's bad, but it's the fun kind of bad *shrug*. Like War Thunder or World of Tanks.

I'll be playing at least.

Just logged out after playing ~1 hour of the tutorial. The good news is that I encountered no glitch, the game is stable and 100% playable. Add to this a community manager that knows his (her?) job and provides prompt advice via chatbox. As for the game itself, I'm still just at the tutorial, so I cannot have a definite impression about it.

Anyway, I already encountered something odd: in the evasion part of the tutorial, the escort had just passed my sub, I was in its baffles (as indicated by the yellow detection marker), then suddenly, in a matter of just one second, it turned 180 degrees and headed towards me, of course leaving me no time to order evasive maneuvers or kill the engine. "Sub detected' - and here I went again to the beginning of the evasion part of the tutorial.

Oh, and another annoyance. Time compression (x4 is the maximum) is obtained via... TC points, which can be (and are) depleted. I suspect here a way of getting players pay for this "commodity" - in a free game, as advertised. Free it may be, but painfully slow unless one does not acquire TC points. Anyway, let's wait for the final product, to see how these TC points can be acquired freely, just by meeting game objectives, vs. paying real cash for them.

the TC point regenerate over time. i finished the tutorial or it it 95% complete i still get the occasional popup.

That's not correct, time compression (max. 4x) cost you nothing, it's always available. But there are jump points to be faster than 4x to skip just a greater distance, which would take even with 4x time compression hours/days and these points are decreasing based on distance and count of jumps

I am at the level-cap of 35 since weeks, unlocked/played all campaigns, built three Type VII subs and have no real money spent on this game.

The jump points range is big enough if you done correctly plan your operations due to the amount of fuel and the jump points are replenished every 10 minutes to a few points while playing.

I'll give it a shot, but need to get my Uplay account sorted first. The email-adres that is is assigned to is gone since last year due to switching ISP.

I have to concur with Seeadler. You don't need any real money for this game if you play carefully and don't need additional commodities. I funded my account just to buy a few additional boat pens. That's all.
For daily duty I just use my earned prestige points and that's in-game enough to reach the (actual) campaign cap phase IV.

Does this game allow for manual targeting at all?

Your torpedo will shoot at the bearing of the scope unless you target a ship and get a torpedo solution. So you can aim manually, but you'll be either doing a ton of math, or just winging it.

Yeah, I figured that. I seems the solution is lost after some time or some event or something I do in the gui unknowingly. Need to redo the solution all the time to get the propper lead going.Which means waiting.

Also, I can't seem to edit the placement of map drawing tools. Do I need some key-combo or is it a once-and-for-all placement deal?

I know the devs have probably been forced to apply all this pay to play dynamics into the game but aside from that I love what they have done and they do seem to care about attention to detail.

For a web game I love how I can fire it up so quickly and get into the action wherever I am.

The wolfpack feature is so much fun. I was in a wolfpack the other night with 4 other players and had 4 destroyers coming down on us protecting a convoy of merchant ships. It was tense, exciting and a very rewarding social experience as we were all on Skype together planning our strategies.

I hope the game maintains a healthy player base as I am confident the devs are listening and have lots of plans for the future.

I like this game very much - I have played Silent Hunter since Silent Hunter 1. I have played Silent Service since the days of the Commodore 64 and Amiga versions. I played Aces of the Deep and all the other submarine sims that have come and gone.

You don't have to have a 100% accurate simulation in which to enjoy a submarine game and have fun with your friends. There are still people in this community who stubbornly turn their back on Silent Hunter 5 despite the enormous progress in fixing it that has been achieved. The same stubbornness is directed toward this game and I feel those people are really missing out if they could only just accept that not every game has to be the complete simulation that hey want it to be and just give it a chance.

You can drag them with the mouse like the dragging the chat window or other gui elements

Go with cursor over the top bar with the three dots, left click - hold - drag
http://foto.arcor-online.net/palb/al...6235396461.jpg

BOOOOOOO!