The Red Book and Blue Book are excellent.
Kapitan, I hope you hang around this thread.
He has a lot to teach us.
First, understand what game you're playing. DW and SC are the grand children of Harpoon. Sonalyst got involved when the Navy wanted a cost-effective training tool for Academy students so they could learn the basics of maneuvering and weapons deployment (ie, shooting the bad guys). The later release of Harpoon for the commercial PC market had to be "sanitized" but it wasn't sanitized
that much. The basic ideas are still valid.
More than that, I would suggest learning how to develop your situational awareness (we'll get into this more in a later post). Knowing where you are and understanding where you want to be are crucial. That is very closely linked, and is different, for each platform. In other words, pick one platform and stick with it.
Over time and with experience, you will learn your boat's strengths and weaknesses. It will become second nature. While I really like the attention to detail the RA folks have brought with their mods, I spend very little time looking at the 3D view
during a fight. That is my one and only beef with Cold Waters. I can't develop that awareness if there are no stations to concentrate on. Maybe I'll do a re-think when CW2 or CW3 come out.
Some of you may have noticed that some of the rest have a deeper background in tactics. We literally lived this stuff for years at a time. Its how we got paid and advanced. Think of it this way, its hard
not to get good at your job when you're on a three month deployment.
In contrast, the biggest thing I had to learn when playing 688I, Sub Command, and later Dangerous Waters was that they were games and not the real thing. The basics are there but I still had to adapt to what I was given. In that regard we're all on the same page.
In other words, am I saying you need to march down to the recruiter and volunteer so you can get experience? Hell no! There are a LOT of tough times you have to deal with in order to get to a small percentage of good times.
OK, so where are the tactics? We're getting there, trust me.
The point of this post is to give yourself
time to learn how to play the game. Whatever platform you choose to play, learn how drive it
before you get in a fight.
The early 688I missions that are included with RA are great for this, but take it to the next step. Go to the mission editor and create some missions where you're just goofing around in a harbor. Norfolk and Petropavlosk are
great locations to do this. Get a good "feel" for how your platform handles. Get some experience working close to land and other ships. Try driving your platform in reverse while using the manual rudder station in Control. One of the keys to ship control is learning how your platform behaves as it transitions from forward movement to reverse.
Another area to concentrate on is learning how to get the most out of your Nav Map view.
You may notice I'm being vague on some of this stuff. That's because a lot of these things are learned by doing. You can't learn a lot of this stuff by just reading about it, you have to give yourself the experience.