[Deamon]

Originally Posted by Highbury

The biggest obstacle to a proper WWI sim on the SH engine is the inability to operate under the prize rules.

I think when you study this subject in-depth you will realize SH needs A LOT more than juts prize rules to play like a real WWI sim.

To this reason alone SH was never an option for my own project.

So obviously we could get SH to look like a WWI game, but can we get it to play like one?

Even if it would just look like one I would subscribe to it. And I think the answere to your question is clearly NO.

I think there is a number of things that can be get out of SH. Obviously you would need to remove all asdics. The early war hydrophones need to be ****ty and not even all ships have them, include air ships/blimps.

Are q-ships even possible in SH ?

But so many other things would be still missing, a hell of a lot of minefields(especially the early british mines were malfunctioning but overall mines were omnipresent and a big probelm, big navigational challenge ( but there is no realistic navigation in SH ) ), many huge nets, there are no nets towed by ships to fish for you and stuff. No early war towed water bombs, no flares ect, ect.

As the war progresses there would need to be SOSUS systems on british coasts, remote controlled mine fields, beam barriers( britain exploited the circumstance that the german torpedos had no safety mechanism. Once put in the tube they would go off when it would collide with the tube hatch, so british forces would tow a long chain of heavy logs at night across the channel for example. At night the u-boat would not see it and collide with it and the torpedo in the tube would slide against the tube hatch and detonate. I don't know how many u-boats got lost this way but england would try any trick at hand and there was a lot going on back then. It is interesting to mention that the german boats would always dismount the warheads and store them seperately from the torpedos below the floor plates, specially secured ), light buoys and chains of boats illuminating the straight of dover barrier by burning magnesium and big spot lights on the coasts at night.

All sort of spy boats, drifter at night listening with hydrophones for you and stuff. In good weather when an u-boat is detected somewhere, everything afloat would be sent out to hunt it or just keep it submerged till it suffocates. Especially in WWI you have a myriad of auxillary vehicles of all sorts ( since nothing else was available or would be detached ). This is the main force you have to deal with actually and not destroyers, at least not in the first half of the war. A lot of armed fish trawlers, yachts, sail boats and stuff.

The british fleet command would be very stingy with detaching destroyers and torpedo boats for ASW duty especially early in the war since they wanted to keep them ready for the fleet, since at that time everything was awaiting the decisive battle with the german fleet. And of course british subs would be always after you when you leave or return to port.

Contraband classification would be changing constantly. Somewhere into the war you would receive almost daily radio messages with new contraband that you would have to add to the list while removing others from it. So you would have to go through the lists every time and see if you are still dealing with contraband. This are just some random examples and not even to mentioned the peculiarities of the WWI technologies and different operational procedures.

There is so much needed for a proper WWI sim. Overall WWI is so much different from WWII, there is so so much that is overlooked, I can easily bubble all night long about it. Anybody who studied it realizes that.

But even if most of this is not possible just driving this old boats would be a fresh new wind and certainly appreciated. I was waiting for this, so go ahead.