[Sailor Steve]

Welcome Aboard!

The real difference between all these sims has nothing to do with which is "best" or even "better"; the difference is between what you want from a sim like this.

With SH3 you have to live with graphics that are more than a decade old, and even then people complained that they looked dated. It does have its share of bugs so a minimal level of modding is required, but that seems to be true of any game these days. What elevates SH3 to that level beyond is that the same decade has brought several different available mod compilations - "supermods" - that each are oriented toward providing something different from the others.

There's NYGM, which is made to improve the realism in the game play. It gives you enemy escorts and planes that are much more dangerous - sometimes frighteningly so. It's for the player who wants to experience the terror that comes with being under attack as well as the triumph of actually winning those battles.

Then you have something like WAC, which is dedicated to recreating the full campaigns and making you part of the real war.

Something like LSH3 is devoted to the visceral side of the game, using amazing graphics improvements to make you feel like you're really there.

GWX is the most popular, and I think that's because it does the best job of combining all the above features. I have felt the extreme emotions that come with attacking and being attacked, and I have felt the placid joy of looking at the sights while just sailing out of a harbor at a stately 5 knots (in real life they do have speed limits).

SH3 is also the only version that works with SH3 Commander, a program specifically designed for that sim, which lets you change many parameters of the game (gun reload rates, wave heights, your u-boat number, starting bases, and others) as well as little things like randomizing the gramophone play order and much bigger ones like the Merchant Fleet Mod, which adds scores of new ships and giving them historical names, so you don't just sink a Liberty Ship, but you'll be told you sank SS Lucius Fairchild, or any one of almost 2,000 others. And that's just one class out of several hundred.

That is why SH3 is still the most popular of all the Silent Hunter series.

SH4 is not just for Pacific Boats. The second release included U-Boat Missions with the Monsun Boats in the orient. There is a fantastic megamod called Operation Monsun that basically turns SH4 into SH3 but with much better graphics. Unfortunately its closeness in time meant that OM never got the love from modders that SH3 did. The good news is that a decade later it is beginning to receive that attention, and some very talented people are working on as we type this.

SH5 got a bad reputation from the start because it wasn't SH3. It gives great and loving detail to all sub-variants of the Type VII boats, but no Type II or Type IX. It was also very buggy. While adding the other types of boats is an extremely task, the one big megamod, The Wolves Of Steel, takes the very best of the available smaller mods, plus a few of its own, and makes SH5 into a very playable, very enjoyable game which is easily the best-looking version of SH there is likely to be.

That's the short version.