Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Dodger
RSRD uses actual Japanese (and others) records to trace ship's movements, so its pretty accurate. The OC (Original Campaign - No Mods) generates vessels fairly close to you, so you should have no problems IF your playing the OC. V-E-R-Y unrealistic.
Good Hunting!
LtCdr Roger Dodger USCG(R)
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What's very unrealistic, playing poker with a deck of cards that is stacked exactly the way a famous game was played so all you have to do is replicate the winner's actions and haul in the cash? Or is a poker game realistic when the cards are shuffled and results are random? Which is a real game and which is a sterile reenactment?
RSRDC is the one that is V-E-R-Y unrealistic. You can sit in a shipping land and hit target after target and they just keep coming like the stupid robots they are. In the real war, after you plugged a target you didn't get any more chances until you found a new honey hole. That's because RSRDC is V-E-R-Y unrealistic.
Real war is dynamic. The enemy reacts to situations and changes tactics to accommodate. RSRDC simply reenacts the results of dynamic decision making from 70 years ago and mindlessly executes them, appropriate or inappropriate.
So, you, wise guy that you are, proceed to zip over to the precise location that the Japanese carriers launched their attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1943. In the real war you would have come up empty because they wouldn't have been there. They would have detected you and gone somewhere different. In the "realistic" RSRDC world they deliver themselves conveniently into your clutches and you fill 'em full of holes.
RSRDC, while seeming to be a good idea, on careful examination, falls apart completely as a fatally flawed exercise. I like its ships. I don't like its AI. I don't like its campaign.
The SH4 1.5 game, which generates traffic randomly, and not as you describe just in your vicinity, but randomly all over the ocean, with virtual targets already present before you enter sensor range, when they are randomly assigned a position that you can detect and become actual targets, is the closest approximation to the reality of fighting a submarine that is possible.
As a real sub commander you had little knowledge of shipping lanes, historical battles (they hadn't happened yet, or had already happened and you lacked a time machine) actual odds of survival (they were much more afraid than we are playing the game), enemy ship identification and submarine reliability compared to what we have in the game. Heck, our ID Manual has every freaking ship on the Pacific Ocean! Their manual was a cruel joke.
So RSRDC takes a game which is already stacked in the sub's favor and proceeds to stack it even worse. In the process, RSRDC absolutely kills the gameplay of TMO, GFO, RFB and the stock game. At least Webster made a patch to fix a little of that for GFO. None of the others reacted at all. I think they were just worn out and couldn't fight any more.
As a player, if you want to go see the invasion of Guadalcanal then load up RSRDC and go look. You still won't see reality, just Lurker's version but the Japanese will be there and you'll be able to bust 'em up. Maybe. It's actually a lot of fun. But in the real war that would have been airplane work, not submarine work.
But as a real captain during the war, you followed orders, went where you were told, found or didn't find targets. If you worked for Christy you had very little latitude to explore on your own. Do it and you're pounding the beach with some Marines. With Lockwood you were assigned a wide area and told to seek and destroy. Lots of flexibility. But you didn't know where they were. Encounters were random from your point of view. JUST LIKE THE STOCK GAME! That's real realism. Not a robotic enactment of 70 year old dynamic decisions made during a different war. That is the very definition of "V-E-R-Y unrealistic."
Let's suppose you are playing a boxing game and your opponent, Muhammad Ali, does the exact same moves he did against Joe Frasier in Ali/Frazier 1. REALISM! Yeah, you just move in behind him, he punches the historical Frazier in front of him and you knock him out from behind or the side. He never sees you. He never reacts to you. He's a stupid robot. Just like RSRDC. Is that realistic? No. Hell no.