[Rockin Robbins]

Wow! What do I say? Let me cherry pick some things and reply to them:

Originally Posted by Patchman123

The thing that I don't like about Silent Hunter 4, is that you are the only submarine in the entire war sinking enemy ships and there are no other Allied submarines sinking Japanese ships. You are the only one in the whole vast Pacific Ocean. There is no way to coordinate with other submarines and attack enemy vessels.

You have to keep in mind that this is a submarine simulation. Almost all of the time submarines acted alone with no sighting of other submarines for the entire cruise. Even when they hunted in wolfpacks, they mostly just divided up territory so they could avoid sinking each other. They didn't talk back and forth much on the radio for security reasons. And they never would be in continuous conversation with another submarine during the execution of an attack. Mostly, submarine operations were a pretty solitary activity.

Originally Posted by Patchman123

The aircraft attacks in SH4 are ineffectual and inflict no damage on Japanese ships. The planes are easily shot down and destroyed by super-accurate AA fire.

They only show a minimum amount of airplanes attacking the ships. They do not show the hundreds of planes used in such raids against the Yamato for example or the Musashi.

How, in a submarine, would you really ever be in position to watch aircraft attacks on Yamato or the Battle of Midway? The real ones sure weren't! Encounters in stock SH4 are random. Encounters in in RSRDC are canned with emphasis on what affects your submarine. Airplanes attacking enemy ships are really just window dressing and if you see it you're probably doing something wrong. One shot from that ship's pop guns and you go glug, glug, glug. I don't think subs lolly-gagged on the surface watching air attacks....

Originally Posted by Patchman123

The Japanese ships are deadly accurate when you fight them on the surface, which is why you have to take them on under water with your torpedoes. Your primary weapon is the torpedo and if you are playing the game in the early years of the war, then most of the torpedoes will be duds that will fail to explode when they hit the ships.

Is that a complaint or an observation not part of your dissatisfaction? The real submariners complained about that a lot. Yes. One hit from any surface ship's guns and you're probably going down involuntarily. Yes, they can hit you from six miles away, just like in real life. Yes, you have to hit them a hundred times to hurt them very much at all, just like in real life. Your torpedoes are crap until the middle of 1943 just like in real life. Welcome to the war, son. We didn't promise it would be fair.

Originally Posted by Patchman123

Why can't you coordinate with Royal Navy submarines to sink Japanese ships? It would be nice if there were more Allied submarines out there sinking Japanese warships. Why can't there be Dutch submarines? In the war, there were Dutch and British submarines operating against the Japanese during the war. Why aren't they depicted?

I can't find a single instance of Royal Navy or Dutch subs coordinating with American subs to have a baseball game, much less sinking Japanese warships. Dutch, British and other allied subs were a non-factor in the sinking of Japanese shipping and had almost no impact on the war at all. They aren't depicted because they weren't effective and never interacted with American subs.

Originally Posted by Patchman123

I think that Subsim.com could do a better job in my opinion with this. There needs to be more submarines and more sinkings of Japanese ships and Japanese ships lying at the bottom of the sea wherever they were sunk by Allied submarines or aircraft. I do not like how the sea is all nice and neat with no shipwrecks. That bothers me. Why can't there be shipwrecks all across the Pacific, instead of just as Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor looks like it had been freshly attacked IN 1943!

We're getting weird now. The Pacific is 62 million square miles of water, mostly several miles deep. When you sink a ship you never see it again. And the several hundred sinkings are so widely separated that locating them is very difficult, even with the space age technology we have seventy years later. In all the war reports of submarines during the war I have read I haven't seen five reports of enemy sunken shipping being encountered. Why should we scatter thousands of shipwrecks all across the Pacific in water five miles deep and how would you see them in a submarine that can't dive to a fifth of a mile? We could grind an eight core machine with 16 GB of RAM to a halt for objects that you would NEVER be able to see.

Originally Posted by Patchman123

Could we have all the mods merged? Thank you.

Sure! Get to work and let us know when it's ready. Mods are written by volunteers who make no income by working on the mod. They are individual pursuits for the pleasure of the modder, who makes his work available for others to try.

Subsim isn't in the business of commanding modders to combine all the available mods. Most of them are mutually exclusive anyway because of the individual vision of the modders involved. Most of the modders have gone on to do other things and are no longer available to modify their work.

Originally Posted by Patchman123

I was thinking about having shipwrecks for sunken Allied and Japanese ships all across the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean.

Could that ever happen? Why is the ocean bottom rather neat? In your next patrol, why aren't the same ships that you sank on a previous patrol no longer visible on the bottom of the ocean?

It's like they were never sunk in the first place.

In the real war you didn't have a GPS navigation system to go visit the site of previous sinkings. If you tried you probably would waste a week and still not find them and Admiral Lockwood would fire you on return to Pearl for not prosecuting the war with "great vigor."

Originally Posted by Patchman123

It's really weird that you do not see Allied planes attacking Japanese patrol planes that attack your submarine. There are no other Allied planes in the game.

During most of the war, submarine operations were conducted in the Pacific Ocean, which translated means "Japanese Lake." There WERE no allied planes to attack those Japanese planes. The Allied planes didn't know where you were, didn't have the range to get there even if they could locate which of the 64 million square miles you were in. Subs acted alone, without any air or surface support, just about 100% of the time. Sub skippers didn't like the either and it was tough toenails.

Originally Posted by Patchman123

I just pray that one day that the game developers will come up with a PC game with a PC with greater computing and graphics power that will have hundreds of thousands of airplanes, millions of soldiers, millions of weapons, hundreds of thousands of artillery pieces, mortars, grenades, bazookas, and a more immersive World War II experience. I am looking for a game that simulates the real war.

As I've shown, that's not the real war--it's a bad movie. Real war is 99% insufferable boredom, punctuated by short bursts of absolute terror and panic.

Originally Posted by Patchman123

I am looking for a game that will be like America's Army, where if you die, you can't come back to fight again and again.

Well that's how Silent Hunter 4 is! Unless you want the game to reformat your hard drive when you die so you have real life consequences for failure. I can't believe that if you die in America's Army you can never play the game again. That makes no sense. Nobody would buy that game.

Originally Posted by Patchman123

I am looking for a multiplayer game that can host millions of people on a single server. However, given how the internet works, that just isn't possible.

You could have millions of AI bots fighting the war for you. You just aren't seeing millions of troops attacking millions of enemy troops. The computing power has not advanced enough for this to be possible.

When will it be possible?

Patchman123.

Even if it were possible, millions of troops never attacked millions of troops in any action in the war. Most actions were isolated actions of a few thousand against a few thousand.

Before we could have a "whole war" simulation, we would have to agree on some ground rules that don't have any satisfying real world answers:

What is the nature of reality? Do we put the enemy in a box, wind 'em up and let them do move for move exactly what they did in Version 1 back in 1939-1945? Is that real? Or is it laughably unreal? I would contend for the latter.

Are the weapons going to be exactly what was available in the war, developed at exactly the same time, la la la? Is that real? Or anti-real? People will complain at you with great vigor however you go and you can't do both.

In short, we have fundamental disagreement about what constitutes a simulation, even in our limited encounters presently in the game. We are hard against the capabilities of today's computers with 2017 supermods. You say they are too limited. We're paring back usage of system resources every day to make more possible in mods you find completely inadequate. FOTRSU is a 3.7 GB mod for a game a third the size. According to you, that is way too limited. We need thousands of sunken ships littering the bottom of a five mile deep ocean, which the player could never see or even detect by any means.

No. We don't. Just no.