Quote:
Originally Posted by Caustic
Just passing through monitoring the progress of this project. This takes me back to the "glory days" of SH4. Just a few questions, are the historical layers from RSRDC incorporated into FOTRS? Such as all of the Solomon Island battles for example and all of the detailed task force layers in RSRDC?
Regardless, i'm looking forward to a new campaign experience, having never played FOTRS.
 |
Basically our position is that "historical" campaigns are not historical. Random encounters are historical. In war the sub commander didn't know where the shipping lanes were. He didn't know anything about the Battle of Midway until after it happened.
From his point of view he went where he was sent, encountered random stuff and dealt with it. Not one of them ever said "Nothin happening around here. Think I'll just abandon my orders and check out the slot to see if the Tokyo Express is running." If he even knew about the Tokyo Express he wasn't free to go investigate, especially if he was based out of Australia.
But sure, it's fun to check out a historical encounter. But the nasty secret is that you can put all the ships in the right position and they don't act realistically anyway! I think putting together individual single missions to ask the question "what if I were there with a sub when Taffy 3 attacked the Japanese capital ships off the Philippine invasion beaches? But to set up a whole "war in a bottle?" No.
The major move that made SH3 and SH4 so revolutionary was their dynamic campaign: the unpredictable nature of the encounters and engagements. For the first time in sub simming history you were in the same position of not knowing that real sub commanders were in. It was grand!
Then along comes RSRDC, which says dynamic be damned. Let's put the whole war in a bottle and freeze it. I have a colorful and I hope funny illustration about doing a video game about the Ali/Frazier 2 fight the way RSRDC works, but we'll spare the details now.