The Perfect Nuke Sub Sim?

[Frame57]

What in your opinion would make for the "perfect modern day sub sim?". I would like to have a free range world map similar to what is used in the SH series. Also the use of tactical nukes for torpedoes, SUBROCS and ASROCS.

[Frame57]

Oh and one other thing. Realistic combat tactics like being able to "Jam dive"

[Frame57]

Message to self! OK, how about this: A mission editor feature that has a random surface or submerged foe. Not the random box select, but the game will generate it and you will not know where or what but it is coming to get you. That would be kind of fun. To me I am torn between the cool modern stuff in SC and DW, but SH4 has agreat "unknown" factor to it when you are on patrol. Now if we could combine those elements into a game, I would probably be in DR. Drew's rehab for game addiction.

[Mush Martin]

I think the next evolution for a subsim
regardless of era.

is player/multirole

command an aircraft
command a ship
command a sub
command a squadron
command a taskforce
command a fleet

all combatants any shiptype plane type or country.
I think media needs to come out a bit more
we see now wonderful chase and free cams in
ever prettier environments but the next step isnt
just screenies as with IL2 its video but the need
to have it with a built in editor for title work and
effects and the ability to export video
ie. upload to youtube or whatever would likely be
next, possibly also integrating gamebased player
soundbites from built in Voice command and
ventro type comm's
Voice command invites crewman characters
that have potential to be familiars and dependables
adding further to immersion.

just a few thoughts you looked lonely down here.
M

[Frame57]

I feel as though I am alone in a padded cell. No, seriously i think your right about the direction of a subsim or other warefare sims. I think the prospect of an Independant sim may look promising for sub fanatics. Maybe?

[Mush Martin]

I still get nostalgic for my old fashioned seawolf once in a while.
M

[Werewolf]

You take SH4 and put modern submarines into it, modern weapon systems and modern asw warfare. Base it on a full scale conflict.

no more fannying about on little 500x500 nm maps

no more play-the-cop-of-the-world-catch-a-drug-baron-or-terrorist-in-a-midget-sub-before-he-blows-up-the-world-clap-trap-crap

no more canned missions whose only dynamic elements are does the akula start in the northern or north eastern coner this time?

no more start the mission beamed straight from your base and into the thick of it

no more annoying briefings "you have been hunted by the bad guys' toughest asw forces for days and are now put straight under 50 of his best krivaks and in between 25 of his elite attack subs, escape without being detected or the mission will end with a female voice saying game over" ....let the mission write itself with proper ingress and egress from the base

And it tastes great too yum yum

[Werewolf]

Oh yeah and one more thing.....dynamic weather....how the h... is it possible to make a so called sub sim without such an important factor as the weather changing!?


I want a subsim and not a Tom Clancy Holywood simulator

[Frame57]

Originally Posted by Werewolf

Oh yeah and one more thing.....dynamic weather....how the h... is it possible to make a so called sub sim without such an important factor as the weather changing!?


I want a subsim and not a Tom Clancy Holywood simulator

Damn! Werewolf, if you were a woman I would marry you...Kidding of course. Alas! Someone else "sees" the vision of the perfect sub sim. Now, if we could get EA or Sonalysts to listen to the both of us...

[OneShot]

To be frank, the most boring aspect of SH3 for me was the travel to and from the supposed area of operations. Even with time compression it was something I'd rather not do, but then thats just my opinion.

@Werewolf : With enough effort some of the things you mentioned are possible in DW already, the problem is that hardly anybody does undertake that effort. For example you can be more dynamic than a starting position. All you need to do is create n-Number of Groups with differing unit(s) in there with the appropriate probability of inclusion so that at game start one of them will be choosen randomly. While I'm at loss right now on the details I'm pretty sure its possible only drawback its quite an effort if you wanna have a lot of "randomness".

Two of your other issues are about mission design which again is something thats highly variable in DW. Its just that nobody has made those missions yet - but it sure is technically possible.

I do however support your idea of changing weather which of course should include things like changing seastate. Further it would be nice to have differing SSPs and Bottom Configurations. This would come in very handy on missions where you have a part in shallow waters (near the coast) and another part in deeper waters.

[Frame57]

True one shot, but you still know what is there seeing as we make the missions. I agree that the transit time on both SH3 and 4 is a bit monotonous. This fun! In the North atlantic we (SSN 678) were tracking a boomer. 2 days into the track who do we find on our tail but a Victor class. What do you do? break off the track and play with Victor or try to shake him and make the boomer think that the Victor was the one in his baffles all along? This is why if the game would generate things like this I think it would be neat. The element of surprize is what make hunting in any genre fun in real life and in gaming.

[Werewolf]

@Frame57

Actually I don't think that we're the only ones who would want a sim like that I just think that we're the only ones hounest enough to admit it. It's my impression that for some reason or another many people look upon SH3 and 4 as being not realistic or a historic simulation only, I even heard the word "life simulation" as if it only simulates a random das boot movie. I think this is way off. While SH3 and 4 are maybe simaulating something obsolete, in my eyes, they are a hell of a lot more realistic in many ways than any DW or other modern subsim out there in the sense that they really simulate the fog of war, technical realism, the challenge of improvising in unexpected situations, the challenge of going through a patrol from the first minute it starts to the very minute it ends AT THE BASE etc. etc. I could go on. Just because you build a sim over some up to date equipment and force the player to do manual sonar targeting doesn't mean that you have a second to none super realistic sim on the contrary I find most of the modern sims to be just another Tom Clancy computer script where you get to press a knob or two. And another thing that really annoyes me about "modern sims" is the fact that they tend to presume that the SSK is already distinct, it's always about nukes as if all the other navies out there who are operating SSK's don't exist. And regarding monotunous, life at sea is monotonous some times, but the only sim so far that is able to simulate the change from monotonous routine into adrenaline pumping action is the SH series.....apart from SHII of course, that one really s.....

@One Shot

Yes, I know, and I will be the first to admit that I'm not good at triggers and mission making and so on, but I have really tried and put a lot of effort into it, actually I have spent more time trying to make missions and campaigns than playing. The potential that DW has compared to the SH series, apart from modern equipment etc., is in my eyes the many variotions of missions available, it's not only about sink everything that floats. But it takes millions of scripts and triggers especially if you want to try to make it dynamic and include more than just the classic boomer that is on the run from the good guys. I spent weeks one just one mission and that was even primitive compared to what a pro could have done and like Frame says, once you have made a mission or campaign yourself, it's got no value really, you know where every trigger and ship is hidden, or at least part of it.

The next thing I thought of was a campaign where you start out in a full scale war invorenment in mission 1 from your base. Then the other missions would just be "normal ones" with certain goals, but they are started in different sequence depending on what happens in mission 1. But this is not possible in DW, maybe not in any sim., the campaign missions have to follow the sequence in which they are put from the beginning.

Different SSP's and bottom configurations are a must in my opnion.

And I would like to see a sim more from the engineer aspect as well. especially a nuke must be a challenge for an engineer. There's more to submarining or any navigating than just placing waypoints on a map and spitting out torpedoes, there is a technical aspect as well especially when damaged.

[goldorak]

Frankly I'm convinced that dynamic campaigns for modern naval warfare simulations are just useless. Don't cite RSR which at its heart was extremely simplistic.
The time scale and enormous distances involved just don't do well with a dynamic campaign.
You either have to focus the scope of the simulation so much that you're basically dumbing down naval warfare, or you need to have something so complex (a complete modern warfare simulation) on a theater/planetary scale that you're just never going to see something like this on a pc.
The way to go is to have a very versatile editor that lets you setup any kind of confrontation you may think of and give you the option to link one mission against the other. In other words an extension of the mission editor we already have in dw.

[Frame57]

SH4 has tapped into a much better random generator that works well. I was 1500 miles away from Japan and was getting dive bombed pretty frequently. I found a Jap carrier being the culpret which was neat. I like being able to divert from my mission sometimes and sneak into an enemy port and raise a little hell. Once for the heck of it i went to San francisco and saw the bridge and there were friendly ship in the bay. So I think the ability to have a world wide map is technicaly available and to have random events happen is doable as well. The randomness that enemy task forces in SH4 astounds me, they are in places i never expect them to be. A similar modern style of this could certainly be made. Although it would be semi-fictitious. It would be a blast.

DW and SC have no battle stations? Unbelievable! There is so much more they could add to a game like this that would be fun and be more of a CO experience than a Sonar operator experience which is pretty much what these games are.

[AirHippo]

Speaking purely as a slightly lunatic individual, I think the difficulty with emulating SH4 (which I admit to having never played, by the way) in its "all the way" approach to missions and campaigning is that it is tedious, unless you simulate every last part of the vessel's operation, to play though. Yes, life in the Navy can't all be about lobbing big explosive dildos at people, but the main attraction of naval "simulations" (including for a moment the more arcade end of the genre such as Battlestations: Midway), at least for a large part of the audience, is the shooty bit.

A further problem then arises; if you go in for the full-on, highly-accurate, "as-close-as-we-can-get-it-with-the-available-information" simulation approach, you kill your market stone dead. It's not an exactly heaving market to begin with, so turning off 50% of your audience by effectively requiring them to have spent a decade on a submarine before they know what they're up to is not the most sensible of moves. While it may sound ridiculous, I think it's a very real risk; to accurately simulate the constant work of being a submarine officer (or helmsman, planesman, whatever) is doubtless bloody hard. Worse still, most of that work is probably deeply dull stuff to the more "casual" gamer, while the limitations of waht can be done (owing to time, budget, disc size limits, whatever) will be a drag to those few of us "in the know".

To take a similar example, I spend much of my free time as a voluntary worker on a steam railway here in the UK. It's a long, hard day's work, but thoroughly satisfying nonetheless; however, attempting to play such a thing out on a simulator is pure boredom. Even the best simulators just don't offer what it takes; they cannot match actually being there, but at the same time, they force you to concentrate on what you're doing just like the real thing. For all the carefully easing your thousand-tonne train up a 1-in-50 bank, there's at least as much carefully keeping the speed just below a prescribed mark in order to avoid pointless penalties, and none of the pleasure or tactile satisfaction - or distractions - that are present in reality. All the work, all the tedium, none of the pleasures.