Why should I do all the work?

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

..I mean I am the u-boat Captain. Why should I have to run around doing everything...manual target, man the deck and AA gun, clean the stinky loo while the rest of the crew watch Angelina Jolie. I wish someday someone, somewhere could have a crew member auto target and do all the calculations....but again I'm a lazy bum.:D

[CaptainMattJ.]

..I mean I am the u-boat Captain. Why should I have to run around doing everything...manual target, man the deck and AA gun, clean the stinky loo while the rest of the crew watch Angelina Jolie. I wish someday someone, somewhere could have a crew member auto target and do all the calculations....but again I'm a lazy bum.:D
was this a question or a statement?

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

Both.:D But it would be nice for a crew member to do the calculations based on visuals or sonar/radar.

[Los]

I'm kind of with you on that bandwagon. After calculating 4 or 5 shots at a convoy and all the aftermath of getting away... to come across a lowley single merchant shortly after, I'm like: aww for crying out loud! Can't someone else do this!

my 2 cents..

[ETR3(SS)]

Some would agree, me being one of them. The Captain doesn't do everything under the sun on the boat. But the less you do the more it takes away from the game as there is less for you to do.

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

Well, the Captain makes the critical decisions and plans attacks.

[pocatellodave]

A good leader delegates authority!A good skipper has to make the decisions,so make the chiefs and P.O.'s do the ordering....LOL.It would be great if it worked that way in SH V.Some of the mods actually make it a little better in that regard.Now if I can figure out how to make SH V playable,I will try and delegate the authority,and save the tough decisions for me.

[Sailor Steve]

SH3 had a mode called 'Weapons Officer Assistance'. You would use Manual Targeting, and then ask the WE to identify the target and do the plot. The only thing wrong with it was that he was perfect and rarely missed. Other than that it was a great thing, and I don't see why they dropped it for SH4 and SH5.

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

Wow, Sailor! I wonder if that could be possible to implement in SH5. I mean like a mod and altered to be dynamic instead of being dead spot accurate. Ah, a salty dog can dream, can't he?:D

[Abd_von_Mumit]

SH3 had a mode called 'Weapons Officer Assistance'. You would use Manual Targeting, and then ask the WE to identify the target and do the plot. The only thing wrong with it was that he was perfect and rarely missed. Other than that it was a great thing, and I don't see why they dropped it for SH4 and SH5.

TheDarkWraith systematically implements more and more delays to his mod, some of them (all?) are made configurable, like the speed order delay. I'm sure you would love it, the speed change is no more instant, you need to wait a few seconds before the order is passed down and carried out - maybe later not only delay, but randomness, could be applied to other commands.

As to the topic, there is one thing I hate doing and almost never do - estimating range to targets. I'm being lazy and let my WO do this. He does it much better than I would ever do, too. :D I'm not a big fan of the hydrophone, but my sonar guy is unbelievably unreliable, so I'm made to. As to the rest of the duties, I enjoy them all, so I'm happy to do all the rest (I don't clean toilets, I doubt anybody does).


I'm kind of with you on that bandwagon. After calculating 4 or 5 shots at a convoy and all the aftermath of getting away... to come across a lowley single merchant shortly after, I'm like: aww for crying out loud! Can't someone else do this!

my 2 cents..

The good point of this is... convoy shots don't have to be calculated more than once. Unless you got them panic even before you shot, one torpedo solution works for any target in the convoy, even the rear ones. :)

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

How do you configure the most efficient fuel speed in the TDW file and do I have to uninstall the mod to do so?

[longam]

Just turn off manual targeting and you can use the TDC at each shot or shoot from the hip by pointing the scope at the target, hit the space bar, hit it again and then point the scope where you want contact of impact. This will simulate others doing the input.

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

It's not that easy...I miss a lot.:D

[tater]

Because the fundamental paradigm of the SH3+ series is wrong.

If they had properly focused on the player as captain, "difficulty levels" vs player activities of CHOICE would have been easy to split. Instead, SH5 adds eye candy that requires the player to walk around I guess, simply to justify stuff you'd not otherwise see that has no real gameplay use.

In Sh4, for example, the player should take bearings and ranges. He should have to specifically assign (mentally) a serial number (target 1, target 2, etc) to each ship (the game should not remmeber for you). On subsequent observations, he should select "'target 1" then take another bearing and range. if he selects the wrong target... he screws up the solution. His plotter (a junior officer) should PLOT.

As player if you take a bearing, the plotter should draw a radial line on that bearing. If you take 2 bearing/ranges on the same target, the plotter should draw a line, and have the course, AOB, and range on the chart (and a quick way to tell them to enter that in the TDC.

Ditto for all other types of contact. A crew that does realistic work for you—where the errors of the player are propagated by the crew.

Instead, the choice is to do the job of the skipper, XO, plotter, radarman, sonarman, etc. (some jobs don't get done at any decent level unless you do it yourself)—or set the game to magical modes where instead of plotting based on observations, it's plotted based on real-time GPS data conveniently supplied to the sub by the willing victims. That or magical targeting where all you do is wish them dead and hit "fire."

"full realism" is the only option that leaves any fog of war, but it requires the player to do things he should not have to do. I'm fine with the ability to do all the jobs as an OPTION, but I'd prefer a sim where I'm the skipper, myself.

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

tater well said.:yeah:

[BigBANGtheory]

"full realism" is the only option that leaves any fog of war, but it requires the player to do things he should not have to do. I'm fine with the ability to do all the jobs as an OPTION, but I'd prefer a sim where I'm the skipper, myself.

I think that sums it nicely, and SH5 isn't a million miles away from this state.

[Yosarian]

This is also the reason why SH5 has failed here in Germany in almost every major gamer-magazines. Not because of the numerous bugs, but mainly because of this stupid design errors.

"Mick Schnelle", one of our longtime freelance reviewer of almost all simulations and semi-simulations, wrote:

"If these running through the boat were optional: wonderful. Should we run times even to the sonar station, because the sonar guy has struck his head: okay. But as a constant chore, you can condemn these design decisions to the bottom of the Mariana Trench."

If Ubisoft create this design for the casual player, then they don't know their own casual players customers. The casual player do this running maybe twice or three times just to try it out, but after that he just wants to sink ships in a casual way.

It would have been so easy to look at other games who make it right, such as Dangerous Waters. There you can use each station manually but also switch to Automatic-Crew and set your focus only on the gameplay of your own preferences.

[tater]

I think that sums it nicely, and SH5 isn't a million miles away from this state.

Unless SH5 is grossly different than I've read here, or than SH4, it might not be a million miles from this—10 million, maybe?

The base paradigm is wrong.

The entirety of SH3/4/5 is set-dressing for ONE primary activity. The player—as skipper—observing through the periscope, then firing the torpedoes.

The simulation is in obtaining that firing solution. All of the auto-targeting, contacts on nonsense is just that. Nonsense. The solution automagically appears. There is no fog of war, no errors in ranges, no human error in plotting.

The question that should have been asked at every decision tree regarding how to model a given type of event in SH should have been to ask what the real skipper did, and what did his firing party do with this information, and what reduced data was then presented back to the skipper.

Bearing and range. Chart has an X on it. 2d look a few minutes later (timed by his crew—and the quality of the crewman can add a tiny error bar to how well he worked his stopwatch). A 2d X, then a line between is drawn by the plotter. Again, a tiny error possible based on the quality of that crewman, how rested he is, etc (since the game tracks that sort of stuff anyway). The skipper is then given feedback; "She's heading 270 true, AOB 17, range 3nm, speed 7.5." All of that not based on magical "contacts reports on," but rather that every single distilled piece of information the player gets is based on the player's bearing and range (good, bad, or ugly), possibly made worse by less than perfect crew. Deciding which guys are best, and making them your A-team then becomes some fun crew management.

Heck, even the position of the sub itself should be less perfectly known. If you have not shot stars in a few days due to weather, making a specific landfall should be hard.

Instead you get GPS perfection—but hey, the cook asks you about the soup or something, right? Yipee.

IMHO, the place I want immersion is in combat. I'd trade all the sub interior nonsense, all the interactive BS crew in the after battery compartment... trade all of them for a well-simulated attack party in the control room. The nice thing is that this is actually easier to do since the firing party usually communicates in a very specific way, there is not a lot of small talk (which if not done near perfectly becomes anti-immersive). Guys doing their job, OTOH, speak in direct, to the point jargon. Hearing the same descriptors over and over is immersive in THAT situation, not while making small talk.