Well I'm a great believer in realism but what the game offers at present is no more than a cake walk....Shesh my first mission out of Hawaii was to insert an agent inside Tokyo Bay...Now this would have made a real skipper cringe with fear...Well it was a cakewalk....I sighted but One ship by a non existent SD radar..But thought I better give it a wide berth..Guys That bay should have have been crawling with ALL manner of small craft from Sampans to Small ships..Not one NADA!!

I'll give my whole hearted support to all the modders because IF we get the patches then in 6 months time THIS game will be unrecognisable from when I first purchased it....Based on the assumption that 75% of the modding will be a carry-over exercise from SH3....The modders will know exactly how to and where.
Then you can bet that SH4 the modded game will be a realistic rendition of pacific theatre Sub war against the Japanese, not a turkey shoot which I'm afraid to say right now that's all this game IS.:damn:

Deep Six

The man has a point :hmm:

I think the conclusions people are jumping into are completely wrong. Noone here wants hard escorts, just esccorts that aren't blind. Likewise, noone here wants a game that's neccesarily hard - but as hard or challenging as it should be.

I tap my old 'realistic result' sign again - what counts is an overall plausible outcome. If a game about Pacific subs kills you more often than in 1 of 5 careers when you don't misbehave, something may be fishy. When a game about pacific subs allows you to run amok sinking ships on impulse, and dismiss your enemy as incompetent, then something is even more wrong.

In the end, what we really need is a good, plausible balance that rewards good, realistic behaviour and punishes players who act rashly and unrealistically.

I just had a great idea... everybody is saying that the US crew was inexperienced in teh early war.. yet we start the campaign with a quite efficient crew..

What about a mod that give you a much less experienced and capable crew in the begining.. say even the watch and engine room is below 70% efficiency even if you put your best crew there...

If US had inexperienced crew in the begining, why should we have a 100% effective watch and 100% effective engine room?

AS I read (not sure if its true) for example if your engine room is not 100% effective your engines are louder, the acceleration is slower , top speed is less..

If this is true.. .we can have a quite challenging early war with a "GREEN CREW MOD" .. :D see we already have a name for it too...

Any modder up for this task ?

Well, when it comes to anything i do, i stand by my words. Thats my bandwidth they're using if they D/L my mod. Yesterday alone i had 1400 MB's of traffic from a 25 MB file. So when i feel ive been singled out, i get a little upset.

As for having a point, if he does, im not seeing it. I dunno about others, but most of what ive been doing is fixing what bugs i can, or doing workarounds to make the game less painful until the next patch.

I believe that you also clearly state in your Flavored to Taste Mod that it is Flavored to YOUR taste. So I can understand why you get a bit angry when you have someone calling you out saying it's inaccurate. I mean, it's called Flavored to Taste for crying out loud...:doh:

Just sayin'. Hope you didn't take my comments regarding historical accuracy in the wrong way. I use and enjoy FTT. :)

PD

I share many of your concerns. As I said a few days ago, harder isn't necessarily more realistic. My focus, with the Real Fleet Boat mod, will be to make the game as realistic and deadly (no more, no less) as it was in the Pacific theatre (just as RUb did for the Atlantic theatre). When RFB is complete it will (if it's humanly possible) give the player the same chance of survival in a campaign as a real submarine commander had in the Pacific. Every mod I use and every mod I make will be measured against all the real world data I can get my hands on, and if it doesn't give realistic results it will be adjusted until it does. If unmodded SH4 generates more casualties than were generated among US sub skippers in WW2, RFB will tone down the deadliness of the simulation even if doing so means that some players will say it's boring. RFB will not be an arcade game and if players want more excitement just for the sake of it they will have to look elsewhere.

On the other hand, if unmodded SH4 has a survival rate that's higher than it was in reality, RFB will make the game more deadly.

In my experience with SH4 so far, I'm not getting the impression that it's not deadly enough. I've been attacked by aircraft three times on my first patrol - they all missed, but if they keep attacking as they have been they're gonna get lucky sometime, and it doesn't take much to bring the death toll up to that 22% level (a single deadly attack in 5 careers will do it). On the other hand, targets should be far fewer and farther between than they are in the unmodded game. Something has to be done to reduce the target population.

There's room for many mods with many different focuses. RFB will be focused squarely on realism and on giving players the same range of experiences that real WW2 Pacific submarine skippers had.

Real U-boat did this, and Real Fleet Boat will also do it. If US crews were inexperienced at the beginning of the war they will be when using RFB too.

Glad to hear you say that. Though I like a rather large Pacific rising sun (I'll just take that out of your mod), I fully support what you all do. BTW, what I dont want to see in SH4 is having to sneak up to a convoy going 2 knots silent running at depth in early 42. Sound familiar? Now,...

STFU and begin modding!!! :)

I have to agree with you Ducimus. Some people here are attacking mods that are being released as not having enough realism or whatever... and personally I am already sick of this and have decided to stop releasing mods for SH4 because of this and a few other reasons. There does seem to be be a somewhat snobbish, know-it-all attitude here in the SH4 mod forum with some of the posts. Not everyone of course, but some. I helped answer some of Tater's modding questions a few times and never once a 'thank you' or anything from him. Just 'Where's this?'.. 'How do I mod that?'. It's simple really- no one is forcing people to use any mods. Don't like a mod? Then don't install it. It's that simple.
Long live the U-boats. :rock:

That is my kind of mod.

'funny, i seem to recall you praising tater's "good attitude" (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=109595) and encouraging his efforts...

and who said anyone is being "forced" to use a mod? but if everyone doesn't blow sunshine up your a$$ then you pick-up all your toys and go home?? tell me, who really is the one here with the "snobbish attitude"???

Exactly right! In my entire time playing SH3, vanilla and GWX, I sank exactly one BB, no CV, no CA, and 2 or 3 CL...That's in hundreds of hours of patrolling.

In SH4, first patrol out of Cavite, I sank 2 CA and seriously wounded a Kongo. Yeah, it was fun, but it won't be the 4th or 5th time it happens...at least not for me.

Good post!!!!

To clarify, I was referring to you (having a point, I mean), sorry I did it in such a half-assed way. :p

By the way, we had long and hard discussions in the RUb team forum, and even longer and harder discussions with WaW and NYGM, on the subject of "why are tonnages easy to get?" - and they still are.

Beery had a fantastic answer of "this game is a U-boat ace simulator" (as opposed to just a U-boat simulator), and I still basically stand by it. Many issues regarding the ease-of-sinking also stem from the AI, which I'm sure in SHIV will be a little better, but it's still an AI; it acts artificially and even in the best conditions, once you know what you're doing - the AI's behaviour normally won't surprise you that much.

So as far as answers, all the way from SHIII there were ideas of reducing traffic, better varying traffic routes, setting up more efficient enemy patrol patterns, getting rid of easily-exploitable 'features' and adding more nuances in detection, damage modelling and weapons modelling for the player to worry about in general.

As I said, the key should be not to make it hard for the player universally, but to make the player work for his kills and pay for his mistakes correctly. It might sound like just a gameplay issue, but realism is right up there too. I think that's right at the centre of all 'realism modding' - putting more accurate restraints on what a player can and can't (or shouldn't) get away with.

Good greif as much time as ive spent dismanteling stock SH3, NYGM and GWX, i could probably write an essay on why tonnage scores are high.



Just as an aside on the topic of this thread in general, of the three choices a person has that i orginally mentioned. I excercise all three constantly. I didn't just say that, ive been doing just that for the last few years. Using a mod, and liking some parts of it, but not other parts is how i got into learning more about how to mod the game myself. Ill say straight up, i dont mod for the public. I mod for myself, first and foremost, and share what i did out of nothing more then good willl, not as a mandantory community service who's demands must be obeyed.

Sorry to say but you seem to be the one with the snobbish attitude by going by with this post and some other posts you have made. I've mainly seen you just criticize peoples work that they are doing for free and have no requirements on you installing it. It's not like they are charging you a fee to play their mod. You don't like it simply don't use it. One thing you gotta remember criticizim is good if done correctly, when it's done in a matter that someone percieves as attacking is when its becomes bad and is not needed to be said. Some will just stop modding for the public for these reasons and as a community we need to encourage them not discourage them.

thanks for the input Crueak, but to the best of my knowledge the only "criticism" that i've offered up in this regard was that perhaps just porting over gwx sensor settings to make the asw harder didn't really qualify as "realistic" (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...108075&page=2)...
that nvdrifter felt "attacked" by this and persisted in making all manner of puerile ad hominems is, while unfortunate and regrettable, not my problem;
and if that makes me a "snob" (or any other of the trite appelations that have recently been thrown my way) then so be it, "i'm a snob"...
:lol:

thanks for the input Crueak, but to the best of my knowledge the only "criticism" that i've offered up in this regard was that perhaps just porting over gwx sensor settings to make the asw harder didn't really qualify as "realistic" (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...108075&page=2)...
that nvdrifter felt "attacked" by this and persisted in making all manner of puerile ad hominems is, while unfortunate and regrettable, not my problem;
and if that makes me a "snob" (or any other of the trite appelations that have recently been thrown my way) then so be it, "i'm a snob"...
:lol:[/quote]

well i am by no means calling you a snob, was only stating the impression i gathered while reading a few threads and that is no means to make a basis of judgement on someone. So i do apologize if the post above was takin the wrong way. My whole point was just that there is both a good and bad way to criticize someone. The fact is that modding is for some is almost a second job, which is most of the time a thankless job. So I can understand how some may get fed up with it.

no worries.
in my profession (working concert musician) one gets a lot of both the good and the bad sort of criticism (and in print!) and one learns to separate out the wheat from the chaf and to not really take anything with too much salt... so yeah, i know all about good vs bad criticism. but i'll stand by that i'm an ardent supporter of the hobby and its hobbyists and don't believe that i at any point crossed the line such as to warrant the ill reception that i've been seeing here of late.

Hey, I didn't realize people were so sensitive, sorry, perhaps you shouldn't take every little thing so personally. I had baby duty today, and was typing all that with a squirming 9 month old in my lap and a 3 year old running around in the background... somewhat distracting. Thanks, nvdrifter, you helped me find a few files I needed (and figure them out), lack of an explicit thanks wasn't an intentional slight. <S>

Modding this is very much like skins and mission building in Il-2. People works on what interests them. If your thing is LW in north africa, it's pretty pointless for someone to chew you out for not making skins and missions for the IJAAF in Burma. Presumably everyone can come out with the flavor of game they like. Some will have it as real as SH4 can do, even if it's considerably more boring than mods that make it less boring. They might also switch back and forth---I like historical Il-2 missions, but that doesn't keep me away from the odd online furball :D

tater