I've left SH2/PA out of my best list. SH2/PA was a superb piece of modding work. The PA team managed to take a totally deal linear campaign and give it life. Also, their work was so highly moddable that me (a non-modder) was able to write a post processor to correct bugs and enhance their generated scripts.

However, what killed SH2/PA for me was the fact that you could not save and load a patrol. What a shame ... otherwise, I might still have it loaded. Even SH3 has save/load problems, but not to the extent SH2 did. I never understood and anyone could program a game that cannot handle saving/loading. Amazing!

* It's said that SH3 saves shouldn't be done submerged.

Ok, can't resist any longer. This was the first subsim I bought, and loved it even if I preferred Fleet Boats. I reloaded COAD and AOD to my computers several weeks back, and fell in love again. It's great to massage the roots now and then.

Buddahaid

AOD is a pretty awsome game, i always love to ask my sonar man to play the '' Long Long Way to Tipperary " for all the crew members whenever we take out a big fat British convoy. haha, " it's a long long way to Tipperary, and my heart is right there ..." ;)
ohh...! there is an incoming radio message from BdU, sorry guys, i really gotta go. godspeeed!

I wish Vivendi took a team of programmers and handed them over AOTD to give it a modern graphics engine, milk cows and manual TDC. Not even touching a code line of the rest, it would be instantly the BEST ever subsim produced to date. :rock:

Agreed ...

Yes, there are a few game engines that if they kept their core logic and only updated the graphics, they would immediately be winners. I would include in this:

(1) AOD

(2) SMG - Sid Meier's Gettysburg

(3) RTD - Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon Deluxe

Steve,

One thing I notice about AOD while playing it today is that the cycle of the waves is proportional to the number of CPU cycles. (It's very easy to raise and lower this in DOSBOX.)

Interesting.

It didn't really bother me; it's just that people used to complain about SH1's every-night-at-midnight weather change and say how wonderful AOD was by comparison. When I noticed that it stuck with me. I would park in the fog and go to high TC while standing on the bridge. It was funny.

I totally agree with Gettysburg! There's no good Civil War gams on the market.

Ditto. Gettysburg is one of the very small handfull of games that has never been uninstalled and always gets moved to any new pc I buy. I was thrilled that I was able to get it to run on my Vista laptop.

I actually have SMG archived at the moment (had it as part of the CWC). Also, had WNLB and ANGV, but they don't come close to SMG.

Did you need to use a slow down utility to make adress SMG's map scrolling?

SMG is superb:

* A simple elegant interface.

* Games typically go back and forth until the very end. (which is often extended).

* Every spoken line meant something specific to the game.

I even developed by own mod manager for SMG.

As I write this right now, I am playing RTD.

Want to see my showcase of a Classic Game, then check:

http://www.wargamer.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=307087

No, never tried any utility, I just started using the right mouse button to recenter and move it that way.

I would also add the SMG (for me anyway) was the last of the 'great manual' games (I invented a new category:D ). Both the main game manual and the Reynolds tactics guide you actually wanted to read like a good book, and made a great game even better.

Whoa? How'd you do that? Was it Vista 64?

Home Premium. All I did was copy the entire game folder from my XP box to the laptop. I did need the Firaxis Win2k compatibility patch to get it to run (which I don't use on the XP box). It looks a little stretched on the latpop's widescreen display, and you don't get the pre-battle map animations (moving arms across the map), videos, etc. But the game plays fine otherwise.

'Boat on the surface captain', 'Now running on diesel engines!'
Woa I'm not the only one playing AOD! :D
I personaly think they're too many little (and not so little) things wrong with SH3 to make it my number 1 subsim. Here's just a few of these little things that drive me nuts in SH3; I can't even enter the name Christopher Werner, not enough space. Where is La Rochelle? The water depth is way too shallow (in the bay of Biscay for example). Then there's the 'big ones', no wolfpacks, no convoy zig zags, no dynamic radio communications. I'm not sure if all these things I've mentioned have been modded, but still... I remember for a while my SH3 folder became a huge bloated modded monster. But I digress, I don't want to turn this into a SH3 bashing post. SH3 does have some things that it does well, like manual targeting, great eye candy and ear candy too! (hehe ear candy...)
But in the end, AOD is the game that makes me feel like in the Das Boot movie.
I remember reading somewhere that the AOD programmers watched Das Boot over and over again, and it shows!
Aces of the Deep, still king of the atlantic!

Yes, I agree. The main thing that made me leave AOD in the end was the lack of manual targetting (And even if it had, the graphics are not sharp enough to get accurate data of the target), something that SH3 simulates quite well. But I miss a lot the atmosphere and specially the Wolfpacks. I have not done a single campaign/patrol with a Type VII in the Atlantic with SH3, I find it too stupid to locate a huge convoy and engage it in kamikaze style. So my SH3 careers have always been limited to the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Type IX long range patrols.

AOD still rocks :rock:

And AOD had a nice manual, and a huge fold-out map.

The white victory flags were very cool. I suppose they are available via a mod in SH3?

I still have the map. I keep it in one of my u-boat books.

I know this is an old thread but I could help reminessing on Aces of the Deep. What a classic game. I too have kept the original box, manual, and map. I had the command version where you could use voice activated commands. However I don't think it worked right. I tried loaded in up on my XP a couple of years ago box but it threw an error when I tried to put out to sea.

Dynamix the developer made some great games (Red Baron, Aces over Eupore & Pacific). I loved reading their manuals they gave a good history lesson concerning the war and the various sub commanders and their carreers. AOD even included interviews with the real U-boat aces such as Otto Krestchmer and couple of others whom I don't remember. It's a shame the games today just don't seem to be created with the same tender luvin care and attention to detail. Slap a coat of nifty pixels and shove it out door seems to be today's standard for game developement.

Command AOD
 

guys can someone help me out here what do I have to do ( or get ) to make CAOD work on my PC. I have XP and really want to get back into CAOD. Someone told me that we need some kind of free software patch or program to make this work we attempted to load CAOD and it started up but did not go very far. Can someone help with this?? Thanks. I had SH III but had a hard drive crash and every time I go to relaod it it tells me my id number is not correct and frankly I am unwilling to once again add the many mods I had on it to make it workable. I would be happy to do CAOD at this point thanks!!!!!

If you have a modern PC with much memory, you need a memory allocator (see Alloc.exe on my Mediafire page) to reduce the amount of free memory. For me this works.