I too have been let down with SH3 not sure - there seems to be something missing - In AOD, you could just put your mouse pointer on the map, and the uboat would sail there etc etc, then you would get an encounter, but SH3 just takes too long -

SH3 just simply does not cut it for me anymore, havent been playing for months.

Regards
Shelton.

Dude you think that's realistic? Just sail anywhere and encounter a convoy? Many real boats spent their patrols without sinking or spotting a ship.

Whats so special about AOD compared to SH3? Nothing, in my point of view. You talk about wolfpacks in AOD, but i never saw any wolfpack, except a couple of times when i reported a convoy and some yellow dots appeared on the map as other uboats. But i was usually alone when attacking convoys. I remember AOD as an old DOS-game full of memory problems, and the update based on Windows was full of bugs.

If you cant find convoys in SH3 you hunt in the wrong places, as far as i know SH3 simulates real convoy traffic while AOD was random. And later in the war you wont find much outside convoy lanes, which is realistic. When the allies could read uboat messages in late 1941 uboats could patrol for a month or even two without spotting a convoy or a single ship since convoys changed course when they knew uboat positions. But the germans came up with the enigma-codes...too bad SH3 came without the Enigma-machine, how about a mod? ;)

But i dont miss anything from AOD, except that online manual maybe...historical info about the uboat war and more.

I find myself agreeing with both sides of this discussion. However...

AOD was very special...it's even better today because of the capabilities of my cpu. It still presents "palm sweating" situations that I think are mainly due to the fact that you cannot go outside the boat with "hollywood" camera. You cannot cheat. Your mind is left to wonder where the DD's are. You cannot pop up to the surface and choose an easy way out when you're getting hammered with DC, as you can with SH3

The DD AI is far more aggressive in both the original SH and AOD than in SH3...as a result, higher scores are attainable. A lot of times in SH3 I can keep my scope level with the surface (awash) and fire away at a convoy and never get pinged.

As far as I can (personally) determine, the only thing I didn't like about AOD was it's not having manual TDC...and of course, it's grafics. So...IMHO SH3 is nothing but an arcade game except for ONE thing...this community's MODDERS. <hand salute>

...one final thought--the main purpose of the undersea weapon is to sink ships...not shooting down airplanes. A/C are not cost effective.

Look at the far wall of the radio room. That typewriter? Looks familliar?

And Enigma was designed before the war. The poles stole one (Army version) in 1939, in fact.

Aces of the Deep :up:

Reading this thread makes me remember the good ol' days of doing Aces of the Deep, which is the only sub sim I completely finished to the wars end. Best sub sim ever made. It would be great to see a sub sim made exactly like AoD with all the original features and then add current graphics and a few good things like the hydrophone room to it.


:cool:

I must admit, I agree. Yes, I thought AOD was the bee's knees at the time (after I *finally* got the thing running on my 486SX40 - flashbacks to heavily modified boot disk). I was mesmerised by the rolling wave effects and the graphics were more than a step up from Silent Service II. I played it for hours, nay days, straight - even moreso than I now play SH3.

BUT...

Wolfpacks? Didn't care for them. Even back then I didn't think they were "quite right". Would I want Wolfpacks in SH3? For completeness perhaps, but only if they were rendered accurately. But this would, for reasons already explained by others, get boring pretty quickly. So I'm not fussed by it.

What I *do* miss from AOD, however, is:
-the printed grid map - but this doesn't really count 'cause I still have it and use it to this very day :smug:;
-the nightclub - SH3 Commander has a Newsmod, but I'd love to include somewhere the typical "scuttlebutt" of the time - the true and not-so-true tales that add to the atmosphere;
-the pennants on the boat when you returned to base.

AOD will always be groundbreaking, but the fact is, I'm playing SH3 now and loving it - thanks to all the modders :up:...it's great to wax nostalgic and reminisce, but the bottom line is, where's my copy of AOD? In a box where it's been for 8 years! (I had CAOD, but that lasted all of about 1 week on my hard drive).

PS to wg_emevet and rolfatle, try SH3 Commander, it will do/support some of the things that you are hanging for.

Aces of the deep, was great, I liked it alot, but it did have a few things about it that drove me nuts. (more on that another time)

Things that AotD had that I don't think SHIII has...

1) We can't park our sub at the bottom of the ocean down to 200meters about. In SHIII, we get all kinds damage if the bottom of the boat even touches. Nor can we get stuck in the mud.

2) AotD had 'water seeping into the boat.' Remember the gauge that indicated how much water was in the boat? Why doesn't SHIII have it? (the water in the tanks, i don't think it had one for water inside the presure tank either though.)

3) Yes SMOKE ON THE HORRIZON is not in the game. I think that its because, for all the graphics can do, they maybe can't simulate 'smoke on the horrizon' from the bridge view. So they don't put it in, sux.

4) In AotD, I believe, that our subs speed had to do with impact damage of the torpedo. As in, try to 'charge' at full speed just before firing a torpedo at a ship. I believe this gave a better chance of doing more damage to a ship in AotD.

5) Yep, wolfpacks, let alone convoy reports from other subs, were the bomb.

Stuff that I think SHIII could have...
A button to tell sonar man to 'report ALL contacts.' If theres more than one ship on sonar, we can ONLY tell the sonar man to report on the NEAREST (warship or merchant) contact, but not ALL CONTACTS.

About the convoy debate... AotD had too many convoys sometimes. They would cris-cross each other sometimes there were sooo many.

Just a question, in SHIII, am I supposed to sink neutral ships??? Thx in advance.

No, that´s gives you negative renown.

I forgot about the pennants! That was a nice touch.

What happened to CAOD? One week? I never had that one. What happened to you?

SH3 Commander? What does it do? What are 'must have' mods for SH3?



:cool:

Yep, AOD definately had it. Was great subsim that really gave you the feeling of being there.

But nowadays the standard gods-eye map and the too-easy-to-beat artificial intelligence would be the main immersion killer for me.

It was a rather poor attempt at porting AOD to Windows. Quite buggy and rather disappointing after the "real deal". That's what I thought at the time anyway.

Read about SH3 Commander here.

Hello,
i know this thread is old, but still...
SH3 is better than AoD, there can be no doubt. There probably would not have been an SH2 or 3 without AoD though. But if you really play AoD again after SH3 you will suddenly realize that there are a lot of things missing and wrong in AoD. Convoys were so abundant, and you were always told their exact position that you somtimes met three convoys crossing each other on different courses, which is absolutely unrealistic - but it certainly was fun, ok. In reality boats came home having never found a ship, let alone a convoy.
And i cannot remember enemy harbours full of ships in AoD, in fact there were no enemy or own harbours at all (SH1 had that). Sure, leaving and entering port in AoD was shown with one bitmap being pulled along in front of another, but you do not really want to compare that, do you? AoD was very good for its time, almost a quantum leap in that genre. But i just never had a subsim before SH3 with that realism and immersion, and where i could see my own boat diving from outside (OK, the old "Das Boot" subsim had it, and SH2, but SH2 failed with a lot of other "features"), and in such graphical quality - this is simply outstanding (let alone "seeing" your control room and crew members).

The wolfpacks never left port together, and they marched to their op area single, the courses were set up by the boat's navigators (there were a few deviations like those FlAK traps in the later war, and when they marched to intercept the invasion - but that was all). In fact the commanding officers often did not even know of other boats in the vicinity before an attack. Wolfpacks were alone managed and organized by the central command, first from the villa "Kernével" and later the HQ "Koralle" near Berlin, leaving U-boat commanders virtually blind concerning the general situation. The build-up of wolfpacks was dynamic - boats were contacted to give away their position, and if they were near a projected intercept position ordered to patrol a certain region, but only after the "B-Dienst" (Military observation with spies, radio intercepts etc.) had reported the probable position/course of a convoy. And the yellow rectangles in AoD were absolutely unrealistic, U-boat commanders would have been happy to know the position of other boats to synchronize an attack, but this was almost always impossible and only known and ordered from "above". Also the boats bound for the operation "drumbeat" were leaving and marching alone on different courses (which was certainly never a wolfpack).
Greetings,
Catfish

Both of these are pretty unrealistic. I don't think you'd have a gauge for total ballast onboard. They might have had them for single tanks - I'm not sure - but having one for all the tank would be a piping and tubing nightmare.

The speed of the boat at launch is only going to affect the speed of the torpedo for the first hundred meters or so.

AOD:

errr.... Get Over It! :roll:

(Heard of NFL, NHL, - 'GIRLS?? - well perhaps the latter with 'Father' is pushing it - but hey!) :rotfl:


PS - Dont bet money on there EVER being another subsim (at least on a PC platform) there isnt enough profit in it - see other threads!

I think that Silent hunter 3 is better than AoD.

Aod was very good for his time but we have now a game that do about the same things and more with better graphics .

only few things remain from AoD with is not possible with sh3:
wolfpacks, bdu ordering new patrol grids, and bilge water gauge.

I have a copy of Cod that works in windows, but runs a bit fast in my computer :roll:

I thin that sh1 was a very good game too.
a great campaign ( start departing in manila and finish the patrol sinking ships in the same port that is now japanese), good damage modelling ( the water in the engine rooms could damage the e-motors and diesels) , very good graphics, and enemy submarines .

The stand-alone version of SH3 isn't even as good as the old Wolfpack or SS2 on the Amiga, ( gameplay-wise I mean, not so much graphically ) God bless all modders.

WELL MODDERS?
How about a Water in the Bilge Gauge???

Need wolfpacks, it gets a bit lonely out there trying to take on convoys and their escorts by yourself!

I've been forming a theory on this.

Because graphics are so complicated these days, it takes an enormous amount of programming time to finish the graphics. That leaves not so much time for the gameplay. Back in the days of Aces of the Deep, the graphics were way simpler. The result: An enormous amount of the programming time budget could go for gameplay programming with AoD.

The modern computer gamer thus suffers.




:(