Another idea(s):

Warflags, USN fleet boats of WW2 were renowned for their colourful warfalgs which displayed their sinkings and achievments. Those of the Growler, Ray and Wahoo come to mind.

So instead/aswell as conning tower insignia, have the sub display a warflag when it returns to port, maybe even the warflag can be updated with the latest sinkings of the submarine. I seem to remember that in the original SH, in the cutscene showing return to port, your boat sported victory pennants for each sinking you achieved. Include this aswell please....

Sniper_1.

Shore bombardment - It happened on many occasions

Crew management - After each patrol a percentage of crew must be rotated off your sub. This is historical accurate as many boat had around a quarter of their crew replaced, sometimes more.

Multi national play - Like to see British, Dutch subs with the allies and both Japanese and German sub to play with.

1> Improved Dynamic Campaign. Plenty of people have already mentioned potential improvments, such as special missions being assigned during a patrol. I want that to happen. Give me some Marine Raiders to drop off occasionally, a convent full of nuns to evacuate out of the path of the Japanese advance, pilots to rescue, harbors to recon, etc, etc, etc.

2> More sub customization options. All the extra gear you could buy in SH III? Keep that, but toss in paint schemes (a lot of sub skippers fiddled with that), warflags, and on subs with more than one spot to mount a deck gun, let us decide where to put it.

3> More streamlined crew management...but don't get rid of it. Let us set watch rotations and such. Adding more 'attributes' to the crewmen as someone else suggested would be nice too.

4> Subs, subs, subs. I'd love a chance to play the Japanese, but if it's Allied only, I'd like to take a Brit or Dutch sub to sea, and I want a full selection of US boats to choose from. I also wouldn't mind being stalked by an IJN sub or raising my periscope to discover my enemy counterpart cruising along on the surface...

5> More traffic. Yeah, I know a lot of people play with the reduced traffic mod, but it seems to me that the ocean should have more activity in certain areas. When I hug the coast of Britain and don't even see a fishing boat, somethings out of whack...throw in the inter-island traffic such as barges and sampans and such.

6> More immersion. The radio stuff needs to be improved over SH III. Send us messages that were historically sent, updates on the status of the war, news from home, etc. Have the option to turn this off, I suppose, but please...put it in.

And just for a small thing I'd love to see...

7> More guns on the boat. US Boats often carried small arms for supplemental firepower. Lemme set the BARs up on the conning tower so I can pump more tracers into patrol boats and other small nuisances. :D

Replays

I would like to have campaigns saved to a replay file so they can be viewed in cenematic fashion so to say. Could be nice to look at how the AI works in ASW and how you attack, etc, analyze. I think it can be a very nice and needed feature

Hello everyone.

I'm basically a subsim newb and i got hooked when SHIII was released. I instantly went out and bought a copy of Das Boot too and i spend a lot of time searching through the list of documentary channels on sky for decent WWII submariner programs. It's wrecked my life :rotfl:

Anyway, introductions aside, I can see a lot of good suggestions here for the upcoming SHIV. Personally, the most important feature improvements - IMO - would have to be:

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1). Like everyone else has said - a more involved campaign.

The world does feel a little lonely at times in SHIII. Most of the time this is not a problem but sometimes i can't help feeling like i have the only German boat in the world. Also, it feels a bit too samey when i have to patrol over and over again. Some previously mentioned diversity of objective would be greatly appreciated.

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2). Heightened experience of being inside the submarine.

This one is most important to me. I really appreciate being able to stand in the conning tower and sit on my (captains) bed etc etc. However, continuity seems to pass me completely by as the screen flicks into each compartment. I've seen quite a few people mention the ability to roam freely about the sub, however i can't help but feel this would detract from gameplay by introducing a first-person style edge.

What i propose would be like a kind of camera waypoint "track" between compartments. For instance - if i am in the command room and i want to get to the bridge, then i press F4 and the camera moves towards the hatch and up the ladder to the conning tower, and from there up onto the bridge. This is a feature that i have craved from the start after being initially a little dissapointed at the internal navigation dynamics.

Also, when i bring up the navigation map, it feels like i am viewing the map from outside of the sub (if you know what i mean). Using the above idea it would be nice to have the camera zoom into it to try and establish that i am still in the sub and i'm looking at a real chart, rather than a planning screen in "non-space".

On top of all this, I completely agree with what everyone else has proposed for the sub interior. More compartments (even just to explore) and more crew interacting with their tin-can environment.

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3). Alternate course navigation

How many times have you logged a course to a far away destination, only to bump into an enemy contact and make a detour?

I just found it a little too tedious that i had to zoom out on the navigation map and make course alterations, only to re-enter them once i had dealt with the target.

It would make my life sooooo much happier if - upon spotting a contact - you could press a button and your current course settings would vanish but be saved to return upon a second push of the button. Meanwhile you would be free to enter new details to deal with what is at hand.

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[joke] 4). I want the ability to peek up at the bridge to see how bad the weather is without sticking my head up and getting waves over my head. Hahaha, no seriously....I have a phobia of the ocean. Hehe :doh: [/joke]

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[half joke] 5). How about adding the crew quarters compartment where you can sit down and play a fully working version of chess with one of the crew. Would be good for those of us that dabble with 1X :up: [/half joke]

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More importantly, imagine the effort it'd save those of us who like to make movies :arrgh!:

Do we know if anybody is taking notes? By that i mean is Neal and the rest of the 'Sealords' taking notice of what is being said here (especially the SHIV DEV team). It might be a good time to roll up everything that has been said here and present maybe the top ten wishes of the Subsim SHIV forum to those who will actually be bringing us the game, I was a member of the SH3 Forum at the official site but this site is/was much better.

Sniper_1

History has shown us the dev teams do read the main forums of the community.

During the last Subsim&SubClub meeting this has been confirmed by Florin (SHIII) once again.

Good Stuff :up: :up:

Lets hope they listen more this time to what the Forums are saying.
Allready its easy to see a general consensus developing about what is wanted in SH4, so lets all hope that they can include these features in SH4.

Sniper_1

I don't see why they wouldn't take everything said in this forum into account.

After all, SH doesn't seem to attract the low-attention spanned twitch gamers who only want more bang for their buck.

One thing that i'm not in agreement with everyone else about is the ability to play different/opposing nations. I'd prefer to stick to and focus on one, but that really isn't too important to me. Whatever is cool :D

Based on what has been said 'officially', SH4 is going to be another member of the Silent Hunter franchise, set in the pacific war. That pretty much means that the game will:

1. Be focused on the players submarine i.e. little or no 'stragtegic' element to the game.

2. The player will play as a USN submarine skipper.

3. Will include much of the elements allready seen in SH3, i.e. dynamic campaigns, boat upgrades and crew management features.

I doubt that other nations subs will be included, but the modders should be able to easily address this issue if the DEV's take a little time at the outset to make the game more open and moddable.

Sniper_1

Just though of another thing i'd like to see in SH4.

During WW2 USN fleet boats were regularly sent back to
Mare Island or Hunters Point for refitting and upgrades. Can we have that included in the game? The forward sub bases can carry out 'minor' upgrades and refit work, but the 'major' work needs a Naval Yard. So every 3rd/4th patrol or so you have to run stateside for a 1-2 month layup in dock while you boat is overhauled and new weapons/sensors etc. fitted.

Sniper_1

an icon on the nav map that told you wind and sea state (then you'd quickly know if you could man guns or not).

a difference in what constitutes safe weather to man the deck gun and what constitutes safe weather to man the conning tower guns (being higher up, the tower guns should be able to be manned in considerably worse weather than the deck gun).

Hmmm, might be nice but seems a bit too unrealistic to me. That remids me of another option I was thinking off

More settings in options/realism menu
Please provide more choices in the options/realism menu. We need atleast a setting for all non-realistic features. So that an arcade lover can have an "lets shoot sumtin" game and a real realism lover can have a "real""realistic experience.

Exactly. I hope the 'disk space' nonsense won't come in the way of it.

I'd defend it on the basis that a Captain would be kept apraised of the sea state (and could feel it), we can't get that input and under accelerated time, don't have any input from the crew to tell us of changes.

I could live with it being an option that can be turned on/off.

I still remeber SH1 which was a pacific threat type subsime if I do recall right. I would love to have another Pacific threat subsim to add to the collection I have right now. (SH1-SH3) Personally I do believe that there can be some updates to SH3 that would improve the game play but having a game to see the difference between the Uboat campign and the American Sub Navy would be great.

Jan

Japanese subs are a must: think about it, you could start off in a two man midget sub or something and move up from there, then you could be a mother sub and fire midget subs or something. plus it would have a learning curve ex. going from the easy pre-US war days to the US-Japanese war, thus extending the war for you

New missions from HQ ex. attack the Panama Canal, raid Pearl Harbour, hunt other sub or ship etc. maybe add in secret missions ex. delivering atom bombs to Germany or testing out a new sub etc.

Fully set interior and crew, ex. I want to see my torpedo crew loading external torpedoes while on deck etc., I'd also like to see damage, so when water is pilling in through a hole in the engine room, i want to be there

Innovative online- play as cat and mouse ex. 1 team plays as the destroyers (or better yet cargos) and another as subs. However leave destroyers and such out of the single player.

Timed crew shifts.

maybe receive weather reports, and hurricanes

"News" system over radio when in port and/or out on the water (a la Starlancer)

better death sequence, i want to be in the sub till it implodes, and then watch her sink.

wolfpacks

Gents, my two cents worth. A full range of IJN ships, not just the BB's, CV's ect, but all the auxilliarys, like the submarine depot ships, and the repair ship Akashi, and the later CVL's, have the Chiose and Chiyoda, then if they survive to the point of their conversion, have them respawn as the carrier's, likewise, the Hyuga and Ise, respawn as BCV's (I think that's the right acronym). If the Dev's want to do it right then they should give us plenty of classes of ships.

forgot to mention more realistic damage model, when BB's roll over their turrets fall off, all deck cargo should slide off along with anything else not nailed down, including crew.

To get the maximum number of ships in SH4 the DEV's should enlist the modelers on this site now to help them. The DEV's could probably create roughly the same ammount of ships for SH4 as they did for SH3, but just think of the numbers/versions/skins etc. that could be created with the help of the modders here :sunny: .

Sniper_1