Is it worth getting
 

After the craptacular duds SH2 and SH3, I gave up on Ubisoft. After playing a bit of AOD on dosbox I decided to revisit modern subsims. If anyone can bother to answer these questions yes/no I would greatly appreciate it.

1 Do ships in SH4 constantly run aground/into each other like in sh2 and 3?
2 Are there AI controlled subs and can they DIVE this time?
3 Do the AI DDs in any way cooperate or coordinate their moves?
4 Is the radio traffic random or always the same?
5 Does the enemy's detection work(or rather not work) the same way they do in earlier installments?

Hi DGJ :sunny:

Hard to answer. SH3 & 4 have been so heavily Super Modded they don't resemble the stock games anymore Thankfully.

At $30.00 for Sh-4 GOLD that has U-Boat Missions included you just can't go wrong for the price.

And I ain't no UBISOFT fan.:yep:

I've not experienced ships running aground in SHIV 1.4 as of yet; although I understand it is possible, through maneuver, to trick destroyers into running into merchants. However, that's not an implausible occurance. ships don't exactly stop on a dime, and if one merchant captain who has never convoyed before zigs when he should have zagged.... Well, things get hectic once the convoy is attacked and the merchants run for cover. I did watch a ship sink in high seas without me hitting it, don't know if you'd count that as "running aground" (The seas were sufficently high that I was at periscope depth, yet on external cam my deck gun was occasionally above the water).

I haven't seen one, although I think I heard that there weren't.

The AI on the DDs seems much improved. It's taken me up to a few hours to disengage from an attack on a convoy. A lot of it depends on where you are when you make the attack. My most successful attacks, I have hit the convoy from their port/starboard bow and sailed under the merchant to exit dead astern. The noise from the merchants has allowed me to escape relatively unharmed. Once, I escaped this way without so much as a single ping striking my hull.

Not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean the radio contact reports? If you mean that, then you'll find the unmodded game quite a target-rich environment. Not sure about the super-mods, haven't tried them yet.

Their sonar seems to work fine to me, and at night they're lookouts are sharp enough to spot your periscope if you leave it up all the time.

Overall, I'd say the game is worth the money. However, DO NOT attempt to play any version of the game before 1.4. That means, if you buy the non-gold edition you need to download the 1.4 patch and apply it before you play it. Several serious bugs were fixed between 1.0 and 1.4 (in fact, even between 1.2 which I bought and 1.4). The u-boat missions in the gold edition (also available separately from direct2drive) are patch 1.5, if you get either the gold edition or buy that patch separate (same price either way), you're fine.

Also, mods make the game, and they're pretty easy to use too.

much of the game is unfinished just like the earlier versions but it has come a long way from those days and is worlds better than those ever were.

yes it is very well worth it, but get the gold version that already includes version 1.5

ps - the modders have mods to fix almost all of the short commings so no worries