Wolfpack vs Uboat -- Differences ? ? Pro's/Cons
 

OK

I have to ask.. What are the differences between the 2 ?

A list would be nice... Any one want to give it a shot ?

They are 2 completely different games

Wolfpack is a multiplayer-only sim where a group of players work together to hunt for enemy vessels. "Co-op Silent Hunter" is the best description for it.

UBOAT is a crew management game wrapped in a submarine theme. "The Sims submerged" would be the best description for it.

Yep 2 completely different games.. BUY BOTH



Wolfpack - Instant action Mission base.. very immersive solo or as designed, Multiplayer Crewed.. all manual..


UBOAT - think Silent Hunter series with a RPG twist .. you really have to keep up with the crew, including shooting the cook now and then.. although most solutions can be AI.. you can manual attack..kinda too.. When you first start it looks a lot like the map and time compression everyone is use to from the Silent Hunter Series.. The Planes are already there with a full UBOAT interior.. radios stations and transmissions from HQ etc.. a very good looking FULL Blown game.. mission can be anything from ship sinking to spy drop off to find lost ships and help other subs damaged to diving for wreckage goodies.. but lots of bugs to start with in their Early Access (more features = more bugs).. I am sure that will change.. NO Multiplayer..


I have to say by content UBOAT has the top spot.. but for an immersive feel on a 1-2 hr hunt.. Wolfpack wins there.

yep...need both...:)

I wish.

The game is currently just a convoy attack simulator, of which you are already near enough to find them. There is no "hunting" for targets involved.

Both games are great but not finished yet. Completly different styles. Unfortunatly Uboat is almost unplayable atm. But really promising. I'd say the best mod ever would be a way to switch to Wolfpack when you are close enough to hear a contact in Uboat then back to your Uboat campaign with updated stat^^ It will depends on the games but if we could get enough info from saved games and edit them maybe. Or a campaign in Wolfpack but doesn't really seem to fit in the game. I don't know. We will see but I hope they will both be finished and polished :-) I love the crew management in Uboat. Having to sleep, repair, recharge, ... is really cool. It adds to realism imo. Uboat is more a campaign solo game while Wolfpack is pure immersion. In wolfpack you are on a mission to attack a convoy. It's really the time when in a campaign you dive to make a sweep and you heard them. It's time to attack on full realism mode in coop (or even lonewolf style)

If wolfpack get a good mission editor, accessible through editable files
+ stats files at the end of the mission.
and
if Uboat makes it possible to edit saved games :

You could pass from one to the other.

That would make that the perfect game Imo.
No places feels like Wolfpack
but full traversal of the Atlantic makes no sense in wolfpack.

By the way : Wolfpack > Uboat (since a wolfpack is many uboat ;-))

It’s patently obvious what the differences are; I suggest you read their store pages and watch a video on YouTube about each and do your own research.

There’s no point asking someone here to spoon feed it all to you because they’re completely different.

One is heavily based on co-op realism, the other is a single player management game.

U-boat is a new game and it's very good.
Wolfpack is a new experience and it's awesome!

Personally i was very excited about both games. And i was surprised how fast i lost interest in Wolfpack. I followed the development over a year and watched a lot of streams after release. I wish, the spark would have set me on fire. The depth of simulation is very, very nice. But it has too many edges. Its graphics are not comparable to UBOAT and the gameplay becomes extremly fast repetitive.



Overall i recognized a deep lack of communication from the dev-team and updated perspectives for the game. Additionally the gameplay is to narrow focussed for me. I like to walk around the sub, manage things, feel the immersion and hunt ships. UBOAT might get all this very detailed sim-feeling from Wolfpack when the SDK is released, but Wolfpack will never get the broad gameplay from UBOAT. So in my opinion Wolfpack is a really nice done simulator, but will loose the race. Main reason is the missing community communication from the devs and nearly no content updates (so far). I cant see, where the game is going.

It's EARLY ALPHA... what we have to 'play' (test really) is a bare bones semi-random mission with early interactive stations.

Read the Roadmap to see what's coming. Read the interviews.

I really hate this aspect of Early Access. People have no patience, and they certainly don't respect the development process. There is so much more to come, and what we have may well significantly change.

You've basically paid to test and give bug reports and watch the development process.

If you're not onboard with that, you might as well wait until full release.

But play testing as each new system and mission is added would really help propel the game to be the best it could be, but you need patience and respect of the process.

Can you give us some ideas on how we can make it a "hunting" sim?

Co-oping a single uboat (with captain controlled time compression) through a silent hunter style career is the game i really want.

But that's not what wolfpack is, and i'm ok with that. It's just not something that will (or even hasn't so far) kept my attention. It's become rather repetitive already. Cool for an occasional session, but not something we'd do nightly.

It already is a hunting sim; the only thing to possibly change is that the grid were supposed to go to, we never need to get there... we could have to hunt in and around that grid, but that would probably mean about an hour plus, of real time “hunting” before a convoy was detected.

Most people wouldn’t be up for that, but having it as a separate mission as an. option would be great.

The only other hunting I can think of is multiple different contacts at range, and some might be ships we can’t attack, this we have to then turn around and go to find the other contacts and see if we can find some to attack.

That would be very cool, but again increases game time.

I definitely however veto any time compression in the game; it would destroy what the game is.

Thanks, gutted, for the feedback. Agreed it can be repetitive, although we have a lot more content to come and a lot of other features that will deepen the gameplay. The current version is about 20% of the total game. We have stuff planned that will address the variety of missions, some of it I cannot discuss at this time. I will say that when the Enigma, HF/DF and kurzsignale parts are finished, you will have more hunting options.

We had a lot of discussions about time compression and warping. Initially I was in favor of it, because my time to play games is pretty limited. We examined the mechanics of a Silent Hunter style career and essentially, it is the same thing over and over:

1. the player starts the mission
2. clicks on max time compression
3. watches a sub icon move across a computer screen map of the world
4. waits 2~20 minutes for the game to spawn a convoy ("intercept" a convoy)
5. alerts the player and stops time compression
6. player now makes the observations necessary for the approach.

Spawn a convoy or to "intercept" a convoy is essentially the same thing. Whether the game has convoys in a database and they are generated when the player's coordinates meet the required criterion for "contact" and convoy generation. Or if the game randomly spawns a convoy at predetermined intervals, the player really has no way of seeing this and the perception is the same: our sub is sailing at 2048x times actual speed and we came across a convoy.

When a player watches a sub at max TC zipping across a map of the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, it's all imaginary and simply feeds the perception that the sub is "in the world". When a player is "hunting" he is simply watching a screensaver until the game spawns a convoy.

If there are radio messages informing the player of possible contacts or map updates that show intel where convoys might be, that does add a lot to the perception that the player is hunting. But it still boils down to the same thing--max TC until the game stops you and says "hey, you just found a convoy". Player decides to investigate a harbor? Spawned enemies, contact. Player sails across the Atlantic to the Horn of Africa? Spawned enemies, contact. Player sails to the US East Coast? Spawned enemies, contact. That's not bad, I'm not saying that. But it is what the games amount to.

With a co-op game, we simply cannot expect 5 players to spend a lot of time looking (waiting until the game spawns a convoy). We sure don't want 5 people to spend an hour looking for a convoy and never finding it. And we made the decision to avoid time compression because that's too game-y for the atmosphere we wanted for Wolfpack. Real time tactics build a lot of tension, real human emotion, and that makes Wolfpack different from Silent Hunter where a guy can zip around a convoy in 2 minutes and replay the same scenario until he gets the results he wants (that's fun too, but a different fun). In Wolfpack, no computer message alerts you "there's a convoy, get ready!" You and your crew find and examine the convoy with your own eyes.

So the current version of Wolfpack cuts out the hunting aspect that involves a lot of time waiting. Because as any hunter knows, there is a lot more time involved in hunting than in finding.

Correct me if wrong Neal, but while there may not be a "There's a convoy, get ready" message, in reality, Wolfpack just starts (currently) at the next step from such a message and one knows there's a convoy somewhere in the vicinity.
I.e., in SH one gets: A. A convoy reported message then goes to an intercept spot and then B: hunts for and hopefully finds it.
Wolfpack just skips A and goes to B in other words. The B has the same aspects in either game (other than multi or not obviously) ?
Regarding TC, I'm not sure it's any more "gamey" then plopping one's boat in the middle of the ocean with the foreknowledge that there's a convoy already nearby.
But doing the "plopping" is a good time saver idea, which of course, is all tc is too.

as mentioned previously by gutted, the gameplay does get repetive, with the current situation being that the subs spawn almost within sight radius to the convoy.


Personally I don't think this is inherently a bad way to do it, and Neil got right on the money.

Waiting is not always fun.
Games are supposed to gratify the player and not bore him enough to leave the hatch open on a hydrophone check.



For now atleast I will be waiting for new content and features, with my eye trained especially for

- new adversaries (like new warships and airplanes to dodge),

- later some variations to Uboat models (like the type II coastal boat and IX),

- maybe some sort of "career mode" (though no ideas how this would be done)
- i like interacting with the enviroment on the boat. If Wolfpack is going to be a firstperson immersive uboat crawler, then the conning tower, bridge etc should have some nice buttons and knobs to push and turn because i like things that do other things.
- mission fail/success screen rework. its pretty anti climactic the last i saw of it.




But a small dev team means no breakneck speed and so i will simmer down for now with these ideas off the top of my head, retreat back to my hole and wait for new updates.


TLDR: Yes its repetetive. New content pls. Good luck devs.:up:

My thoughts on Wolfpack Updates ect


1. When the escorts get Hedgehogs that will be a whole new ball game and uboat crews will have to adopt new stratergies like greater reliance on the sonarman as he reports the escort with Hedgehogs closing calling out the distance as he listens intentley judging the distance of the approarching escort.


2. When Aircraft are put in Wolfpack that raises the bar again do you surface on a cloudy winter day trying to close the distance to a Convoy when liberators with radar are in your area and the Aircraft communicate with the Convoy escorts giving them your location


3. Wolfpack a one size fits all Simulation so to speak as regards from what the Devs have said so far AI Bots on the unmanned stations for Single Player nice touch that.
The idea of some sort of Campaign realy excites me i dont know if this will happen.

I have written a SH3 GW3 Campaign for the Steel Sharks Clan in the scripted leyer of the mission editor i would love to write something similar for Wolfpack as well as new Missions making them more challanging having the escorts with different crew class compitant Veteran Elite.
More escort types stretched Flower class river class captain conlony class Usn ewarts bensons buckleys tacomers as the war progresses with better deadlier Depth Charges.
Also Merchants from different nations.


Re Missions the bigest Wolfpack Convoy ive seen so far was 32 merchants 3 escorts
writing a Wolfpack mission 36-40 merchants laid out 4 rows of 9 then 4 merchants at the back with 4 escorts but a escort support group arrives on the scene an hour into mission so will you go for more tonage or do you now evade the toublesome escorts and slip away to fight another day


4 . Human Controled escorts now this sounds very interesting indeed dancing around AI escorts is one thing evading A Human controlled escorts a whole different ball game for sure.


I know its a Big wish list with a capital B

Wolfpack Played 12.5 hrs
I dont like multiplayer so i dont play much of Wolfpack atm . I can see though that it is miles ahead for that virtual out on the sea feeling and comradary when you have real players playing along side . There is a lot of the roadmap to be added .
The devs seem fanatical about having a highly polished problem free game .

Uboat . Played 6.3 hrs
Too convoluted (maybe i just need to play it a bit more) , no hardcore options . Very early beta imo .
The bugs dont worry me because the devs atm are hitting the bugs out of the ball park .

I bought both games .
This is the golden era of pc ww2 sub games atm .

Have a slider on the lobby settings page that gives you approx min to max distance that a convoy would spawn from the sub . The slider would adjust the approx random distance that a convoy would spawn . Have it visible on the join page so players can decide if they have the time to play that particular scenario . It might be too technically difficult to implement at this stage of game development or dumb idea , i dunno . Maybe just have 3 different spawn distances to choose from .
I know its a lot of work but if there was a mission editor and a steam workshop it would solve the problem .

After getting some shuteye and coming back to see whats up in the thread:
AI can only be so smart and is always slaved to its directives, ergo. it cannot really act unpredictably, like a human opponent would.
I'm also reminded to quote "It is hard to make a AI that makes mistakes."


I think it would be a improvement to the game to aim the game towards a PvP element such as a Wolfpack vs. Escorts, with all but the merchants themselves being directly human controlled.
Don't get me wrong though, I think the game is fine as it stands. I only think it benefits from having both sides controlled by humans to add in the unpredictability the game needs.
Regarding the destroyers/corvettes etc; it could be done as with the uboats. One or two areas for the players, a captain, helmsman, sonarman. A captain for commands and weapons control, helmsman for engine and rudder control, sonarman for hydrophones and ASDIC.

While I say weapons control, I don't mean direct control though. I think the gun mounts and depth charges should be AI controlled but with indirect fire commands/directives given by the captain. (as in, captain directs fire by binoculars but has no direct control on aiming)

Additionally the escorts could give orders to the merchants such as evasive manouver directions, speed changes, assume column/line/box formation etc.
Though this then should be somehow balanced that the convoy cannot outright outrun the sub players to win the scenario, though this can be rebalanced after playtesting and feedback. (if the idea ever makes the cut)

This could also be expanded to the aircraft being controllable, armed with depth charges and machineguns. Also with radios for the pilot to communicate with, searchlights, flares to mark sub positions etc.

I'm not too familiar with how transparent the atlantic ocean water is, as in, could you see a sub's silhouette that is in periscope depth from say 30-150m height, or how visible the periscope would be.
But while the aircraft would not neccesarily be a remarkable threat factor (speaking in game terms) to balance out the planes not being too OP, they would add in significant pressure on the subs crew, knowing that there are planes around, and staying in periscope depth is a risk in itself.
I also remember somewhere hearing accounts that the noise from the aircraft could be heard vibrating in the sub hull, though this could be with the cold war turboprop bears...


"Aircraft in the early days of Air ASW primarily relied upon visual lookouts to detect submarines. These patrolling aircraft consisted mainly of Consolidated PBY-5 Catalina seaplanes, smaller aircraft, and various airships (or blimps). Their weapon systems were limited to guns, depth bombs, and rockets."
Technically if the devs were to add a warship "convoy" (read: carrier/battleship with escort) then it could be also sufficiently logical to have fighters/dive bombers instead of Catalinas.


I see land with a harbor. A convoy with heavy escort is barely out of the bay when the first torpedo sinks the vanguard corvette, the small airstrip near the harbor scrambles three fighter-bombers and convoy increases to flank with the escorts frantically banging the seafloor with their ASDICs while reinforcements are inbound from the port.

The wolfpack lurks about getting into position and fires off salvoes while being chased by briton warships and american planes.


EDIT; Thoughts?