My wish list for the next U-boat sim
 

Im sure there have been a lot of these posts, but this is my wish list for the next sub sim based on WW2 era U-boats. Some of the items are a bit demanding, others are quite simple, all of them are detail oriented... the details make or break games like SH3 and SH4 and what they are meant to be.

post your thoughts here, tell me what you think is lame, impossible, awesome, kick arse cool or never going to happen in our life time and even add your own ideas to the mix.

so... here goes. (no particular importance to the order)

1. The ability to have the crew man harbour stations upon entering and exiting the port. this would be an all non-essential hands on deck (after a mine strike incident crews were required to do this) it would be very very nice to see a crowded top deck and conning tower with my sailors waving their hands and hats at the lovely ladies on the dock.

2. Manning of stations in shifts similar to SH4 instead of micro managing like SH3.

3. 3D model of every interior compartment of the U-boat from the stern tube to the bow tubes... even the head! Each compartment should contain animated crew in the process of eating, sleeping, maintining equipment, going about their duties, repairing battle damage or - going out on a limb here - having any one of hundreds of possible conversations with their bunk mates (nothing big - something like they had when you pass a couple of people sitting next to each other like in half life 2 no life stories... just a little scuttlebutt)

4. When the crew is loading external stores show the men on deck going through the paces of actually doing the work, rigging up the equipment, etc. the process could be done faster if the sub is stopped in daylight with calm seas and good weather.

5. Use of enigma machines for decoding of some messages.

6. Survivors manning and lowering life boats... not just appearing (and the crew should know better than to say "Ship spotted!!!" everytime a lifeboat hits the water) not only that but like in SH4 men walking on the decks, getting killed and even jumping overboard wile lit on fire! You just sunk a ship its something thats pretty nasty to do to your fellow man... the player should get a feeling that makes him grasp what was historically envolved on a moral level.

7. special missions - not like inserting agents or rescuing downed pilots... more like realistic to U-boats like laying mines in and around an enemy port.

8. AI U-boats out on patrol in the sea with you... might be 10 miles away... might be 500 miles away, but they are there and you might stumble across one some day. (note: they have to be able to fire torpedoes and submerge etc)

9. more game play while in port. Perhaps instead of a 2-d interface there could be a 3D 1st person environment. walk around in the sub pens... see port personnel repairing your boat, fitting it with new equipment, go to the bar and have small talk with other captains or interpersonal discussions with your crew and officers or chasing the affections of that young french girl :hmm: (again half life 2 like or heavily scripted like GUN or gran theft auto - nothing too deep just some bit of immersion) Time in port should be more than just slapping new stuff on your submarine and heading out on the next patrol... the player should feel as if they are really leaving an aspect of the game behind when they leave port.

10. There is a lot of time to pass when out on patrol. I find myself sometimes spending a couple of hours of gameplay watching a little dot move across the map. many of the above implements would address this but - add a pull down menu in the captains quarters. in the menu you can cycle through any one of hundreds of cross word puzzles, word searches, or period news paper articles to read. Books on the captains book shelf would be accessible REAL titles like "Moby dick" which you could read cover to cover in the game... players could acutally use a simple CFG file to add their own books to the collection OR THE BOOKS OF OTHER PLAYERS FROM THE FORUM! anything to kill time on the patrol!

11. Radio with stations much like in SH4 - only difference being that you can direction find these stations to assist in the manual navigation options to triangulate your position.

12. this one kinda goes with the interior modeling of the compartments. why not add crew sliding down the ladders during an alarm dive? or ad crew moving from compartment to compartment during the shift changes? the player has 30 to 50 men on the boat... he should be made to feel like it... not the 7 ot 8 we are used to seeing.

#2 is a must. Totally agree there.

#3 I definitely see working. In GTA there are already Pedestrians stopping and talking to each other on the street. You can eaves drop on their convos. And GTA IV promises to make this even better. Should work for for this easily.

#5 I definitely dig. I already have an enigma code machine on my computer. Its so fun. I just wish I had messages to decode.

For #7 I would like to see being able to resupply at a Canadian coastal town. Apparenlty U-boat crews may have done this. They walked into local stores, bought things, and spoke perfect English. Apparently. I can't confirm this. But that would be awesome to do.:rotfl:

#9 I really like too. Make it so that you have a character that you manually walk around the base. You can go into your office, go the the barracks, the shipyard, etc... They could make it so that you could either go there entirely on foot or beam there. They did a similar thing in the atrociously bad Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales. Would make in between patrols very entertaining. You could even witness the pre-patrol party at the nightclub.:p

For my suggestions I'd like to see more varied submarine controls. Like being able to set the dive angle or use the electric engines while surfaced for leaving the harbour. Be able to send crew to forward compartments for faster diving. All of the minute things you could to do edge out a situation.

I'd like to see animations in the crew that actually show their fear in the midst of DD attacks. Maybe even make it so that your officers had personality traits. Add some RPG elements to the crew management so that being a Kaleun is about handling your crew as much as its about doing math on the fly.

The ability to surrender.

A more dynamic Bdu for certain. Make it so that you actually feel as if you're being directed to be a part of an overall plan for the war. Also have special missions like maybe get directed to monitor the weather for a few days or be sent to aid an ailing U-boat. Add some surprise into the game.

yes more dynamic than "press the attack" and "keep up the good work"

Quite right too... I'd like to see some sort of dynamic bdu... prehaps a way for you to get renown (Albeit very small amounts) for reporting in at appropriate points... because really the radio is kind of unrealistically modelled at the moment..

about the Harbour thing,

Drop the idea of a AI controlled Characters in there!

if you have Internet

make it a sort of 3D Multiplayer Lobby!
(for the ones that do not have internet will get AI characters interacting ofcourse)

1. if you use a mic you can talk to someone when they are close to you. so only people in a certain range can hear you talk.

2. you can check in a hall where you can check the status of certain players in the harbour (what boat they use, the amount of ships sunk and the amount of tonnage)

3. in the Bar's and stuff you can indeed go for a chit chat about ur patrol with other people ;)

4. about 2, its actually a Profile thing you can update after each patrol and you can check it from others.

could be fun no?


edit: almost forgot for Career mode

LET THE CREW GROW BEARDS when your long on sea

I'd settle for a heated toilet seat :D

That would without a doubt be the best graphical addition of all time.. I really like it :D

Well that would be a real sausage fest. In a bar, try and flirt with someone: "Hey thats a really pointy Knights Cross you've got there."

:roll:

HAHAHA thats great your at sea for a month or two on a tiny boat cram packed with dudes then you get back to the Multiplayer port and there is nothing but other dudes. yikes.

the french chicks would be AI and their AI protocol would follow two basic programming guidelines

1. Be cheap
2. Be easy

I support all your ideas guys.But the game must be about Kriegsmarine U-Boats of World War II and nothing else.That must be the main story,definately.:)

3. Be hairy ;)

Razor shortage you know. Not sure what their excuse is for the rest of the century.:-?

hahaha at least they are clean... had this buddy of mine who was in the navy in the 60's in southeast asia. said he got completely drunk and met this beautiful woman went back to this young ladies house and went to bed with her.

he woke up the next morning sobered up with a pounding head ache in the bed next to this grinning asian girl - he claims that the only parts of her that were clean was around her mouth and around her nipples!!!! :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

i vot that we NOT simulate situations like that in the next U-Boat sim!!!

The ability to keep a torpedo in the tube but run it's detonator timer...selbe stopfen I believe it's called. WE SHALL NOT FALL INTO THEIR HANDS!

Gapping holes in the side of ships when hit by a torpedo

A collapsing hull at crush depth

i think some of these things were featured into SH4... only problem is they were done incorrectly (for lack of a better word).

SH3 is hands down the best sub sim ever... anything that comes afterward should be modeled more or less directly after SH3 with additional features added into the game.

In my opinion UBI really built us all up with SH4 just to let us down. now i wont start a war here with words... and i wont go so far as to call SH4 a "bad" game but if you compare SH3 and SH4 against one another in terms of initial quality versus SH3 wins without a fight.

if only a hand full of the above suggestions made my myself or anyone else who posted in this thread were implemented into SH3 there would probably never be a need to create another ww2 based submarine simulation.

but why stop with multi player in port and in the bars etc?

i made the suggestion in the MP forums that every time a person runs the game they are part of a virtual world and when their career has them leaving port to patrol a grid... if they see another u-boat pulling into port it is being controlled by another player somewhere else in the world. If they receive a contact report it is because another player somewhere spotted a convoy and sent the report in.

there would be virtual worlds for every year of the game... a 1939 career, 1940, 1941, 42, 43, 44, and 45. you could play any year any time you wanted you would be with players of the same year career. If you were running a 1943 career none of the 1939 guys would be any wiser to it as they are dealing with 1939.

what about time compression? time compression vote. if passed with a majority vote time compression could be initiated to the compression value voted for. but what if someone votes no because they are about to engage a convoy? no problem, any time a player anywhere in the virtual world is near another ship time compression is locked out.

The game would be much more fun to play if my subsim skippers were out there in that cold water with me. And when i receive a contact report from U-132 in grid square AM19 i can say to myself "Oh man thats P_Funk's boat... and im only 3 hours from there..." :hmm: