Welcome to the forum from another relatively new person.
2.0 ghz CPU is the minimal required by SH4 iirc.
Unless your laptop is specifically made for gaming, it might not have the horsepower to run the game smoothly, so that might be a cause of the sluggish cursor in some spots.
Looking up online, it seems Ubisoft stopped using StarForce in 2006.
There are utilities to remove StarForce once all games using it have been uninstalled.
If your copy of SH4 was made in or after 2006, you might be lucky and not have one with StarForce.
I have learned a few things on these forums, and a few things through trial and error, that might prove useful for you.
I do know that the manual lists stuff that is not in the game, and doesn't list stuff that is in the game.
For example, with manual operation of sonar/hydrophone or radar, Home and End keys, and the mouse wheel, can be used to manually 'aim' them. The mouse wheel is most accurate imo, allowing you to slowly turn them at 1 degree increments, handy for more precise aiming of them.
The moment you 'fire' a torpedo, the TDC apparently stops updating torpedo data. It is best to manually open tube(s) before firing torpedoes, to prevent torpedoes from being launched with targeting data several seconds old.
You can often hear stuff on manual hydrophone use that the sonar operator will not report.
You can manually 'ID' something as a merchant or ship and 'update' it so it will be shown on map (if such a setting is used)
Convoy escorts can be devious little buggers (personal experience).
If there are several of them, beware of them apparently 'getting lazy' and then taking off, as one of them might actually have killed their engines to lurk and listen... or worse, make a (fairly good) attempt at imitating the sound of a merchant (with a 'flaw' for someone that uses hydrophones manualy to investigate the sound of a suddenly detected merchant)
A trick for escorts.
2 torpedoes, 1 at them, one 5 seconds later and aimed ahead of them. They don't speed up, boom. They speed up to avoid the first torpedo and don't turn enough, boom. Or the rare chance they will thread the needle, or have both their tail and nose blasted.
Trying to wait out a depth charge attack might not work to well, I have heard that any ship basically that can deploy depth charges has unlimited depth charges...
I have heard of, and encountered, that enemy's sometime can easily spot/see (and hit) a sub at night, even when they, technically, should not even be able to see the sub in general. Heck, I was near Wake once, looking for targets on the way back from patrol, started getting shot at by an apparent shore gun... 6-7nm away, at night... at least I think it was a shore gun, since I saw/heard no evidence of ships, and it was a lone gun firing at me.
It's amazing what silent running, all stop, and thermal layers do to mess up escorts, it is like they don't know what to do when stuff blows up when they don't know where I am even at... or do not even know I am there in the first place.
I guess it kind of goes well with the saying in my signature...
One minute the enemy ships are all
Then
Then
If knowledge is power, then being unknown is to be invulnerable... (unless at least one of them knows how to actually track down and blast you out of the water, but I am still middle of 1942, so I haven't encountered any good sub hunters yet)
Overall, SH4 is still a good game, despite the not so good manual, and some of the short comings such as in terms of the enemy's ability to spot you easily when they shouldn't be able to spot you easily... there is also the problem with aircraft, some areas have absurd levels of aircraft. Some real WWII subs maybe reported several dozen aircraft spotted during patrol... but try several dozen per day... or a dozen an hour (rough estimate)...
You can either dive a lot and rely a lot on SD radar, or just lurk deep and slow during the day, and doing surface travel during the night.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteamWake
Well welcome ! 
What thing is that? I thought it was just a matchmaking service. |
I decided to google it.
It seems it does a lot more than matchmaking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameShadow
"GameShadow is a gaming community website and freeware utility that keeps PC gamers up-to-date with patches, game demos, trailers, mods and other content for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 games. GameShadow identifies the exact version of every game installed on a user's PC, then checks its database to determine which updates are available for those games."