[JF1981]

1/ Diving control improved
- diving planes (divin control surfaces) manual control
- ballast manual control

We want the sub sim to be more realistic.
When one had to change rapidly from depth, one had in previous version of the sim to go at full speed.
In reality, even with slow speed one could fill the ballast tanks, which is not possible in previous SH thought done automatically but not enough in certains cases.
Please include manual control of the ballasts as well as diving planes (the diving surfaces angle). This feature means that changing depth at close from no spead should be possible at the vertical speed we want. Previously, going from 200 to 10 meters took ~2 mins at full speed and 15 mins at reduced speed. By mean of manual ballasts, one can vary the vertical speed and get from lowest depth to periscope depth in a reasonable ammount of time, which used to be only possible by pushing the E motor in the previous SH.

2/ Multiplayer is important
- in general, the AI does not what humans do
- human vs human is much more interesting than human vs AI

Pease do something that allows to have like previously (SH III) the battles hu/hu (DD/SUB) which made the sub sim 10 times more interesting in my sense than SH IV, simply because those battles are much more difficult/complex in a certain way.

3/ Dynamic campaign or at least non linear campaign

In the way SH III did the things, the fun was really high, because of the fact that linear campaign within such a sub sim where one can do whatever he wants, is really not suitable.

We want to have freedom and encounter the traffic as we could, given the informations transmitted by radio, or given the chances that convoys are passing through certain critical paths.

Simply linear scenario is really not that interesting in campaign mode.

4/ We want to be able to customize as much as possible the ship loadout such as type as torpedoes, ...

5/ We want a much larger scale of type of mission such as
- intercept
- rescue
- recon
- other special missions
- milk cow (receive or give for example)

6/ We want a much better AI
- If our sub is discovered and localized, one should go in the opposite direction (even if this means turning from 120° for ex), making our attack hopeless but going at surface and changing position again without being noticed
- the direction change could be much more clever if our sub is localized, in order to avoid the situation where we are able to have a good firing position, and not only starting to zig zag, keeping the same direction more or less ( I mean instead og going 90° then zigzagging 60/120 one could turn completely heading 180° if our sub is located at 10 o'clock or making zig zags that are constantly changing in degree and in duration)

7/ Pushing realism further
- Why not including a realism campaign mode where calculating our position in the only way, this might be done by a crew member of course, however simple accurate plot on the map is graphically nice, but really too easy. Realism mode should not plot position, rather calculate inaccurate location of our ship, however should manual position calculation be possible (by instruments, stars etc), we could try to understand how difficult was life in those ships.
- In general, using the intruments to get informations out of the sub is really something nice, for example, such as other sims, why not to include depending on the realism level, a difficult mode where reading depth out of the mano is the only way to know our depth ?

In summary

Yes graphics are important,
Yes it is nice to implement new features, but
Don't forget that we are now used to difficult subsim games and
That we need a much more interesting challenge, "sim"ly speaking.

In that sense, SH will stay the leader of this kind of sim, as is IL-2 for air sim of the 40's.

Thanks for notice.

Footnote :

(1) And Yes, related to an above post, please Open Source of what can be, such as AI code.

(2) As well, in general, please produce a High Quality game, this is really a major point after SH IV missed to do that (I personally prefer SH III, except for the graphics)

(3) Very special care on the hydrophone is really appreciated since this is, when one knows how to listen, a precious help to locate and extract informations such as type, gross speed and direction of the unit just by listening to the propeller.
* Only earing a noise, always the same, without any parameters adapted to the reality of the ship is annoying. Earing the propeller from front, side or from rear is really not the same, just for example.
* At high speed, the propeller cavitates, which is a really specific noise.
* Taking the time to make a really accurate and complex to understand and manage sound system is really something that would improve by 10 times the interest of the game, since "hard simmers" are certainly going to do a wide use of this in order to locate and go in the right position of convoys, even in the deep, below the temperature layers, without being noticed.
* The noise of the waves and the rain could be something really disturbing if it is bad wether as well
* Screw skill on the hydrophones should change the accuracy of the informations we receive
* Implementing simple black and red lined on the map, showing the direction of the ships, is in my sense not a good way to proceed. Rather simplify the things and segregate the hydrophone informations from the map ones, keeping in our hands the task to manage the phone's informations and ploting what can be.

(4) Finally, keeping in touch with the community, and in particular giving the feed back about all the features that are going to be implemented could be something we appreciate during development phase.

In the end, Listening about each and every community comment and question is now really a mark that this game will be emphasized by us or not who are the customer in the end. Taking the time to have the reflection about what should be done in design phase is worth, sure.