[Rockin Robbins]

First of all SH4 is NOT an upgrade to SH3. It is merely a different game/simulation. They both have egregious flaws, like SH3's complete omission of wolfpacks, and both have their strong points. Neither can claim any right to the "most realistic" badge. In my opinion, if you like sub sims you should want to own both. Which one becomes your favorite depends on a lot of subjective factors. If you get SH4, make sure you get the Gold edition, which has the U-Boat Missions Add-on as part of the package. DO NOT buy plain vanilla SH4 for a bargain and then download the Direct2Drive UBM add-on. It has a one time use key. When you need to reinstall (and you will) you'll have to jump through hoops until the cows come home to try to get a key. Don't go there.

I'm a TMO guy. But as a beginner, even with Brand X experience, TMO will just kill you. Escort behavior is that much more intelligent. However, your main problem will be that before you can initiate any meaningful evasion moves, boat handling has to be second nature. Live with stock, GFO or RFB for awhile. With any configuration, you can load up my TMOkeys mod to give you a keyboard layout from TMO that is very much like SH3 and has many advantages over the stock SH4 layout, including your old friend F6 for one touch access to the attack screen.

I've done lots of testing on RFB. I love it, except for the nav map massacre. As long as you are zoomed back far enough that targets are rendered as diamonds, there they are. But if you zoom close enough that in the stock game they would be rendered as silhouettes, they simply vanish. Since when did standing too close to a chart table cause all your information to disappear? Just load up TMOplot and the great TMO plotting system will be substituted, which renders all contacts as a white position dot. Now you can zoom in and they're still there.

If you like Brand X on SH3, you'll love FOTRS, the Brand X of SH4. Lots of eye candy, new ship types, new HUD, TMO enemy AI (ratched back just a bit), this is a fine, fine mod if you have the computing power to run it. I don't have a state of the art computer and it still runs fine.

But which game you like better will depend on your personal background. SH3 and the Atlantik has the advantage here because the U-Boat Navy was part and parcel of the Nazi propoganda machine. Its achievements were trumpeted and glorified all over the world. Therefore, lots is known about it, especially in Europe. However, what is known is mostly fluff and movie (Das Boot) stuff, not having much resemblance to reality. The most important thing all that (mis)information generates though, is interest. Without interest, playing the game can be a much more tedious thing.

In contrast, the American submarine effort was top secret. There was very little knowledge of what they were doing during the war (this protected the lives of the submariners, something the Germans did not seem to value), but also kept the public, even the American public, from learning about and identifying with their submarine effort. After the war, the info kind of trickled out after the public lost interest. This resulted in very incomplete public awareness in the US and almost no knowledge of American submarine exploits overseas. It is very difficult for Europeans to identify with American World War II submarines. However, I contend that it is worth the effort.