Originally Posted by jerm138
I turn on all realism settings except 2: Outside cam, and Contacts update. Here's my reasoning:
Outside cam: You HAVE to have the willpower to not use it for anything besides watching your kill. I know that isn't real either, but I need SOME eye candy, and it's bad tactics to wait around and watch through the scope... that's just me.
Contacts update: I've read a lot about this debate from both sides of the argument. I tend to agree with RockinRobbins, and here's why:
I can't speak for WWII boats, because I was on a nuke... but I spent a lot of time in the control room on the tracking party, and we kept the plots pretty well up-to-date using data that the OOD called out to us. He had information available to him similar to what we have available with contacts update being turned on. Granted, it wasn't real-time (but pretty close) and might not have been dead-on accurate, but it wasn't far from it.
The point is that us blue-shirts did the plotting... the OOD didn't have to leave the scope and come over to the desk, pick up a pencil and protractor and plot dots, we did it for him.
Ultimately, I think that 'reality' is somewhere between the two, and unfortunately, I don't think there's a way for the game to compromise. My suggested solution would be to have a "mark" button just like the button to send data to the TDC, but it sends it to the plotter instead. For instance, you raise the scope, point it at the target, set a range on the dial, hit the "mark" button, and a mark is placed on the map. If you misjudged the range, then you'll have bad map data.
But since we have to use what we got, I figure there are enough other shortcomings in the game, I don't feel like I'm giving myself too much of an advantage by having it turned on. But to each his own. If you get more satisfaction out of plotting dots manually, by all means DO IT!
I'm sure there are some people who would say that turning auto-targeting off is unnecessarily difficult, but I don't want to play like that.
... and I KNOW my skipper knew how to do the plotting himself if he wanted to, because he occasionally schooled us on it.
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