Trav,
DiD is DiD
!. The point is, survival matters. Now you are new to the game, so I advise you to have a campaign where you save and load at will, and get all that cowboy stuff out of the way. I did the port thing, and the airplane thing, rammed, rolled and drowned escorts, and I loaded when I got DCed or sub-netted, or bombed to hell. That was my first career. I quit that one in 1942 with an excellent crew and a souped IX because I accidentally pressed 'synchronize' in the options and the game stuttered permanently thereafter.
I play DiD now. It's a helluvalot more intense. The whole point of Uboat existence was survival. Maybe watch Das Boot again if you have to. But I think that everybody needs to get the cowboy career out of the way. Then, you start to get interested in the big question: can I make i through the whole game without ever getting killed? That's the question that pushes me. In another post someone brought up the idea (damn me for forgetting his name in like 4 hrs) that this game gives you the arena to test your own sense of risk. That's what I'm after. If I put 50 hours into a career, it becomes more and more important and the stakes in each gamble become higher and higher.
That's the rush of it, and it's what's kept me playing constantly since August. The next thing for me is to turn off my external view, but I'm too stuck on documenting my uboat career with screenshots for that. Anyway - specific concerns:
plane fighting - I got bored of it. And, their bombs can be deadly. I hate planes. I avoid them.
TCing into port - don't. I always leave port and re-enter port in 1x. Patrols are so important, long, tense, and probably few, that it's worth starting and ending at 1x. Leave concerned and return triumphant, if at all.
Mines - too bad. If you thought there were mines nearby, then you should have been no higher than 64x. You can probably recover from a mine at 64x.
Same goes for aircover. If you are in a hot zone for air patrols, keep the TC low.
Slamming straight into a wall - you did that? What, a sub-net?
In that case - know that I _never_ go into ports. Mines and subnets and shallows and pantloads of patrolling DDs means that I go nowhere near them. I've met plenty of battleships, tankers, and other big fish out in the open sea.
So, that's a long answer. But play a cowboy career and if you don't get tired of the game once and for all, you'll probably get DiD.
KB