As far as the weapons officer goes, if you have his assistance disabled he will no longer be able to provide target information or a solution for you. The only use I've seen for a weapons officer is to have him call out when tubes are opened, and torpedoes launched, but that is of little use. Sometimes if I want those confirmations I'll stick my navigator in that position for about 5 minutes, then take him back out.
Back to the nav map updates, I still think it's pretty fair. Say you are submerged, trying to evade a couple escorts. The only knowledge you would really have of course is the hydrophone, and that is pretty limited. It can of course detect all of the escorts that are after you (except those that are ahead and behind) but it wouldn't be able to keep track of them all at once. At the very best, with a skilled operator constantly turning the hydrophone around and listening to each escort for a few seconds, you would get an update on each escort's bearing, estimated speed, estimated range, and estimated guess of whether it's closing or moving away. But, you would only be able to get those updates one at a time, and probably about 20 seconds apart, as it takes a bit to turn the hydrophone and a little bit of listening to determine all these things, and even then it's only an estimate.
This would mean that a real captain would have to keep all this information in his head, and try to visualize the constantly changing situation. There would be no point in plotting it out on a piece of paper as the situation would constantly be changing. Within two minutes, all the escorts would be at different bearings doing different things than they were before, and your little map with all the points plotted on it would be useless again. Nope, it would all have to be kept in your head. This is why, with the real map updates option, you have to stay at the hydrophone yourself and constantly check on all the escorts yourself. It's not what a real captain would do, he'd have his sonarman handle that, but in the game your sonarman only gives detailed information on the closest escort. So, you have to do it yourself.
It's not like it makes it horribly difficult or anything, you shouldn't be all that worried about it. It's pretty fun sitting there listening, trying to figure out what they're all doing and react to them properly. 90% of the time you're only really up against one escort anyway, so you mainly just turn your stern to him and quietly try to move away. Not too bad.
|