And remember: fight the boat! This is no pleasure cruise where you hide out at periscope depth all day and feel safe. You're not. Especially in TMO enemy planes can and will see you and bomb you at periscope depth all the way down to 100' in clear water. What seems safe is actually much more unsafe than staying on the surface and submerging when necessary.
Your job is to find and sink as many enemy vessels as you can. It isn't black magic. In general, the more square miles of ocean surface you can search in a day the more contacts you get.
Best cruise speed for a fleet boat is 9.5 knots. That is ahead standard in most mods. At 9.5 knots you'll never drink enough diesel to have a fuel shortage. And you can use higher settings in combat situations. Just don't use them for cruising.
Early in the war torpedoes like to run deeper than they are set. I just set mine to run on the surface. The damage to the target is the same. Although the Mark 10s are more reliable early in the war, resist the urge to use them. I'm on a mission right now with an S-Boat and Mark 10's. You get only 12 torpedoes and it will take 4 to sink just about anything. Do the math. It's not good!
I'd make my first couple of cruises with automatic targeting. You have to learn how to handle your boat and targeting just gets in the way. Your goal is to know which buttons to push to do what you have to do without looking it up all the time. Manual targeting can be so engrossing that you forget that you don't know how to handle the boat yet. One step at a time.
This game is supposed to be fun! If you find yourself not having fun, and you will, take a break. This game, like the real submarines, contains plenty of frustration. Walk away, come over to Subsim and talk it over. When you go back to the game the problem will seem to solve itself.
And finally, in SH4 there are many ways to do it right now. Sometimes the proponents of alternate ways to do it right get hot under the collar and try to argue about who's got it right (implying that the other way is wrong). CapnScurvy and I like to do that sometimes. Ignore us, we're just having fun.
