[Sailor Steve]

This question crops up every once-in-awhile, and it's an invitation to a fight. First off, if there was a concensus among SH3 players that SH5 was better, none of us would still be playing SH3.

Is it broken without mods? SH3 is broken without mods.

Is it a dud like SH4? SH4 is not a dud. SH4 is actually a better platform than SH3. SH4 suffers from coming out too soon, so SH3 modders aren't interested. SH4 has the potential to be the best of all of them.

SH5 has some great improvements. The problem is that none of them are implemented properly or fully. As it stands now, thanks to a couple of modders, SH5 is very playable and a great many people think it's a lot of fun. That said, there are a couple of things still undone that would keep me from dumping everything else even if I had a computer that would run it. On the other hand they are things that annoy me only because I'm weird.

1) No Type II or Type IX. I'm not really into the IX, but what's good for one is true of the other.

2) The whole RPG thing. I don't mind talking to the crew, but they are only capable of two or three sentences, so what's the point.

3) The bunkers. In SH3 there is a u-boat pen in Kiel right from the beginning of the war. It wasn't actually finished until 1944. In SH5 this is repeated, and there is one in Wilhelmshaven, which in real life never had one at all. This is minor, but it annoys me no end. On the other hand the harbors themselves are much closer to their real-life layouts.

4) The ships. After two years the best modders have still not been able to fully import new merchants into SH5. SH3, meanwhile, benefits from Iambecomelife's Merchant Fleet Mod, which adds more than 60 new merchant types. These could be imported into SH4, but no one has yet done so.

5) The ships. SH3 has SH3 Commander, which gives names to ships you sink, and greatly multiplies the crew names, among a host of other things. It seems I may be able to add historic ship names to SH5, but I currently can't even experiment with it. I really wish there was a version of Commander for SH4.

SH4 is better than SH3, and SH5 is better than SH4, but SH3 is still the most fully rounded and complete subsim yet. If you can live with those negatives the you and SH5 should get along quite well. When I can finally afford a new computer I will play SH5 (it kinda sorta ran on my PC for awhile, so I know what it's like, and I like it), but until all the issues I mentioned are addressed I'll also keep playing SH3 and SH4.