Welcome to the Kriegsmarine, Fosson
BE MORE AGGRESSIVE!!!!
Long, incredibly tedious reply follows:
You sound like me, although my "baby" was SH3 (and still is, if ever I get the time to start her back up again now that I'm busy with SH5). But what really drew me when the first announcements came out about SH5's development was the "live crew" feature and the unrestricted movement in the sub. I'm really, really big on immersion and the role playing bit of being able to walk around talking to the crew, seeing them at work, looking at real models of real equipment, perfect layout etc. on top of it being the North Atlantic just had me jittery with anticipation. And then the first screenies came out and I was floored as I never thought that SH3 would be surpassed.
But, alas, Ubi did what they had done to every previous iteration of SH. The devs, those wonderful guys, ever taking up the next version a couple of dozen notches (unlike several other BIIIIIIG dev teams out there who are perfectly content to just slap a new coat of paint on their old work and call it "massively new and improved"), worked like crazy to make it the best ever and Ubi pulled the brakes and said "we don't care if it's halfway done, just slap it in a box and push it out the door. We have "Assassin's Creed 75, The Bangkok Days" to get ready for."
Sidebar note: I actually love Assassin's Creed, and I am not what you'd call an FPS fan, but that one "gets me." It's just that I'd like to see them actually
finish the job for a change or sell off the franchise to somebody who
will. Heck, I'm sure they could enlist quite a few of of the incredibly talented modders of this forum to help out for a very reasonable fee. They're doing it for
free right now, after all.
Anyway.
So the launch was a bummer and it took a while before it sucked me in, but boy am I sucked in now, thanks to the aforementioned super modding crew of SubSim!
As to survival, take it from somebody who's been playing SH for a long time and have found that one aspect in which they all shine is how
real life documented techniques (read it, it's good!) actually work: I can't say this often enough: Your U-Boat is
not a warship, it's barely fit to be designated a surface craft. If you see a threat, dive. If you think you see a threat, dive. If there are no apparent threats around, think about diving anyway, just in case.
Your Flak pea shooter is nothing but a giant trap designed to lure you into the belief that you can actually fight it out with aircraft. Don't even think about giving in to it. You'd be better off unscrewing the bolts and throwing it overboard to keep the temptation away. An airplane is a nimble, fast target. You're a big, lumbering, slow target that maneuvers like a pregnant cow. In the
best case scenario, the enemy pilot is drunk and low on ammo but still manages to kill off half your deck crew before he has to go home for another bottle of scotch.
Your only, only proper response to spotting an aircraft is "FLANK SPEED AHEAD" and "ALARM, CRASH DIVE!"
Oh, and "SOMEBODY HOG TIE BERNARD AND STOW HIM IN THE HEAD BEFORE HE WANDERS BY THE CONTROLS!!!"
Same with surface ships of the armed variety. Your deck gun is meant only for unarmed, unescorted merchants (and passing sail boats if you're bored, but the tonnage sucks
). Don't even think about duking it out with a warship. By the time you've zeroed in on them and started scraping off their expensive paint job, you're an 800 ton heap of scrap metal headed for the bottom.
Short version: The surface
will get you a mention on the UFA Wochenschau, but it will be at the end under the heading "Fallen for the Fatherland."
Your U-Boat is a finely tuned, highly efficient offensive weapon that relies entirely upon stealth and surprise. Without at least one of the two, it's a very expensive coffin.
As to evasive techniques, if fairly certain that they haven't spotted you (as in they're not doing 26 knots in a beeline for your current position), you're generally better off just going to a safe depth and shutting off everything, you don't have to hug your crush depth. They won't be looking for something they have no suspicion is there, so unless you're directly in their path you'll probably be fine as long as their passive detection systems don't pick up any strange noises. And don't pay attention to the game's CO2 meter. It's broken. The "percentage" you get is "percent of lethal", not "percent of atmosphere." You can stay down long after the crew starts babbling that the CO2 has passed 10%, you can actually stay down until it creeps into the 90s. It's been tested. Just ignore the warnings. So don't ever hesitate to sit down below with a good bag lunch watching the meter creep up as long as you're not in the 90s.
Finally, when you have stealth and surprise on your side, attack and attack anything that moves. But don't hang around for the pyrotechnics if it's an escorted target, no matter how impressive they are, and they are. If you must have that screenshot, and I know the feeling, trust me I do, then you can always "cheat" and use the external camera. But you don't want to waste a single precious second of your limited "getting the heck out of Dodge" time on admiring the fireworks. Pick your targets, empty your tubes and dive. Then, but this is only my personal preference that seems to work well, move as fast as you can in a direction roughly perpendicular to the bearing of the escorts.
They won't start paying attention to you (unless you're directly in their passive listening zone ahead, so don't be) until things start to go "boom" in the night, and when they DO, they tend to head straight for the likely starting point of the eels that just hurt their chickens, at which point you should be deep and very, very silent. After that, go with your instincts.
OK, I'm going to stop now before the last hardy soul reading this falls asleep
Again: Welcome aboard!