[Admiral Halsey]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

After years of playing TMO/RSRDC I loaded up a GFO configuration without RSRDC. I was surprised how much fun GFO is and how I didn't miss RSRDC at all.

RSRDC says it is a campaign mod. But it also modifies your submarine, most of the warships, the environment, enemy AI, weather, air traffic........and lots more without any knowledge or consent of the player. If you play TMO and add RSRDC you are no longer playing TMO. All Ducimus' carefully balanced gameplay goes right out the window.

Ducimus' built-in campaign is just great and I much prefer his vision of SH4 gameplay.

Even RSRDC's campaign is a house of cards that falls on examination. He merely put the entire war in a straitjacket. If, for instance, a port sent out a convoy a week but interrupted it for a couple of weeks while the Wahoo lurked offshore, that port will send those exact convoys out, interrupting for the Wahoo, which will NEVER be there in your game. You can just sit outside the harbor and pick off scheduled convoys all war, except for the weeks Wahoo was there in real life.

That's called a scripted campaign. Seems historical but turns into a farce in practice. It assumes that if we wound time back and reran the war, every event would happen exactly the same. No, it's worse than that. It assumes that no matter what you do the Japanese would do the exact same things they did during the war. The one biggest improvement that SH3 and SH4 brought to submarine simulation was the dynamic campaign, where you can't predict encounters and they are randomly constituted. That way you can't predict what will happen in your war.

RSRDC removes the greatest improvement of Silent Hunter 4 and restores the strictly scripted concrete overshoes of Silent Hunter 2, and it's a vampire mod, sucking the soul out of any underlying supermod. NOT PROGRESS!

To be fair I don't think one really should play RSRDC just for the convoy's. I find I have just as much fun watching Midway(even though the AI planes kind f it up all the time) to the Naval Battles at Guadalcanal to the Philippine Sea and Samar. That's where the mod shines and where it's at its best. Though a mod that just adds the scripted battle's from RSRDC to TMO would be the best IMO as it still give's you Duci's viscous evil AI yet gives you the battles of the war presented as accurately as possible within the game's confines.