Let's thoroughly muddy the waters here. What is realism? Your answer to that question, and there are several possible valid ones, will give you a crazy wild variation in the mods that will send the game in your direction.
Take the severity and effectiveness of depth charge attacks. If you do a strict number of depth charges dropped/number of submarines sank numerical analysis, you might come to the conclusion that submarines were pretty darned safe from depth charges. That might lead you to lessen the effects of depth charges until your testing yielded about the same percentage of sub sinkings that actually happened in the war.
The original author of RFB did exactly that. And turned out the most wildly unrealistic mod in the history of Silent Hunter 4. What went wrong? The most effective attack strategy was to stay at periscope depth and ignore the escorts. They would rain depth charges all over you, but you were almost perfectly safe because the simulation was "realistic" based on a valid analysis of results in the war. Players became Rambo. SH4 became a farce. And the numbers agreed with reality.
Reality isn't related to results. In the war, about a quarter of submarine sailors died in the war. Most of the time they died together with 80 of their shipmates when a boat was lost. As a result, it didn't matter how few boats were lost, the men were afraid. They expected that there was a very good chance they wouldn't survive their submarine existence.
Men who are afraid for their lives do not imitate Rambo. They are cautious. They take calculated risk. In the game we have plenty of John Wayne wannabes who "sink the escorts and then you can just take out the merchies with the deck gun." In reality nobody would ever do that. Escorts are very shallow draft and fast. Therefore they are hard to hit and take up torpedoes you might have to schlepp 6000 miles to replace. If you shoot and miss an escort, they're on you forcing you down and the convoy gets away.
In the real war, when you stalked a ship, set up for the shot and it turned out to be an escort, you turned away and found a real target. Every time. The risk/benefit ratio sucked in the skulls full of mush occupying the real submarine.
So one definition of "reality" results in players gaming the system and playing in a way completely unlike a real submariner. Is that reality? Then there was Ducimus. He said reality was between the ears of the player. Real submariners were afraid for their lives. It isn't possible to make the player literally afraid for their lives, but we CAN make them assess their risks in somewhat the same way.
This is done by making enemy AI and the effectiveness of their weapons better than in the real war. Suddenly you would never consider taking out the escorts then in a leisurely way deck gunning the convoy while getting a suntan on the fantail. Suddenly you aren't ignoring the escorts while shooting all your torpedoes from periscope depth. Suddenly there is a great chance of getting sunk, even when doing everything right.
Suddenly, YOU are acting realistically! Why? Because by statistical analysis of the results of a group of encounters, the game is "unrealistic."
Don't even get me started on campaign mods. We've had grave errors made there too. And it's all based on what you think "realism" is. Realism is a bit like an electron in orbit around the nucleus of an atom. You can specify its velocity or you can specify its location. Choose one. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
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