[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by Philipp_Thomsen

Just installed CW and played.
5 minutes later, uninstalled.

Reeeeeally arcade, drive around with WASD?

Yes, really teaches you to be responsible for your sub's movements, JUST LIKE REAL LIFE.

No first person camera?

Periscope view. Do you have any other specific complaints to back your assertion there is nothing that is remotely related to a simulator?

Originally Posted by Nippelspanner

So far you simply bashed DW and the other titles, without giving reasonable examples, and your last sentence is nothing but delusional. What does that even mean, "none of them would have made it on a real US sub."?
At least the lingo and procedures are simulated - not like in CW, where your crew consists of mutes!

Most of the lingo is not simulated, at least not in DW. You don't get calls for, for instance, Flooding and Equalizing the Tubes, only Launching them (can't you remember yourself pushing the button two seconds ago?). You get the initial sonar bearing report, but they never tell you anything like Contact Sierra 3 is having a left bearing drift.

And as Wiz points out, the autocrew is pretty weak overall.

As for why you are steering the sub yourself. As a person who is actually against the implementation of automated steering in Cold Waters, I say it is because the manual steering better simulates the realistic level of attention a submarine captain will pay to his submarine's maneuvers.

Formally, critics are correct that a real submarine captain has a OOD and a helmsman. What they ignore is that he also has a real boat costing hundreds of millions (in 1970s dollars), 100 men, and real conditions to deal with. At any moment, his smooth ascent to periscope depth can be threatened by a mistake in the compensation calculation, wave action creating suction, subtle changes to the boat's buoyancy due to the neighboring seawater being of different salinity, mistakes by his helmsmen and or OOD, or sudden mechanical failure in his planes. Sure, the chances of these happening in any one ascent is relatively slim, but if it does and he broaches the captain will be at least disgraced and in wartime he may die. Given such severe threats, he will be paying attention.

The "formally realistic" subsim has none of these. Your sub will be 100% reliable in reaching the ordered depth. Once this gets accustomed to, subsimmers tend to find that problem-free period of time very boring and entertain themselves either by fantasizing the outside situation (3D view) or spacing out (time compression). This of course has nothing to do with real submariner mentality.

So, how do we make our lazy, complacent subsim captains care about their sub's maneuvers? By making them do it themselves. Then, threatened with real consequences they will and must care. But soon they'll be receiving automated steering, that perfect automated steering that has led to such irresponsible attitudes in the first place.

Are you, the Godfather of the naval simulation genre himself, saying that the boats in CW behave reasonable and authentic? If a Los Angeles class submarine would be that ridiculously agile, it would not even need counter-measures... what for, if you have fail-safe "knuckles" that shake off every torpedo 100% of the time in this 1:1 simulation that probably breaks OPSEC

The knuckles are not working very well for me. The noisemakers are indeed 100% effective in the sense they buy you some time, but this is balanced by the torpedoes' reattack logic, so unless you can move entirely out of the range of their seeker during their detour around your noisemaker, they tend to reacquire you and you have to spend another noisemaker, and another, and another, until the torpedo runs out of fuel.

In Dangerous Waters, the decoys effectiveness is not 100%, BUT on the other hand once you decoy them once you are basically done and your basic evasion technique is limited to Turn 120 degrees, Pop Decoy, Straddle Layer with Automatic Sub Control, pop another decoy, come back under the layer, rinse and repeat until the torpedoes are lost. Plus you don't need to bother with conserving the suckers. Overall, Cold Waters provides the more challenging and punitive experience.