Most of today's games don't really need manuals because they're designed for the brain dead, where it's basicaly "fire! fire! fire!" and that's it.
Other games don't come with a manual because they have interfaces that are extremely well designed and the games themselves deal with stuff that ordinary people are very familiar with already (car driving sims come to mind). In these games any person can simply take the controls and just roll with it without thinking twice about it.
Yet another type of games is purpousfuly designed without a manual because they're so poorly designed that the player gets more gratification from discovering how to play the game than actualy playing it. Little kids are very fond of this type of games, where they basicaly earn bragging rights by learning how to do a particular trick in their game from dedicated magazines, and hence feeling important because their "in the know"
There are, likewise, more other categories were a manual isn't crucial.
This game, however, DOES NOT fit any of those categories. This game touts itself as a simulator (it says so in the cover box) and should therefore come with a high school sized book, in which not only the games interface is explained in detail, but the theory and background knowledge that one would need in order to be a competent captain should be explained.
Ordinary people have no idea of how CO2 poisoning works (well, aparently neither did the developers) or what the law of the sines is. Ordinary people have no clue in their regular lifes that it is a good idea to order your crew to open up the torpedoe tubes before firing, nor do they know how to convert speed over time into a distance traveled.
Since all of these details (and many, many more like them) are so crucial to the game play experience, the correct thing to do would be to include a high school sized book that covered all of this, plus some tidbits of Uboat trivia or the like for background flavour.
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