[Snowman999]

Not sure I buy that. Granted, they're a different type of game. Possibly they could be said to be more mathematical - although given the procedures involved in setting up a WW2 firing solution, I'm not sure in what way.

The procedures in a WWII firing solution are trivial compared to passive TMA, use of narrow-band analysis, Doppler, and programming homing torpedo tactics. Basic, Sub School-level TMA requires intuitive use of trig; WWII was a visual, Mo-Board fire-control. Modern FC requires a long, intense, highly-technical ID phase that WWII didn't have. That faint 57Hz signal fading in and out somewhere north of 50,000 yards away might be a Victor I or it might be nothing. Determining which is hours and hours long . . .

But 'pretty non-graphical'? The only reason modern-era sub sims are expected to be non-graphical is precisely because every one to date has been non-graphical. There's no logical reason why they couldn't be as graphically pretty and immersive as SH4.

I say non-graphical because they take place submerged. You never fight surfaced. Most of the time your opponent is also submerged. You see interior compartments, not glorious sunsets and transparent water. Modern warfare is sensors, not eyeballs.

And the idea that a modern-era subsim is for hard-core types would be fine if there weren't so many hardcore simmers playing the WW2 ones.

But they aren't that hardcore because to date there hasn't been a sub sim on the level of complexity as a Falcon was for flight. WWII sub driving was much, much harder than any sim has tried to show.

That said, there are some people here who would buy one. Just not enough to make it commercially feasible given the level of modeling required. SH4 has lots of graphical code investment by the team, but the environmental, sensor, and tactical feedback load is actually pretty light compared to what an all-passive combat environment takes. SH4's variables are in files moddable with text editors--because it's a visual, inside-the-horizon environment with very little automation of function. And because it's manual by the player it's pretty easy to learn to play by newbies. TMA, even at very easy levels, is hard work. Took me a whole summer on stupid-study to get the basics down.

You've only to look at the forums here to know that there are SH3/4 players who're so hardcore I'm not sure I'm even okay to call them 'players'.

The ones who haven't gone to sea and done this stuff for real are exactly that. As far as diesel boats go include me, and I've been studying WWII USN sub ops since the 1960s, almost from the day I straddled a MK14 in the forward room of USS Bluegill while a very greasy TM3 in a Santa suit gave me my present.

Yet there're SH players who want a quick blast. But the same could just as well be said for DW and the like: some players want to get deep into the nuts and bolts of modern sub warfare and tactics - others just want to sink stuff.

I agree, and there have been numerous modern SSN sims published. None have blown the doors off and they were in significantly more favorable eras for PC games in general. As we move farther away from the Cold War there is less and less interest. USA college freshmen this year were born in 1989. I doubt one in five even knows there used to be someplace called East Germany.

If there was a WW2 SH5 and it failed, there wouldn't be an SH6. As for whether there will be an SH5 at all - personally I doubt it anyway.

We agree there. I think there is good reason to believe that SH4 is a failure from Ubi's POV.

But even so, there's only so much you can really do with a single setting within a given time period. And there wasn't really that long between SH3 and SH4 - and now, with SH4 barely out of Ubi's door, we're already looking toward SH5.

Perhaps because some (many?) of us percieve SH4 as underwhelming.

As it is, those who have a great interest in feudal Japan probably feel really frustrated that CA haven't revisited their favourite period. You can't please all of the people all of the time.

I don't think the analogy holds. That series, in whatever era, is fundamentally about land armies with muscle-weapons in a terrain-centric model with a macro world-model overhead. If they had gone from Shogun to WWI trench warfare it would be a closer comparison to SH4 and a nuke-based Cold War SH5. Not even the move from prop planes to jets was as far a leap as WWII DEs to SSNs. Maybe wooden ships-of-the-line to Teddy's Great White Fleet--it was that big of a jump and it happened in fifteen years.

Ubi, bless them, have given us four excellent sub sims, all based in the same time period with the same technology. But you can't please all the people all the time, and there are those - like me, I admit - who are at least a little disappointed that their favoured time period isn't catered for at all by a firm that obviously has the potential to produce the definitive modern subsim.

Have to disagree one more time. I think Ubi's team would be incapable of doing the advanced environmental modeling an SSN game would need. Sonalysts had a head-start from their classified work. Ubi's team right now is about pretty graphics, not deeply mathematical real-time physics. And being Eastern European I also think they just don't "get it" enough in NATO naval terms. Ubi management's recent funding policies don't indicate they would be willing to put the team together that could get it.