[XenonSurf]

Hi Fidgety,
I assume you are playing TWoS, but my comment is true for any modlist:
The nights in SH5 with default game options are very dark, and there are even mods like DynEnv 2.9 that make them darker for realism, up to your point where you don't see anything. My assessment is this:

I think that at night in Real Life, you could hardly see a small merchand ship at 2000m with binoculars if the sea was totally still with no fog and the moon ahead of you (in the direction of your optics) , an ideal situation but already not so 'bright' for you... This means that a wind of 2m/s would actually considerably drop your vision, not to speak about higher winds creating a lot of 'noise' with the wakes. Also no moon at all will take away a lot of difusing light reflection which also hampers your vision. All this cannot be perfectly simulated in a game (water and atmospheric effects are very hard to reproduce).
Problem with that: the game SH5 becomes almost unplayable at night where an attack is almost impossible, contrary to what happened in RL.


Solution is simple:

Go in the game options and rise your Gamma value, you can rise it just a little bit to see ships up to 3000m with binoculars, with no moon and no fog please!, at which point the game becomes playable IMO. Best place to make these settings is in a Historical Mission, the TDW Torp Tutorial, which puts you in front of a single moving ship. Set all weather options, launch the mission, do the gamma settings until you can barely see that big Cimaron Tanker at 4000m with binoculars (and not see it further).

See first thumbnail below for Gamma setting.

In addition of that, you can let your WO assist you more efficiently by identifying ships for you, this will gain you important seconds and compensate for the poor vision. You can set in the OFEV to automatically launch the ID book with the exact entry (SOAN tab in the OFEV, see screenshot 2 below). In WoS you would need to activate one of the optional mods contained in JSGME after installation.

See 2nd thumbnail below, Auto ID Book in the OFEV.

There is the quirk in SH5 that your crew can magically see very far away, much further than you can do, in any weather situation. This ruins the tactical game aspect and there is nothing AFAIK you can do against. Some submarines in RL were caught on the surface with bad weather by destroyers or patrol boats...This will not happen in SH5 for that reason.


Cheers,
XS