Why should I do all the work?

[BigBANGtheory]

Originally Posted by tater

"full realism" is the only option that leaves any fog of war, but it requires the player to do things he should not have to do. I'm fine with the ability to do all the jobs as an OPTION, but I'd prefer a sim where I'm the skipper, myself.

I think that sums it nicely, and SH5 isn't a million miles away from this state.

[Yosarian]

This is also the reason why SH5 has failed here in Germany in almost every major gamer-magazines. Not because of the numerous bugs, but mainly because of this stupid design errors.

"Mick Schnelle", one of our longtime freelance reviewer of almost all simulations and semi-simulations, wrote:

"If these running through the boat were optional: wonderful. Should we run times even to the sonar station, because the sonar guy has struck his head: okay. But as a constant chore, you can condemn these design decisions to the bottom of the Mariana Trench."

If Ubisoft create this design for the casual player, then they don't know their own casual players customers. The casual player do this running maybe twice or three times just to try it out, but after that he just wants to sink ships in a casual way.

It would have been so easy to look at other games who make it right, such as Dangerous Waters. There you can use each station manually but also switch to Automatic-Crew and set your focus only on the gameplay of your own preferences.

[tater]

Originally Posted by BigBANGtheory

I think that sums it nicely, and SH5 isn't a million miles away from this state.

Unless SH5 is grossly different than I've read here, or than SH4, it might not be a million miles from this—10 million, maybe?

The base paradigm is wrong.

The entirety of SH3/4/5 is set-dressing for ONE primary activity. The player—as skipper—observing through the periscope, then firing the torpedoes.

The simulation is in obtaining that firing solution. All of the auto-targeting, contacts on nonsense is just that. Nonsense. The solution automagically appears. There is no fog of war, no errors in ranges, no human error in plotting.

The question that should have been asked at every decision tree regarding how to model a given type of event in SH should have been to ask what the real skipper did, and what did his firing party do with this information, and what reduced data was then presented back to the skipper.

Bearing and range. Chart has an X on it. 2d look a few minutes later (timed by his crew—and the quality of the crewman can add a tiny error bar to how well he worked his stopwatch). A 2d X, then a line between is drawn by the plotter. Again, a tiny error possible based on the quality of that crewman, how rested he is, etc (since the game tracks that sort of stuff anyway). The skipper is then given feedback; "She's heading 270 true, AOB 17, range 3nm, speed 7.5." All of that not based on magical "contacts reports on," but rather that every single distilled piece of information the player gets is based on the player's bearing and range (good, bad, or ugly), possibly made worse by less than perfect crew. Deciding which guys are best, and making them your A-team then becomes some fun crew management.

Heck, even the position of the sub itself should be less perfectly known. If you have not shot stars in a few days due to weather, making a specific landfall should be hard.

Instead you get GPS perfection—but hey, the cook asks you about the soup or something, right? Yipee.

IMHO, the place I want immersion is in combat. I'd trade all the sub interior nonsense, all the interactive BS crew in the after battery compartment... trade all of them for a well-simulated attack party in the control room. The nice thing is that this is actually easier to do since the firing party usually communicates in a very specific way, there is not a lot of small talk (which if not done near perfectly becomes anti-immersive). Guys doing their job, OTOH, speak in direct, to the point jargon. Hearing the same descriptors over and over is immersive in THAT situation, not while making small talk.