Sinking destroyer with deck gun

[Hinrich Schwab]

Originally Posted by CCIP

The trouble for the game, of course, is that destroyers just have HP. Run it down and you win. Subs also just have HP, and can take hits easily. In reality, the chance that you would do any serious damage to a destroyer charging you head on is miniscule. The chance that a single hit in the pressure hull would kill you is very high. He also has much more accurate, faster-loading and deadly guns. So what would actually happen is that even if the sub was still in one piece after a few shots, the average destroyer is 2x faster - so you'd get rammed and that'd be the end of it.

Sub vs. destroyer showdowns like that ever historically happened. Showdowns between subs and corvettes and gunboats did, but even then subs have a pretty poor record in those (afaik they never did better than a draw in those situations, and that's against ships whom they matched in surface firepower and exceeded in tonnage).

That is also the beauty of the game. As good as the AI can be, it is also unbelievably stupid. Any destroyer captain worth the hot seat would maneuver around a sub to avoid presenting any target to the fore or aft of the boat because of the torpedoes. The game, conversely, can be a bit single-minded.