What rules you have in SHIII?

[Torvald Von Mansee]

Hmm...I never thought about it, but I guess that I do have rules.

I like to conserve torpedoes, if at all possible, so I use the deck gun if I have a chance, first. That came orignally from my not really using torps effectively, but now that I can, it remains. After all, it would be annoying to come across the Rodney or Illustrious and not have the torps to kill either.

I know it's not realistic, but I do like to use the "disembodied" eye/camera, because that just makes the game more fun. And if I happen to have unusually detailed information from that not otherwise knowable, I'll just put it down to my skipper having some incredible 6th sense abilities.

I won't do the "dead is dead" thing, as I fully expect my guys starting in '39 to actually NOT make it to the end of the war, alive. The question is: how many times will they get killed? (Btw, I notice that most of the u-boat aces had their careers over by '41, possibly '42. I guess the game doesn't model being promoted to a shore posting)

I still need to get the gramophone feature to work. I may make a point to only get recordings that would have been availabe at the time, e.g., Caruso or whatever. Yet I'll still probably have Cream blasting, and imagine a British hydrophone operator on board a DD asking himself: "WTF is that?!?!?!" [<---uuuuuuh, why is the acronym signifying "wave to friends" missing? Rhetorical question, actually, but it seems silly to have a filter for that]

I never thought about the fuel/food thing. It would seem bizarre to be able to return to Brest/La Rochelle/Kiel from the Grand Banks w/a 1% fuel reserve. Wouldn't the game just kill you, then? I don't actually know, as I haven't finished my first patrols, yet. I don't know how much food u-boats would carry, though I suspect they could probably replenish supplies somewhat by fishing and perhaps a jerry-rigged cistern (I just noticed a theoretical pun, there).