The future of Submarine simulations

[Jaqwon_The_Chef]

I think a company like Paradox Interactive could make some great Subsim games. They already make games that appeal to a niche audience and do extremely well with their historical sandbox titles aka. Crusader Kings, EU4, Hearts of Iron.
Great company that really pays attention to detail and Historical accuracy. Two things this genre needs

[Aktungbby]

Jaqwon_The_Chef!

[Hartmann]

Originally Posted by Jaqwon_The_Chef

I think a company like Paradox Interactive could make some great Subsim games. They already make games that appeal to a niche audience and do extremely well with their historical sandbox titles aka. Crusader Kings, EU4, Hearts of Iron.
Great company that really pays attention to detail and Historical accuracy. Two things this genre needs

Great strategy games but not simulators. it´s another world with a lot of graphics and a very different game engine.

[Jimbuna]

Welcome to SubSim Jaqwon

[ReallyDedPoet]

Welcome to SUBSIM Jaqwon_The_Chef

[JU_88]

I suspect SHO was merely born out of SH5's failure. A way for UBI to try to Milk/recoupe what they had already invested into SH5, (a bit of low risk and cost effective recycling on their part)
A sorry way to see out a once great franchise. But that's Ubi for you.

R.I.P Silent Hunter.

What ever we get next, I hope it gets the building block approach, whether that's though paid DLC or an F2P model, I don't care, just so long as its by a developer who's in it for the long haul and not the '2-3 patches and we're out' approach. And I really hope I will never find my self needing to install 'mod soup' to get the most out of it.

[Terragon]

With a sub simulator, I think the mantra, "Easy to learn, difficult to master" should apply.

Not everyone is a realism nut. But I do think the learning curve shouldn't be steep. I would like to see better tutorials implemented (other than shooting a single target with auto-aim).

I like the idea of getting a casual crowd in a game that is easier to learn, and allows them to take incremental steps towards 'realistic'.

I would love to see better mod support. And by the way, we shouldn't have to mod a game so that it will WORK.

Something cool would be Oculus Rift support, with proper voice activated commands. I would like to see a U-Boat vs. Surface mode where players can play both sides. Speaking of multiplayer, I wish that there was a mode where players can play on the same U-Boat.

One as captain, navigator, torpedoman, etc. Players would have to work together on patrol. I also like the idea of trying to fix things that break on your U-Boat yourself as a damage control party, with some type of mini-game or procedure you have to do personally. Depending on how you do, it can shorten or lengthen the time the system can be repaired (optional).

Some more story-based stuff would be great as well. I know simulations are supposed to be mainly about the nuts and bolts, and while my imagination is great, I wouldn't mind playing in a story with cutscenes and extended dialogue based on real events and history.

There can be so much more there than what they put it without sacrificing the sim. I would love to see a game developer go, "Screw it, we are going to make a sub simulator that will be the measuring stick for all sub sims to measure up to."

I think there is a possibility that a sub simulator will exist out there one day where the casual player would love the hell out of it, and 100% guys would like it as well.

For now we wait and mod SH5 or play SH3 to get the bad taste out of our mouth.

[Rockin Robbins]

I think a submarine simulator should be about submarines, not just U-boats. Submarines won their war. U-boats, by their very existence and because they were used, lost their war. Making heroes out of villains seems to me to be doing a disservice to mankind. Not that the men who served on those U-boats were terrible men. The U-boats themselves were inappropriate tools. The manpower they stole, the materiel they diverted, the time they squandered in a pursuit they could not possibly fulfill absolutely guaranteed the defeat of Germany. Every man who died in a U-boat died in vain.

Why? Because England received supplies on the bottoms belonging to other nations. Destroying those nations' property and killing their men absolutely guaranteed that Germany would end up fighting the entire world, sealing its defeat, instead of focusing the war on its natural adversaries, which it could possibly defeat.

This folly is obscured by the fact that Germany's "leadership" made a hat full of fatal mistakes. The utter failure of the U-boat was in good company with dozens of fellow failures, leading the wishful thinkers to wonder if the U-boats could have won the war. They could not. Every kilo of steel, every highly trained and irreplaceable man, every second devoted to the management of the U-boat war was wasted.

So why are so many people captivated by the possibility of commanding such a craft? I believe it is the contrast between the publicly prosecuted and highly promoted U-boat campaign vs the secretively conducted American submarine campaign.

Even during the war, the personal heroes of American submarine commanders were.......German U-boat commanders! They studied them. They analyzed their successes and imitated them. They studied their failures and tried to avoid those mistakes. But the American sub commanders' key to victory did not lie in anything they did.

Their victory lay in the correct analysis of why the Japanese war was different from the war against Britain. Japanese shipping was on Japanese bottoms. There was no risk of drawing other nations into the war against the US by sinking Japanese shipping. Yes, there were technical reasons American submarines were much better than U-boats, but without that central fact, Japanese shipping was on Japanese bottoms, NO submarine could have gained victory in that war, just as no submarine could have won the war for Germany in the Atlantic.

I wonder if American leadership were even aware of that crucial fact? Certainly the Germans never considered it, or they would have confined U-boats to coastal defense and diverted men and materiel to those areas where they could secure victory. But I suspect that American leadership also was blind to the most important strategic factor in the submarine wars of both sides.

I'd love to see a simulator that included the American boats in its world view. I think the opportunity to assume the duties of any single man in the crew is brilliant. I think the opportunity for cooperative play between players assuming different crewmembers is brilliant, although there are dragons there.

But most important is that the game have depth. Just about anything should be able to run on automatic, but have as much detailed manual control available by the player's choice, configurable on the fly, as possible. If you want to supervise the loading of food on the sub and decide where each item is stored, then you should be able to. If you just want to push a button and be supplied, that should be possible.

The dev team needs to be stable over a period of years, with evolutionary updates released every year or every other year. Income needs to continue to come into the company past the several weeks of introduction in order for this to happen. A game with the depth and customization we want won't be built in a year. Or two. Or five.

That's why an evolutionary model of a long-term team is necessary. The game won't be complete on release, but an overall vision of a schedule of implementation of announced goals, along with a strategy to produce a reliable income stream, not just a flash, of money to make this possible, must be found.

It will mean commitment beyond the comfort level of game company and player. It will mean foregoing the popcorn disposable sale of FPS games to millions in exchange for a grueling, slave to reality, long struggle for mere thousands. It's a tough sell. I don't see any buyers.

[Julhelm]

Writing in the 1970's Admiral Gorshkov identified one of the primary causes for the failure of the U-Boat campaign as the inability of the germans to support their submarines with surface units and aircraft, thus giving the allies free reign to hunt down the subs with specialized hunter-killer groups. Interdicting these would have been a much better use of the pocket battleships than trying to use them for merchant raiding. But the ultimate reason for the failure of the U-Boat campaign must surely be Hitler's hybris in declaring war on the Soviet Union and the United States in the same year.

On the subject of what a sim should be like, there is no one size fits all. I personally would not be interested in a hardcore DCS-style sim. I can say categorically that the one sim I had and still have the most fun with is the old Red Storm Rising, with Fast Attack and the original Silent Hunter as runners up.

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by Julhelm

Writing in the 1970's Admiral Gorshkov identified one of the primary causes for the failure of the U-Boat campaign as the inability of the germans to support their submarines with surface units and aircraft, thus giving the allies free reign to hunt down the subs with specialized hunter-killer groups. Interdicting these would have been a much better use of the pocket battleships than trying to use them for merchant raiding. But the ultimate reason for the failure of the U-Boat campaign must surely be Hitler's hybris in declaring war on the Soviet Union and the United States in the same year.

Huge factor in why using U-boats as an offensive weapon in the war was grossly inappropriate! And the Germans could not produce enough surface units to control the Atlantic, no matter what, even if they sacrificed every piece of land weaponry ever built.

Their only path to victory was to focus on one adversary at a time, keeping all others at arms length until each one was defeated in turn. That would have required discipline that Hitler did not possess. And even that would not have guaranteed a win.

The best way for Germany to have won would have been not to fight the war at all, to pay off the British and French, then make them dependent nations to superior industrial and management skill.

And Germany should have accepted the Jews as major contributors to their efforts in WWI, proven patriotic citizens who would sacrifice for the good of Germany. The Jews had indispensible talent to contribute and Germany squandered all of it. They thoroughly deserved to lose and defeat looks much more like victory today than victory would have at this point.

But they were led by a delusional madman, worshiping himself, sacrificing his own nation on the altar of insanity.

[Julhelm]

All of the german heavy surface units constructed after the Deutschland class were bad designs that were entirely inappropriate to operations in the North Atlantic, mainly because the steam machinery limited their range.

The invasion of Norway only accelerated the defeat of the kriegsmarine by robbing them of several surface units that could not be replaced.

[dominiclevey]

im thinking about making a spiritual successor to sh5 well ive been thinking about it for a while just need people to help me do it

[ZeroAntiquity]

Interesting...

[BigBANGtheory]

Originally Posted by Julhelm

On the subject of what a sim should be like, there is no one size fits all. I personally would not be interested in a hardcore DCS-style sim. I can say categorically that the one sim I had and still have the most fun with is the old Red Storm Rising, with Fast Attack and the original Silent Hunter as runners up.

DCS has a lot to teach other sim, granted the hardcore simulation and study sim style is not for everyone which is also why the developers of DCS have the Flaming Cliffs series allowed to operate side by side.

What do I mean by that...
- Free downloadable simulation with very basic units for players to try out and get a feel for things.
- Free and regular updates to the core simulation with a mixture of improvements, bug fixes and new major releases every few years.
- Players pay for naval units of their choosing with the developer focusing on the most popular e.g. U-boat type7 & 21 and more modern units like a Vanguard class nuclear sub, perhaps patrol boats too anything playable basically but non-playable is all free in the core sim
- All about attention to detail and immersion, knobs and switches doing things, radio chatter, VR
- Having a lite version which includes many playable units but at a lower level of simulation e.g. not being able to walk around a sub interior, but you get many subs

The point is to have a model that continues to fund new development on the base simulation for all by selling new simulation modules to players that want them. From my observation what doesn't work well in sims is where players make a one-off payment for a sim and then require (no fault of their own) updates, fixes and improvements over many years and sims need this.

DCS and Falcon4 are the only sims that seem to have nailed that model and for different reasons. I'd just forget Ubisoft at this point this way of games development is incompatible with their business model... they wont share their code and they wont do rolling updates.

[Ketoujin]

Salve All,

Yes, I would very much agree that some kind of other developer with a business model that included regular rolling updates and a passion for functional and historical accuracy and depth and also breadth in terms of the number of campaigns/subs/surface vessels which might be conned.

Best,

Gunnar