Can anyone explain to me why they're not depressed by games that always end in death?

[mcoca]

Originally Posted by Beery

In SH4, in my experience, the chance of the player's sub being sunk is about one in every 5 patrols - that's close to a 100% chance of getting killed during a career.

<nitpick>
Actually, assuming 20% (1 in 5) chance of dying in each patrol, and 5 patrols per career, that's a 68% chance of dying during a career, nothing close to 100%
</nitpick>

I agree with those who have said gamers take a lot more risks than they would IRL. To get really realistic results, you must get them in a realistic way. As an example, a career started in December 41 will nearly always get unrealistically high tonnage. Why? Because very few players will try sonar only solutions without even putting up the periscope, as many real life captains did.

In the same way, it should be rare to be killed if following proper doctrine: running slow when submerged, not going up to periscope depth unless you are using the periscope, etc. But that's no excuse for keeping the current passive AI calling it "realistic". The IJN escorts were not good at their job, but they were not the lazy idiots the game AI escorts are. I mean, in some cases the escorts let the convoys sail ahead unescorted while they pursued a sub contact. Not intelligent, but certainly not passive.

I just read Silent Victory, and I was surprised by how often subs were depth charged and how often the DCs didn't cause any damage. I think of it as DC suppression fire.