Cold-War Era SH5

[tater]

Originally Posted by The General

Man, you crazy!

I never considered buying SH3, either since the Atlantic doesn't interest me much, and playing a U-boat doesn't interest me at all (a DE I could see playing, but it wouldn't hold up for much gameplay).

tater

[Fat Bhoy Tim]

Originally Posted by Snowman999

My dream is to do SH4 again, but correctly, with someone on the team who knows USN customs and traditions. Make it a CO-simulator, not an attack trainer. More command decisions, make the crew "alive", have an XO and a COB to work through, add some RPG elements. SH4 represents the end-of-the-road on how techie you can make a TDC and have anyone but a few grognards care. There is SO much more to command than running approaches.

And I absolutely demand an R&R sequence in any future SHs. With little-umbrella drinks.

what he said. Other than approaches, there's little to get you involved.

[Mostinius]

Originally Posted by Snowman999

As said by others, they're completely different types of games, pretty non-graphical, much more mathematical, much lower interest base amongst gamers. They're for truly hard-core types.

Not sure I buy that. Granted, they're a different type of game. Possibly they could be said to be more mathematical - although given the procedures involved in setting up a WW2 firing solution, I'm not sure in what way.

But 'pretty non-graphical'? The only reason modern-era sub sims are expected to be non-graphical is precisely because every one to date has been non-graphical. There's no logical reason why they couldn't be as graphically pretty and immersive as SH4.

And the idea that a modern-era subsim is for hard-core types would be fine if there weren't so many hardcore simmers playing the WW2 ones. You've only to look at the forums here to know that there are SH3/4 players who're so hardcore I'm not sure I'm even okay to call them 'players'. Yet there're SH players who want a quick blast. But the same could just as well be said for DW and the like: some players want to get deep into the nuts and bolts of modern sub warfare and tactics - others just want to sink stuff.

Originally Posted by Snowman999

I've looked at waterfall displays for 6-hour stretches, months at a time. Not fun.

Aye, perhaps so - but again, that's entirely based on your own experiences, and while I respect that experience, it's not safe to assume that because simulations of something you've done a lot would bore you it'd necessarily bore other people. While many pilots probably spend time on Flight Sim, it'd probably bore some of them senseless. But speaking for myself, real-life landlubber as I am, the sonar detection/analysis element of DW is the most intriguing part of the sim.

Different strokes for different folks, as they say.

Originally Posted by Snowman999

I don't think there's going to be an SH5 of any type, but if there was a CW SH5, and it failed, there for sure wouldn't be an SH6.

That stands to reason. If there was a WW2 SH5 and it failed, there wouldn't be an SH6. As for whether there will be an SH5 at all - personally I doubt it anyway. But even so, there's only so much you can really do with a single setting within a given time period. And there wasn't really that long between SH3 and SH4 - and now, with SH4 barely out of Ubi's door, we're already looking toward SH5.

Consider the Total War games. Shogun: Total War was hugely successful in its time. And when Creative Assembly had a bunch of improvements they wanted to make to the model, they had a choice to make. They could either remake the original, and release Shogun 2 - which would no doubt have been hugely popular with those whose interest lay in feudal Japan - or they could branch out and set their new version somewhere else. They went with the latter, and gave us Medieval. When they came up with a whole new engine for the game, we moved to Ancient Rome. And then, most recently, they went back to the popular medieval period for Medieval 2. The point is, all those games could have been about daimyos and shoguns in Japan, with better graphics and gameplay every time. And that would have been popular with some of the player base, and less popular with others. As it is, those who have a great interest in feudal Japan probably feel really frustrated that CA haven't revisited their favourite period. You can't please all of the people all of the time.

Ubi, bless them, have given us four excellent sub sims, all based in the same time period with the same technology. But you can't please all the people all the time, and there are those - like me, I admit - who are at least a little disappointed that their favoured time period isn't catered for at all by a firm that obviously has the potential to produce the definitive modern subsim.

[scrag]

Well as far as graphics goes the WWII Stuff is nice as the work is all visual ie using the periscope for approaches or the deck gun for dispatching the odd cripple. Unfortunately the very art of Modern Sub Vs Sub combat occurs at depth and is very dry (read mechanical). Sure there is the firing of weapons and moving around, evasion and etc. Most of the SOnar displays are crap (compared to reality) and the effectiveness of A/C as well as Skimmer Sonar is totally over rated - to the point of being stupid. Even Sonalysts Game was stupid when it came to how easily a modern SSN would be "detected" by the OPFOR. A cold war (hot war) game would have to be based no later than the mid eighties to when it started on the late forties. INMO.
Still think it would be very interesting to see a SH IV spin off with the player to be a IJN Sub Captain.

[tater]

I see the graphic issue immediately. A ww2 sub visually tracked and fired on the target most of the time. Watches were stood on deck, on the surface a fair chucnk of each day. Ships were observed to have been sunk with Mark 1 eyeballs. Small craft were attacked with guns.

A cold war sim puts you underwater. The firing solutions are gathered passively, no eyeballes except looking at a CRT. Surface watches? Putting in to port. Kills? Not observed, the proper data gathered.

Unless you play with all kinds of externals on all the time in a 3d person view the pretty view would be entirely inside the boat.

tater

[cali03boss]

I'm reading this over and many of you are talking about immersion issues...that you don't feel like you're commanding until you're running down a convoy.

Did you ever consider that your crew gain experience by you just calling drills on them? Making them work longer? Diving, surfacing, running silent, battle stations, repair crew, changing course....all does its part.

[tater]

No, it could be immersive, but not terribly interesting.

Like having an Olympic Skiing game where you do simulated leg lifts and other strength based stuff, but never actually race

tater

[mookiemookie]

Someone else already mentioned this, but it bears repeating with the "appeal to realism" talk. A lot of the technology and specs on nuke boats and Cold War operations are still classified. It'd naturally take somewhat of a leap of imagination to create a sim to fill in those gaps, and that alone may turn off some of those who are looking for a hardcore experience.

[silentrunner]

People are saying that the Cold War era subs were boring but it doesn't have to be completly true one of the most popular flight sims is Ace Combat and it is completly untrue. There could be a storyline where there was a big naval war and you could sink other subs as an SSN or destroy stuff as an SSBN.

[Snowman999]

Not sure I buy that. Granted, they're a different type of game. Possibly they could be said to be more mathematical - although given the procedures involved in setting up a WW2 firing solution, I'm not sure in what way.

The procedures in a WWII firing solution are trivial compared to passive TMA, use of narrow-band analysis, Doppler, and programming homing torpedo tactics. Basic, Sub School-level TMA requires intuitive use of trig; WWII was a visual, Mo-Board fire-control. Modern FC requires a long, intense, highly-technical ID phase that WWII didn't have. That faint 57Hz signal fading in and out somewhere north of 50,000 yards away might be a Victor I or it might be nothing. Determining which is hours and hours long . . .

But 'pretty non-graphical'? The only reason modern-era sub sims are expected to be non-graphical is precisely because every one to date has been non-graphical. There's no logical reason why they couldn't be as graphically pretty and immersive as SH4.

I say non-graphical because they take place submerged. You never fight surfaced. Most of the time your opponent is also submerged. You see interior compartments, not glorious sunsets and transparent water. Modern warfare is sensors, not eyeballs.

And the idea that a modern-era subsim is for hard-core types would be fine if there weren't so many hardcore simmers playing the WW2 ones.

But they aren't that hardcore because to date there hasn't been a sub sim on the level of complexity as a Falcon was for flight. WWII sub driving was much, much harder than any sim has tried to show.

That said, there are some people here who would buy one. Just not enough to make it commercially feasible given the level of modeling required. SH4 has lots of graphical code investment by the team, but the environmental, sensor, and tactical feedback load is actually pretty light compared to what an all-passive combat environment takes. SH4's variables are in files moddable with text editors--because it's a visual, inside-the-horizon environment with very little automation of function. And because it's manual by the player it's pretty easy to learn to play by newbies. TMA, even at very easy levels, is hard work. Took me a whole summer on stupid-study to get the basics down.

You've only to look at the forums here to know that there are SH3/4 players who're so hardcore I'm not sure I'm even okay to call them 'players'.

The ones who haven't gone to sea and done this stuff for real are exactly that. As far as diesel boats go include me, and I've been studying WWII USN sub ops since the 1960s, almost from the day I straddled a MK14 in the forward room of USS Bluegill while a very greasy TM3 in a Santa suit gave me my present.

Yet there're SH players who want a quick blast. But the same could just as well be said for DW and the like: some players want to get deep into the nuts and bolts of modern sub warfare and tactics - others just want to sink stuff.

I agree, and there have been numerous modern SSN sims published. None have blown the doors off and they were in significantly more favorable eras for PC games in general. As we move farther away from the Cold War there is less and less interest. USA college freshmen this year were born in 1989. I doubt one in five even knows there used to be someplace called East Germany.

If there was a WW2 SH5 and it failed, there wouldn't be an SH6. As for whether there will be an SH5 at all - personally I doubt it anyway.

We agree there. I think there is good reason to believe that SH4 is a failure from Ubi's POV.

But even so, there's only so much you can really do with a single setting within a given time period. And there wasn't really that long between SH3 and SH4 - and now, with SH4 barely out of Ubi's door, we're already looking toward SH5.

Perhaps because some (many?) of us percieve SH4 as underwhelming.

As it is, those who have a great interest in feudal Japan probably feel really frustrated that CA haven't revisited their favourite period. You can't please all of the people all of the time.

I don't think the analogy holds. That series, in whatever era, is fundamentally about land armies with muscle-weapons in a terrain-centric model with a macro world-model overhead. If they had gone from Shogun to WWI trench warfare it would be a closer comparison to SH4 and a nuke-based Cold War SH5. Not even the move from prop planes to jets was as far a leap as WWII DEs to SSNs. Maybe wooden ships-of-the-line to Teddy's Great White Fleet--it was that big of a jump and it happened in fifteen years.

Ubi, bless them, have given us four excellent sub sims, all based in the same time period with the same technology. But you can't please all the people all the time, and there are those - like me, I admit - who are at least a little disappointed that their favoured time period isn't catered for at all by a firm that obviously has the potential to produce the definitive modern subsim.

Have to disagree one more time. I think Ubi's team would be incapable of doing the advanced environmental modeling an SSN game would need. Sonalysts had a head-start from their classified work. Ubi's team right now is about pretty graphics, not deeply mathematical real-time physics. And being Eastern European I also think they just don't "get it" enough in NATO naval terms. Ubi management's recent funding policies don't indicate they would be willing to put the team together that could get it.

[tater]

But any storyline is by definition a fantasy.

I'm interested in the naval history of ww2. To the extent I can understand more of the history with simulation, it interests me.

Take flight sims. Without having played flight sims (or if you were actually a fighter pilot in RL), you can read every book written about ww2 air combat, and you frankly don't have the first clue when they start talking about dogfights (I had read a huge library of such books before I ever played a flight sim, and after a few years of such sims, I understand exactly what they are talking about when recounting engagements in a way I never did before).

So sure, if I was really interesting in cold war subs, knowing more might jazz me, but I'm not, so it doesn't.

<shrug>

tater

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by tater

So sure, if I was really interesting in cold war subs, knowing more might jazz me, but I'm not, so it doesn't.

<shrug>

tater

I think that's what a lot of it is for players like me is. If it interests me, I'd like to simulate it and dive into what it was like. When I read recounts of WW2 sub combat, in both the Pacific and Atlantic theatres, it makes me wish for a more in depth simulation where I can see how I stack up against real captains when given the same set of constraints, all while knowing what I know about the history and how the boats operated. When I read about Cold War stuff, it's like "eh, yeah, that's nice" but it doesn't inspire me to want to go try it out myself, as I never really read about the nuts and bolts of the equipment used and don't have a lot of interest in doing so.

[Pablo]

Hi!

I think Dangerous Waters and the various Harpoon flavors pretty much have the modern and Cold War submarine and naval combat stuff locked up - at least there won't be lots reason to argue about "realism" because I'd guess the "real" info is mostly classified - so let's think about where Silent Hunter has gone so far:

• Silent Hunter: U.S. in the Pacific
• Silent Hunter II: Germany in the Atlantic, with a companion Destroyer Command for human vs. human.
• Silent Hunter III: Do-over of Germany in the Atlantic
• Silent Hunter IV: Do-over of U.S. in the Pacific

I think it's time for another do-over, but this time have one sim that allows you to take either side in a campaign: Allies (U.S., Britain, Soviet Union) or Axis (Germany, Japan). Throw in player-controlled destroyers for all sides, modifiable AI, and realistic flight models and behavior for the aircraft and I think you have a winner - an "IL-2" for World War II naval combat.

My $0.02

Pablo

[ReallyDedPoet]

Originally Posted by Pablo

I think Dangerous Waters and the various Harpoon flavors pretty much have the modern and Cold War submarine and naval combat stuff locked up

Yes they do

Originally Posted by Pablo

My $0.02

RDP

[Blacklight]

This game would be Dangerous Waters II, except I don't think it would be anywhere near as hardcore as Dangerous Waters is.. I would have a feeling that UBI would dumb it down a little for the mass public, but I imagine the visuals would be stunning.