I give up.

[mookiemookie]

I hate to pile on with yet another thread about this sort of thing, buuuut....

I've really tried to give this game a fair shake, I really have. But it seems like doing the most basic things that a submarine sim should do is like pulling teeth.

Just maneuvering your boat is a guessing game, what without having a compass or any way to know your current bearing besides looking through the 'scope or UZO and ordering "head to view". There is just no excuse, gameplay or otherwise, to have to do this as a workaround as this kind of info isn't immediately available to you. And once you DO know where you're headed, changing direction is not at all easy. You have to head to your map and drag your waypoint around, or order your rudder hard a port or starboard, and then guess as to when you're on your desired heading and then order it back amidships. WHY? Why oh why does something as basic and simple as maneuvering need to be that difficult?

Do you have enough fuel or battery life left to get where you need to go? Guess and see, or click through 2 menus to just find out how much fuel you have remaining. It shouldn't be that hard.

Your watch crew is deaf, dumb and blind. Trying to intercept a convoy is another guessing game. Your watch crew won't tell you that they've seen anything until you come out of TC yourself, and at that point you're most likely 500 meters from a DD. Good luck guessing when to go back to 1x TC so that this doesn't happen. I suppose it makes sense -in the game there's only 3 men on watch, all of them without binoculars, not the historical 4 or 5. No wonder they can't see anything.

Automatic targeting is like deciphering hieroglyphics. What are the 1, 2, 3, dots for? Who knows?! How do you line them up to get a firing solution? Guess and see! No thanks. Nowhere is it explained how this thing works. The manual devotes about 3 vague sentences to this. You'd think one of the goals of the simulation would warrant more of an explanation.

Manual targeting is not much better. A stadimeter that doesn't reliably tell you range is not much good. And without a proper range reading, you can just toss out the rest of your firing solution because it won't mean anything. Without the tools to do what I need to do - sink ships - then why the heck am I even out at sea?

So now let's say by luck and the grace of God, the stars have aligned correctly for you and you've managed to guess correctly what direction you need to be headed in, you've guessed correctly when you needed to come out of TC to set up an attack, you've guessed correctly the range to your target and you've shot your torpedoes. Now it's time for evasion. Well, hope you're ready for more guessing - this time you need to guess the magic speed you need to be doing to maintain your ordered depth, and of course you've guessed at what depth you ordered because the depth gauge is about 10 pixels high.

Ordering your crew to perform the most perfunctory tasks is another guessing game. Do you have enough "morale points" to order silent running? Guess what!? Your XO is in a cranky mood today so no morale points and no silent running for you, Kaleun! Someone get my Luger. I've got a clip full of morale points for you.

I can see that there was a lot of good ideas that the dev team wanted to do with this sim. But the missing and/or broken parts of it just make it a chore to get basic things done. I should be worried about tactically how to attack this convoy. Not worried about guessing how to perform the basic tasks I need to do in order to get this done. I hope that they're listening to our gripes and will address some of this in a patch. I hope that there are some blessed patient modders who can do something with what we've been given...I'd love them to spend their time adding to the game, not having to fix stuff that should work right in the first place.

I want a sub sim, not a guessing game. Until I have more of the former and less of the latter, I consider firing up SH5 to be an exercise in trying my patience, not an exercise in sinking ships.