Hello + the fateful question: which one is the most realistic?

Hello community, I'm Marco from Italy.

My subsim experience is limited to playing some Sub Command and some Aces Of The Deep, both 20 years ago or so.

I was thinking about getting a WW2 subsim, and I'm looking to use the most realistic one there is.

Now, I'm aware that "realistic" might mean different things depending on subjective priorities, and I'm also aware that different products excel in different features while lacking in others. So, the two aspects of realism I'm interested in, in descending order, are:

1) Battle tactics: the sim should almost "force" the player to use real world tactics as used in WW2, while making life hard if using instead unrealistic tactics.
This entails:

details like time of day, sun and moon position, sea state, weather conditions, the amount of time the periscope is raised, etc. should influence the probability of the sub being spotted;

there should be realistic use of appropriate sensors and countermeasures by the enemy, maybe depending on the phase of the war;

There should be realistic failures, duds, etc.


2) Having the possibility of using manual settings for things like navigation, target localization and tracking, fire solutions, etc. So, for example, no contacts shown on the map until the player manually localizes them, manual use of TDC, etc.

HOWEVER: point 1 (battle tactics) is more important than point 2, so if there's a sim which forces the use of realistic tactics, but uses simplified/automated methods for contact tracking and fire solutions, that would be preferable to the opposite case.


----------


So, as far as I understand, the possibilities (from oldest to newest) are:

Aces Of The Deep: surprisingly, some people consider this product still better than all of the others, in some specific aspects. I'm not interested in visuals for now, and if this product forces me to use real world tactics better than the others, so be it!

SH3+mods: I reckon many people consider this the most realistic option; but I read it has some limitations, and allows the use of unrealistic tactics (in game, the sub is not as easily spotted as it was in the real world?)

SH5+mods: A favorite of some other people; mods allow extensive manual operations, but somehow not considered as realistic as a modded SH3 in some aspects?

UBOAT+mods: I read contrasting opinions on this one: a different, new gen product that some consider it already superior to the other sims; while others still consider it limited in realism and for some reason arcade-ish?

Wolfpack: I reckon this product is somewhat connected to subsim.com, and still in a very early phase; is it more hard-core focused (i.e. realistic) compared to the other ones?