Uboat Expanded: Injecting Historical Data into Uboat

Hey, I am the creator of a mod called Uboat Expanded for the game Uboat.

I really like the game Uboat but I wasn't satisfied with the shipping lanes and convoy routes in the vanilla game. Currently the vanilla game only include a small handful of well known convoy codes HG,HX,SC.. Canada/UK, Sierra Leone/UK, Gibraltar/UK and Alexandria/UK, etc.

Which is nice but I wanted more so I looked around and found records of every single shipping route, warship patrol, aircraft patrol and u-boat patrol over the course of WWII from date to date.

I had all the information I needed to create NEW spawners in Uboat to generate historically accurate convoys, yes, but also to generate historically accurate patrols for NPC u-boats as well as NEW MISSIONS for the player themselves. So I built Uboat Expanded...

Uboat Expanded is a mod that is seeking to inject as much real world data from World War II as possible into the game via the "Datasheets". This project is still a "work in progress" and there is still as significant amount of data that I plan on injecting into the game to create a more faithful recreation of the events of WWII. While I wont bore you with all the intricate details of the mod I wanted to highlight some aspects of the game I am trying to improve or add upon.

Uboat Expanded includes:

• Adding 100+ new ports around the world (including the pacific)
• Adding over 20 additional countries around the world each which contain their own shipping and naval activity
• Historically Accurate Naval Ensigns and Flags
• Adding 100+ Shipping Merchant lanes throughout the map.
• Adding nearly 400 unique convoys
• Nearly 100 Dynamic convoys which change destinations, origin, convoy size and makeup, and participating countries throughout the war.
• Convoys are represented as historically Accurately as possible with correct origin/destination, activity dates, countries and vessels.
• Accurate Uboat Roster, Uboat Activity and Patrols, and historical uboat commanders name
• Adding over 20,000 unique vessel names to ships
• Recreation of all Uboat patrol data
• Dynamically created Uboat Patrol Missions sourcing Uboat.net Patrol Data
• An accurate recreation of the Kriegsmarine grid system on the map.
• Historically accurate and more diverse crew member names sourcing actual crew rosters.
• Add Additional Radio Traffic from BdU Command about Intelligence about Convoys
• Expanded Radio: Add over 4000 unique text Radio Broadcasts highlighting current events during the game to the player.
• Expanded Radio: Add over 60+ Hours of audio from real news radio broadcasters during the war.

If this all sounds a little bit ridiculous, it is. The undertaking is immense and the work I have put it to this is a bit overkill. And I am not even done yet. While the base game has bugs, and needs more love from the devs, I am hoping this mod can help raise Uboat to the standard and quality of SH3 and other sims. While I don't intend for my mod to be a complete overhall all aspects of the game, I feel like I can provide a significant amount of historical data to create an game experience accurately reflects the actual naval events of WWII.

I need testers and feedback from history buffs and SIM'ers. So if you own the game and you'd like to support this project please consider downloading my mod and providing me with as much feedback and criticism as you can spare in my bug/feedback thread, here or on Steam Workshop

[Aktungbby]

link4531!

[jealousTransient]

Very cool! UBOAT has always felt a little too arcade-y for me so I'm excited to see people working on bridging the gap between SH3 and UBOAT. Can't wait to try it out!

[Aktungbby]

jealousTransient!

[Niume]

Breathtaking

[iambecomelife]

One recommendation: get rid of most of the groups spawning with 3-4 unarmed merchant ships - they aren't historical, they are too easy to sink, and they inflate your tonnage score. Sometimes groups of 3-4 straggling cargo ships would band together, but by 1940-41 lots of them would be armed, and impossible to attack on the surface. By 1943 pretty much every big merchant ship from the USA or UK was armed. And it was not uncommon to have 1-2 destroyers or at least an armed trawler escorting any group of 3-4 merchants that straggled from the bigger convoys.

[Nordmann]

Wow, this is a truly massive undertaking to say the very least! Good luck!

[Niume]

How is performance effected?

[Schizo]

Very cool! Looking forward to your progress.

[W_clear]

I think the biggest problem of U-boat is that the environment is not realistic. Waves don't change with wind speed, and clouds are worse. Ports, trees, islands, no sense of reality。Except for submarines, there are no people on other ships. This is not as good as sh5。

我认为U-BOAT最大的问题，就是环境不现实。海浪不会因为风速大小而变化，云更是糟糕。港口，树木，岛屿毫无真实 感。除了潜艇，其他船只上没有人，这个还不如SH5。

[Otto Fuhrmann]

I will defintiely try this out! Thanks for your efforts!

[tonschk]

Amazing , outstanding work, I appreciate your support for this Uboat simulator, thank you very much

[KOCATKA]

Good job 👍 : Kaleun_Salute:: Kaleun_Thumbs_Up:

[Able72]

Thank you for the mod. Really enjoying it so far.

[Able72]

Ok, pictures say a thousand words so. . . first the small typo (should be an easy fix.)





Next, the harder one that I'm sure you are already aware of. I got blocked in Willhelmshaven when I first started the campaign. The ships were still there blocking the sub tender when I returned from my mission. Here is a picture once I managed to dive and go under the ships to dock.