Dissapointing to say the least

[UF582151]

Hi all,

first of all I'm not posting just to vent my fustration with this game, allthough I will a little, but also with the small hope that some of the "glitches" I'm encountering might not be constant throughout the game.

I loved the first silent hunters, played II and III a lot, then dropped off with the fourth installment. Was really eager to try of SH5 but this has been a major let down.

Here's why:

COSMETICS: Do not actually make the game unplayable or affect gameplay at all but it subtracts a whole lot to the inmersion and realism, making what a sim is all about fail in a way.

1. The crew will stay on deck in inmersion. Yeah I know, its not earth shattering but it still subtracts a lot to the realism.

2. Crew of sinking ships will keep on strolling around as if nothing even though their ship is burning to pieces. Frankly, the devs would have been better off not putting any crew to begin with. The current behavior takes a whole lot of fun out of watching your latest victim go to the bottom.

3. Sunken ships will hit the ocen floor 10-20 meters above where it really is, so they end up suspended.

4. Very lame damage model. Yeah you get a few holes in the hull of any sunken ship but major damage to the superstructure when you pounce one with the deck gun? Nope. With todays hw and 3D graphics tech this shouldn't have been too hard.

PERFORMANCE: This does get in the way of gameplay a little bit more.

1. Awful loading times and my machine is no slouch.

2. Awful performance when close to bases with relatively high traffic. Trying to use time compression in certain areas is a good idea for disaster.

AI: Oh dear, my biggest gripe with the game and the only thing that has really put me off so much I'm about to dump the game unless someone tells me its just the first campaings where the AI is just plain dumb on purpose to make things easy for newcomers to the series.

Where to start?

1. Well I managed to sneak in a UK base (Grimsby in case you're wondering) with 4 destroyers (class A I think) patrolling. I picked them off one by one with no effort.

WTF¿¿¿??? Not one single destroyer came to the rescue of the others. Unacceptable.

I left one destroyer alive just for the fun (as it was guarding the base upriver...maybe some Uboat will come that way I guess...duh) and proceded to pounce all docked merchants with my remaining torpedoes and with my deck gun from the surface. Oh and I took my time too. In plain daylight I might add.

Well, the remaining destroyer did not stop guarding that river, even though he was less than 10 Km away, no airplanes, no support of anykind. Only resistance was some poor gunners from the shore or some stationed ship...they even managed to screw up may radio.

2. Airplanes. Oh, these are hilarious. I keep being overflown by airplanes.. ."airplane spotted!"...but I have still to see one single one attack me. I dont even bother with them anymore, when the crew on deck spots them its like "yeah who cares" and up goes compression till I find another poor merchant. So much for realism.

3. Evasive maneuvers. None, I'm sick of sailing paralel to some poor merchant and fire at them with my deck gun and they will not try anything. Some small course change but no radical 90 degree disengage route at flank speed to increase distance and reduce target signature.

4. Kamikazee boats. Yep, enemy or friendly, I've seen couple just ram into the shore. Pitty I dont get credit by being in the vicinity. I lied before, one of the destroyers at Grimsby actually sunk that way, I didnt need to do it.

5. Reinforcements anyone? I wiped Grimsby in two trips. That is, I had to resupply torpedoes and fuel. As I was a rookie I even went all the way back to Kiel and not some closer base like Bremen. One would hope that on my way back Grimsby's defense would be up again and major reinforcements would be in the area maybe even a cruiser or two. Well nope. All destroyers were still destroyed (lol) and all merchants were happilly docked...didnt count the days but at least a week went by I guess.

Anyway...dissapointing and embarassing, if the game is really like this throughout the developers should be fired...selling this game at a price of 40 something EUR is plain robbery.

Please, somebody please tell me the AI does get a little harder and smarter later on. Oh, I'm playing this on high level, not realistic yet, as I wanted to get well acquainted with the game first. Does that have anything to do?

Sorry for this long gripe.

P.D. Haven't gone into the bugs but thats one long list too. Playing latest patch by the way.

Thanks for any encouraging replies. The blunt truth like "forget the game, no solution" would be welcomed too so I don't waste my time anymore in a game I really would have loved to like.

[kylania]

Originally Posted by UF582151

COSMETICS:

1. The crew will stay on deck in inmersion. - Bug, doesn't happen all the time, in fact I can't remember the last time it happened. Might be because I use MightyFine Crew mod?

2. Crew of sinking ships will keep on strolling around as if nothing even though their ship is burning to pieces - Bug, fixed in the upcoming 1.2 patch.

3. Sunken ships will hit the ocen floor 10-20 meters above where it really is, so they end up suspended. - Bug, no mention of a fix though. But why are you watching a ship you already sunk when there's other targets out there?

4. Very lame damage model. - Opinion, I'm quite happy with the damage graphics model myself.

PERFORMANCE: This does get in the way of gameplay a little bit more.

1. Awful loading times and my machine is no slouch. - Must be, since loading is near instant for me. The more mods I put on the longer the loads, but it's worlds faster than SH3 was.

2. Awful performance when close to bases with relatively high traffic. Trying to use time compression in certain areas is a good idea for disaster. - As it always has been, and has to do with your PC. This is just common sense really, don't use high TC in traffic areas. Not a bug at all.

AI: - Multiple mods which adjust the AI are already out, and there's more "fixes" coming with 1.2, have you tried any of the mods at all?

2. Airplanes. - Fixed with a mod already, and as far as "So much for realism." is concerned, planes not attacking in the early war is realistic.

3. Evasive maneuvers. - I've seen evasive ships quite a few times, it all depends on if you're detected or not.

4. Kamikazee boats. - Fixed in 1.2 supposedly.

5. Reinforcements anyone? - Rewrite the campaign files if this is what you want Repeated harbor raiding with trips back for reloads wasn't really what the u-boats did, weren't you just talking about realism?

Please, somebody please tell me the AI does get a little harder and smarter later on. - Of course it does, especially with mods.

Sounds like you'll enjoy the stock game a lot more once 1.2 comes out, it addresses a lot of your concerns. Mods pretty much touch on the rest of them. Swing by the Modshop, load up JSGME and try some of the things the community has been building and I bet you'll be a lot happier.

[jobezark]

Thanks for your reply Kylania. Looks like the game will be fantastic by the time I get a machine good enough to run it!

[UF582151]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Happy to see that some of the bugs will be fixed with the upcoming patch. Any date on when it will be released?

Still, I think that needing to use mods to make a game substantially more enjoyable and playable is still plain wrong.

"Airplanes. - Fixed with a mod already, and as far as "So much for realism." is concerned, planes not attacking in the early war is realistic.". I'm sorry to say but airplanes spotting u.boats just a few miles off your coast when a couple of merchants have been already sunk and not do anything is not realistic at all, give me a break.

"3. Evasive maneuvers. - I've seen evasive ships quite a few times, it all depends on if you're detected or not." I think lobbing high explosive shells on a ship at ranges lesser than 4000 m qualifies as being detected, and they will still not do anything significant 99% of the times.

"5. Reinforcements anyone? - Rewrite the campaign files if this is what you want Repeated harbor raiding with trips back for reloads wasn't really what the u-boats did, weren't you just talking about realism?". LOL, u-boats didnt do that sort of thing simply because they would get fried before they got 20 km from any base, let alone trying to pull that sort of stunt two times in a row. The fact that the game allows you to pull it off is what proves the lack of realism. The stunningly stupid and uncooperative AI and the utter lack of reinforcements is what makes such an unplausible scenario possible. Realism in a game means that you cannot do things in the game that would be impossible in a real world scenario. Sorry to say but SH5 fails miserably in that aspect. Anyway the reinforcement issue wasn't my main gripe...the absolutely idiotic behavior and dismal cooperation the 4 destroyers showed is what has me worried.

I will anyhow check the mods.

[kylania]

Still, I think that needing to use mods to make a game substantially more enjoyable and playable is still plain wrong.

It's the difference between a "game" and a "simulation game". You said it yourself, "substantially more enjoyable and playable", that's what mods do. That's why the game it modable in the first place.

Ubisoft gives us the game with enough hooks and resources to turn it into whatever we want. They'll never be able to make a game that meets everyone's taste.

I'm sure there's a lot of new players that like the "scare" that planes give them, but don't want be to bombed out of the water in 1939. By 1942 planes are vicious as some people finished with the stock campaign have said. So we get a game that starts slow, with few air attacks and ends fast, where surfacing is instant death, but we can mod it to be deadly from the beginning if we want that kind of gameplay. Mods = win, win!

If you're playing a simulator and don't want to use mods you're missing out on pretty much everything the simulator is giving you.

[UF582151]

Ok, fair enough.

I used to play hours without end of Falcon 4.0. Mods did an amazing job there and they finally packed the best ones together into an official release. I dont have anything against mods, its just that sh5 "unmodded" doesn't seem qualify as a decent game...that is all, but maybe its all the bugs getting in the way. Waiting for patch 1.2...

Still worried about the AI behavior though. Can you recommend any good AI mod that makes them a tad smarter?

thanks.

[Placoderm]

Originally Posted by UF582151

Happy to see that some of the bugs will be fixed with the upcoming patch. Any date on when it will be released?

Mid April...around the 12th

Oh, wait...

It should be here around April 20th, if all goes well!

Oooops, nope...

Well, if not at the end of April, we're guessing sometime in...May-be








Tah-Dah!! (thank you, thank you....I'll be here all week!) [/applause]

[gt500]

There most definitely is an issue with load times.... Maybe it is a bug with Nvidia cards or something.

My system is top of the line.

8 Core i7 running at 4.2 GHZ. 6 Solid State Drives running in Raid 0. 12 Gigs of Ram and THREE Gtx 480 Video Cards in Tri SLI.

Now for me on a new game load, to the main menu no problem, but when you load or continue a campaign the loading takes a minute or two. The Radar loading icon keeps spinning, but little to no HD activity and next to no CPU usage. There must be a bug here as it makes no sense.

[John Channing]

Originally Posted by UF582151

Ok, fair enough.

I used to play hours without end of Falcon 4.0. Mods did an amazing job there and they finally packed the best ones together into an official release. I dont have anything against mods, its just that sh5 "unmodded" doesn't seem qualify as a decent game...that is all, but maybe its all the bugs getting in the way. Waiting for patch 1.2...

Still worried about the AI behavior though. Can you recommend any good AI mod that makes them a tad smarter?

thanks.

Whoooooaaaaa...

You played Falcon 4.0 and you complain about the bugs in SH5?

A full year after it's release it was still barely playable in campaign mode. If your wingmen didn't run into you on the ramp or taxiway, or crash on takeoff, or declare "I'm a dot" and land as soon as they took off then they would either attack the wrong target or just fly around in circles quoting Hindu scripture.

Compared to Falcon 4.0 SH5 is a model of programming perfection!

JCC

[Safe-Keeper]

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Eier/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot.png[/IMG][IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Eier/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.png[/IMG]A full year after it's release it was still barely playable in campaign mode. If your wingmen didn't run into you on the ramp or taxiway, or crash on takeoff, or declare "I'm a dot" and land as soon as they took off then they would either attack the wrong target or just fly around in circles quoting Hindu scripture.

! Best bug I've heard about in a long time, if not ever -- and I play Dwarf Fortress.

[kylania]

Can you recommend any good AI mod that makes them a tad smarter?

Feared Hunters looks good. Problem is I haven't run into a ship yet to test it in my current patrol! heh

There's a really nice video that talks about the changes though.

Originally Posted by UF582151

Hi all,

first of all I'm not posting just to vent my fustration with this game, allthough I will a little, but also with the small hope that some of the "glitches" I'm encountering might not be constant throughout the game.

I loved the first silent hunters, played II and III a lot, then dropped off with the fourth installment. Was really eager to try of SH5 but this has been a major let down.

Here's why:

COSMETICS: Do not actually make the game unplayable or affect gameplay at all but it subtracts a whole lot to the inmersion and realism, making what a sim is all about fail in a way.

1. The crew will stay on deck in inmersion. Yeah I know, its not earth shattering but it still subtracts a lot to the realism.

2. Crew of sinking ships will keep on strolling around as if nothing even though their ship is burning to pieces. Frankly, the devs would have been better off not putting any crew to begin with. The current behavior takes a whole lot of fun out of watching your latest victim go to the bottom.

3. Sunken ships will hit the ocen floor 10-20 meters above where it really is, so they end up suspended.

4. Very lame damage model. Yeah you get a few holes in the hull of any sunken ship but major damage to the superstructure when you pounce one with the deck gun? Nope. With todays hw and 3D graphics tech this shouldn't have been too hard.

PERFORMANCE: This does get in the way of gameplay a little bit more.

1. Awful loading times and my machine is no slouch.

2. Awful performance when close to bases with relatively high traffic. Trying to use time compression in certain areas is a good idea for disaster.

AI: Oh dear, my biggest gripe with the game and the only thing that has really put me off so much I'm about to dump the game unless someone tells me its just the first campaings where the AI is just plain dumb on purpose to make things easy for newcomers to the series.

Where to start?

1. Well I managed to sneak in a UK base (Grimsby in case you're wondering) with 4 destroyers (class A I think) patrolling. I picked them off one by one with no effort.

WTF¿¿¿??? Not one single destroyer came to the rescue of the others. Unacceptable.

I left one destroyer alive just for the fun (as it was guarding the base upriver...maybe some Uboat will come that way I guess...duh) and proceded to pounce all docked merchants with my remaining torpedoes and with my deck gun from the surface. Oh and I took my time too. In plain daylight I might add.

Well, the remaining destroyer did not stop guarding that river, even though he was less than 10 Km away, no airplanes, no support of anykind. Only resistance was some poor gunners from the shore or some stationed ship...they even managed to screw up may radio.

2. Airplanes. Oh, these are hilarious. I keep being overflown by airplanes.. ."airplane spotted!"...but I have still to see one single one attack me. I dont even bother with them anymore, when the crew on deck spots them its like "yeah who cares" and up goes compression till I find another poor merchant. So much for realism.

3. Evasive maneuvers. None, I'm sick of sailing paralel to some poor merchant and fire at them with my deck gun and they will not try anything. Some small course change but no radical 90 degree disengage route at flank speed to increase distance and reduce target signature.

4. Kamikazee boats. Yep, enemy or friendly, I've seen couple just ram into the shore. Pitty I dont get credit by being in the vicinity. I lied before, one of the destroyers at Grimsby actually sunk that way, I didnt need to do it.

5. Reinforcements anyone? I wiped Grimsby in two trips. That is, I had to resupply torpedoes and fuel. As I was a rookie I even went all the way back to Kiel and not some closer base like Bremen. One would hope that on my way back Grimsby's defense would be up again and major reinforcements would be in the area maybe even a cruiser or two. Well nope. All destroyers were still destroyed (lol) and all merchants were happilly docked...didnt count the days but at least a week went by I guess.

Anyway...dissapointing and embarassing, if the game is really like this throughout the developers should be fired...selling this game at a price of 40 something EUR is plain robbery.

Please, somebody please tell me the AI does get a little harder and smarter later on. Oh, I'm playing this on high level, not realistic yet, as I wanted to get well acquainted with the game first. Does that have anything to do?

Sorry for this long gripe.

P.D. Haven't gone into the bugs but thats one long list too. Playing latest patch by the way.

Thanks for any encouraging replies. The blunt truth like "forget the game, no solution" would be welcomed too so I don't waste my time anymore in a game I really would have loved to like.

Haha, perhaps a little ranty, but still I can understand where your frustration comes from! A lot of us I think have become rather disenchanted with SH5 once the 'oooh....ahhh!' of the beautiful graphics wares off!

The mods mentioned above really do enhance the game, the modders have done a fantastic job making the game much more playable! Its not SH3 yet, but I've got to say with the support the modders have been giving us. There is no doubt in my mind that in the next year or so it will far surpass it!

Don't give up yet! I've been flicking between SH3 and 5 recently.. I go to 5 when I want a nice relaxed patrol with lots of picturesque scenery and stunning boat graphics.

And then I pick up SH3 (With GWX) When I fancy some hard-core simming!

Sev.

[Safe-Keeper]

The game was badly rushed to the shelves, which is pretty bad, but now a patch is coming out to fix lots of problems. It's taking its sweet time, though, don't they know how to rush stuff?

[/sarcasm]

[ottoramsaig]

I installed "Feared Hunters" but I ran into a problem with having a DD constantly chase me and circling. When I doubled back to engage him, he would move further away. After resuming course he would once again tail me. I deactivated the mod and he was gone.

[Reaves]

Originally Posted by Placoderm

Mid April...around the 12th

Oh, wait...

It should be here around April 20th, if all goes well!

Oooops, nope...

Well, if not at the end of April, we're guessing sometime in...May-be








Tah-Dah!! (thank you, thank you....I'll be here all week!) [/applause]

\Golf clap