SH2 / DC: Best subsim experience of my life!!!
 

Hi mates,

back in the days when SH2 and DC were brandnew i played some missions online against REAL DC-CAPTAINS


THIS WAS SO MUCH FUN - I DEFINITELY HAVE TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT


"SINK THE BATTLESHIPS IN SCAPA FLOW" was the mission, designed by UBI, and i had to fight alone versus 3 experienced Destroyer Captains, which were situated at the 3 main entrances of the bay. (NW,W and SW i think)

:ping: It was my first online game ever, and it was daaark night :ping:

History Lessons had been telling me :know: that Prien choose a FOURTH WAY into Scapa, but i could not find it in the map. (they didn't see it either and were no experts for WW2 history what i soon should find out playing against them :cool:)
I choose the highest zoom level and scanned the whole coastline - and there it was - on the south-eastern side of the bay, right as it had been in real life!!! (Cooool mission design THX UBI :up:)

Above Water, with electric engines on, I sneaked through a narrow and very shallow channel into Scapa and made my way through the large, dark and calm bay.

(E-Engine above water while still at the bridge was possible in SH2, i hate that they didn't realize this in SH3 :/\\!!)

The destroyers still patroled at the other entrances and already started wondering where i was. Via ingame-chat they asked each other, if i was already in the game or if there was a malfunction, when i fired all my front tubes towards the 2 Battlecruisers at the northern shore of the bay. As they were docked with zero speed i could shoot my eels with only 30 knots from 4300m distance, giving me enough time to turn around 180 degrees and be already on my way back home, when all the torpedos hit and blew the target vessels with a a large blast up in the air.

NOW they finally knew that i was ingame, but they had no clue where i was. All 3 cruised around planlessly or sailed at highspeed to the sinking ships heading northeast while i very patiently escaped at the cozy speed of 7 knots heading southeast. This took several minutes but being an icecold U-Boat KaLeu i stayed calm and silent - and undetected :cool:
When i was outside Scapa again I stopped the game, no one had even had contact with me.

But the 3 guys in the lobby were out for revenge and "forced" me to play the same mission over and over again.

3 more times i did just the same, with the same outcome. Now they became really bloodthirsty and aggressive but still couldn't find the smallest trace of me. :hmm2:

But as i did it a fourth time, one of the DCs had enough and crossed the bay with highspeed to the south-eastern sector where they never had searched before. He had no proof that i was there, it was only good guessing i think. He just gave it a try after 4 times getting no contact at any of the other 3 entrances, and all target ships sunk every single time, without any idea how this could have happened.

Half way to the exit of the bay, still a few minutes to go, i realize with upcoming panic that this Destroyer now seems to follow me somehow. I suppress my burning wish for flank speed with the diesels because i know i have no chance at all. He would shell me to the ground before i even reached the exit. I also know i can't dive because he pings with his asdic without a break.
Water depth only 17m, actually no wind or waves at all, best underwater detection possibilities. The dark night and my whispering electric engines are my only friends.
I keep him in the Goggles to find out if he really detected me, or if he just is heading the same direction by chance. I still sail with nervewrecking 7 knots speed, still above water, but steadily as a clock he comes closer and closer at changing speeds from 14-21 knots. As he still doesn't attack i decide that he might have found the fourth way somehow in the map, and just tries to find out if i am somewhere in the area. This should calm me down a bit,
but just like a sniffing bloodhound searching for the trace of his prey he does some lazy zigzaging, coming up closer and closer behind me, pinging with his asdic all the time.
As i am not underwater he gets no asdic contact but he kind of knows/feels that i must be pretty close. After 2 more sweaty minutes that felt like hours (!!!), i finally reach the south-eastern end of the bay. I must pass again through this long, too-shallow-to-dive and very narrow channel, and i need all my skills for navigating, but the bloody DC now is only 600-700m behind me. I pray to Poseidon, Neptune and all gods of the seven seas that he might loose interest on this course, but like a dog on a leash he follows me instinctively into the channel, although he might have only a cup of water under the keel. He has still no idea that i am right in front of him, only 400m away now in the middle of the channel.

I know I am more than vulnerable in this situation, a small channel with no manouvering space and no depth to dive and a Destroyer in bloody revenge mode right on my back.

I estimate the time i would need to get through the channel and realize, that i could never be through before he finally will see me and shell me to pieces, or luckily sinks me by ramming my stern with his bow just by chance. So i go to the UZO and take him in the crosshairs. 300 m now. I fire my stern torpedo and hit him in seconds right under the bow. Totally unexpected by its Captain the tincan bursts into a real hell of explosions and fire in a split second !!!

GAME OVER :haha:

This was so cool because they NEVER had me on the screen, not for a single second, and i always managed to accomplish the mission completely.
They only knew that i was there, but they never got a glimpse where, in 5 games with the same mission! I managed to do more or less the same attack as Prien did with U-47, which was kind of cool too. And as one of them finally was about to realize what was going on, he was blown away in the very moment the idea came to his mind.

Keeping cool even in the most dangerous and intense moments felt so *****ing realistic mates, the hair on my back was standing upwards as i had the DC in my back, couldn't escape, and had to hold on to my course for minutes at this ridiculous, slow speed! This was the most intense subsimming experience of my life, and i spent years on the subsimming-seas, believe me!

What made it even more funny to me was that they all were Brits and they knew that i was german !!! :har:

( :yep: History repeating :yep: )

Maybe the 3 still have nightmares :eek: :eek: :eek: about unattended ships exploding unexpectedly in their patrol area :arrgh!:



Hope you liked the story mates, i had to tell it to somebody ! :salute:

Great story! I really hope a WW2 Destroyer/ Submarine multi player sim gets made again. Experiences like this prove it would be the most interesting and challenging kind of naval simulation.

Great story, Nemo, thanks for sharing. Posted on Subsim News
:Kaleun_Salute:

Played DC/SH2 once in MP and it was one of the most awesome MP experiences I ever had up to this day.

Chances to get something like that again are slim, but you'll never know...

Maybe we will just host some games on hamachi? :) back to the past... As I know nobody plays now SH2/DC or even DW games over net... once the gamespy died... It would be nice to play these games online like old times...

Oorah :salute:

I played many games with SH2/DC, both as the DD and the sub.
The ones I remember the most are the 4 vs. 4 we played in the
Gibraltar Straits when the subs tried to make it past the DDs.
Every ships was player operated. Actually, the game crashed
far less than anyone would have thought. GREAT DAYS !!!!!!
We need for someone to develop a new version of that playability.

YESSS Baby, that's what i'm talking about!


Ooh my god, how i would love to play this Gibraltar mission! Sounds so exciting man! Have you heard about the new online place called "Tunngle" ?
I have registered (for free) there yesterday, and they had an SH 2 channel too. I did not get the site to work properly but i think i was too stupid. I will give it another try the next few days to come. Maybe we can play SH2 / DC missions there, but as far as i remember there was no mission editor with SH2/DC? So it might be a problem to create Sub vs DC missions....:o
If we are really unlucky, only UBI has the missions we would need, oh my god, what a thougt...:shifty:
I only played SH2/DC at UBI i think, but maybe the missions were ingame, i don't really remember, it's 10 years or more ago..:88)

BUT I WILL NEVER FORGET THE FUN I HAD :rock: :rock: :rock:

That was due mainly to the Messerwetzer Interop patches. They are available here at Subsim Downloads.

Most of the missions we played were created by Subsim members. I don't recall ever playing an official UBIsoft mission. We used an IRC channel set up by either a member or Neal himself. We also had some great online parties in the main chat room.

I find SHII and DC to be severely lacking in the realism department, but that is mainly due to the mission-based campaign structure and has nothing to do with multiplayer. If things were to get properly organized I would certainly be willing to play again.

Mission text from Gibraltar Mission:

(Interop) Gibraltar
This is a Destroyer vs. U-boat Scenario for up to three players on each side.
U-BOAT COMMANDERS:
Your mission is to navigate at least one of your ships to the objective point on the Mediterranean side of the Straits of Gibraltar. When a U-Boat reaches this point, your side wins the game.
DESTROYER COMMANDERS:
Your mission is to prevent the U-Boats from reaching the objective point. You must sink all U-boats in order to win the game.
The Blue team consists of Bagley-class destroyers.
The Red team consists of Type VIIC/41 U-boats.

Good luck!

I would be down to play a Destroyer Captain.

I played that mission once as a destroyer. Sometimes people would take advantage of the Messerwetzer feature that allowed you to drive the boat like an airplane. I scored a kill on one of the U-boats when he tried to race from deep water to periscope depth and surprise me. He was the one surprised when he overdid it and surfaced. I immediately locked the director onto him and four 4" guns made short work of him.

On the other hand I once rushed over to investigate a contact - right into the loving arms of a torpedo. :dead:

We also had a u-boatman report that he was out of the game. It seems he had put his planes to full rise and forgot to center them once he was coming up. The boat tried to do a loop and when he was vertical everything broke loose and he sank.

One of the features I like the most is the way that the subs can't talk to each other unless they're surfaced, and then the destroyers get an HF/DF warning. Of course TeamSpeak negates that now.

Yeah Steve, its true, there's nothing more satisfying than to sink a cheater with a stock/fairly patched game! Definitely know what you mean, sir :cool:

I did this a lot with cheater subsimmers on SH3 sub v sub. Usually cheaters overestimate their personal capabilities and underestimate what an experienced, tactically skilled captain can do. But that's why they become cheaters i think; they don't give themselves time to gain experience and want to win instantly with some gruesome and ridicolous mods. But that doesn't always work out the way they imagined...:rotfl2:


I agree to 100% about the surfaced messages/Teamspeak issue !

That was a gun time in the old Wolfpack League. Made a lot of friends there and had some great times in the water. Depending what time zone you were in depended upon what flotilla you were assigned to. It had been nice actually meeting some of my shipmates in person!

Nothing beats the thrill of going up against a human, they are so unpredictable. I remember SailorSteve from those days (I was Jochen then).

Since my post below I went back to my little cache of SHII files I have kept over the years and forgot just how unstable it was right out of the box (remember when computer games were still boxed and placed on a shelf in a store? LOL). There were one tweak after another to get it to be the best experience ever. One individual, Duane Duetel spend countless hours work on the fixes needed for a stable platform for both with SHII and DC. In fact the members of the Wolfpact League and here at Subsim donated money to help defray his cost in working on the fixes. I think it wore him out, spending countless hours on the project. It appeared that not long after he did all he could with the project, he disappeared. Duane, in my opinion, did more for the players with SHII/DC than anyone else. He even got permission from UBI to make the changes needed to advance the game among the group. Very interesting times..........:Kaleun_Los: