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lecek · 05-31-23, 08:29 PM

I too like that you can't always be sure.

One of the things with SH3, I played perhaps 2K hours with that game. Maybe more. No steam client to count them, but played it a lot. I made test missions and timed dives and explored crush depth behavior, torpedo behavior, ship weak spots, you name it. It was all systematic, scientific, and rigorous.

It made me a very good player.

In some ways it made me appreciate the ship operation model. For example, I don't know if very many people noticed, but when you surface the boat in SH3 it runs low in the water while the engine exhaust fills in the ballast tanks. Real U-Boats did this to save on compressed air. In SH3 if you wanted peak performance when surfacing without any delay you had to blow the tanks.

It also ruined the game a bit for me. Because under the hood, that game was very deterministic. Without mods, the ship escorts regardless of difficulty give up after 15 minutes of no contact. Exactly 15 minutes. To the second. This made the decoys useless, it just made the escorts stick around longer. (Also the decoys didn't last long enough.) Eventually I would time my attacks and where I would wipe out up to 5 ships of the front row of a convoy with simultaneous detonations. (Actually about 4 or 5 seconds from first torpedo to last. It is easier than you might think.) Afterwards I would dive and evade. Exactly 15 minutes later I would move to the surface and silent speed. Then end run the convoy, rinse repeat. Routinely sank the whole convoy except the neutrals. No damage, no missed torpedoes, never detected even by the escorts until the late game.

This might sound awesome cool. Like I am an awesome U-Boat commander. But the reality is that I just understood the game under the hood so much that the predictability of the game became impossible not to take advantage of. It ruined the immersion.

U-Boat on the other hand, is much less transparent under the hood. Crush depth is not so predictable, neutral ships are not so predictable and more. Though I have been purposely avoiding the kind of experiments I did for SH3, lest I find the same predictability under the hood.

I just wish U-Boat used a curved map with great circle routes instead of the flat map it uses. Ahh well.

05-31-23, 08:29 PM	#9
lecek Watch Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Canada Posts: 30 Downloads: 0 Uploads: 0	I too like that you can't always be sure. One of the things with SH3, I played perhaps 2K hours with that game. Maybe more. No steam client to count them, but played it a lot. I made test missions and timed dives and explored crush depth behavior, torpedo behavior, ship weak spots, you name it. It was all systematic, scientific, and rigorous. It made me a very good player. In some ways it made me appreciate the ship operation model. For example, I don't know if very many people noticed, but when you surface the boat in SH3 it runs low in the water while the engine exhaust fills in the ballast tanks. Real U-Boats did this to save on compressed air. In SH3 if you wanted peak performance when surfacing without any delay you had to blow the tanks. It also ruined the game a bit for me. Because under the hood, that game was very deterministic. Without mods, the ship escorts regardless of difficulty give up after 15 minutes of no contact. Exactly 15 minutes. To the second. This made the decoys useless, it just made the escorts stick around longer. (Also the decoys didn't last long enough.) Eventually I would time my attacks and where I would wipe out up to 5 ships of the front row of a convoy with simultaneous detonations. (Actually about 4 or 5 seconds from first torpedo to last. It is easier than you might think.) Afterwards I would dive and evade. Exactly 15 minutes later I would move to the surface and silent speed. Then end run the convoy, rinse repeat. Routinely sank the whole convoy except the neutrals. No damage, no missed torpedoes, never detected even by the escorts until the late game. This might sound awesome cool. Like I am an awesome U-Boat commander. But the reality is that I just understood the game under the hood so much that the predictability of the game became impossible not to take advantage of. It ruined the immersion. U-Boat on the other hand, is much less transparent under the hood. Crush depth is not so predictable, neutral ships are not so predictable and more. Though I have been purposely avoiding the kind of experiments I did for SH3, lest I find the same predictability under the hood. I just wish U-Boat used a curved map with great circle routes instead of the flat map it uses. Ahh well.