[Rockin Robbins]

I think a submarine simulator should be about submarines, not just U-boats. Submarines won their war. U-boats, by their very existence and because they were used, lost their war. Making heroes out of villains seems to me to be doing a disservice to mankind. Not that the men who served on those U-boats were terrible men. The U-boats themselves were inappropriate tools. The manpower they stole, the materiel they diverted, the time they squandered in a pursuit they could not possibly fulfill absolutely guaranteed the defeat of Germany. Every man who died in a U-boat died in vain.

Why? Because England received supplies on the bottoms belonging to other nations. Destroying those nations' property and killing their men absolutely guaranteed that Germany would end up fighting the entire world, sealing its defeat, instead of focusing the war on its natural adversaries, which it could possibly defeat.

This folly is obscured by the fact that Germany's "leadership" made a hat full of fatal mistakes. The utter failure of the U-boat was in good company with dozens of fellow failures, leading the wishful thinkers to wonder if the U-boats could have won the war. They could not. Every kilo of steel, every highly trained and irreplaceable man, every second devoted to the management of the U-boat war was wasted.

So why are so many people captivated by the possibility of commanding such a craft? I believe it is the contrast between the publicly prosecuted and highly promoted U-boat campaign vs the secretively conducted American submarine campaign.

Even during the war, the personal heroes of American submarine commanders were.......German U-boat commanders! They studied them. They analyzed their successes and imitated them. They studied their failures and tried to avoid those mistakes. But the American sub commanders' key to victory did not lie in anything they did.

Their victory lay in the correct analysis of why the Japanese war was different from the war against Britain. Japanese shipping was on Japanese bottoms. There was no risk of drawing other nations into the war against the US by sinking Japanese shipping. Yes, there were technical reasons American submarines were much better than U-boats, but without that central fact, Japanese shipping was on Japanese bottoms, NO submarine could have gained victory in that war, just as no submarine could have won the war for Germany in the Atlantic.

I wonder if American leadership were even aware of that crucial fact? Certainly the Germans never considered it, or they would have confined U-boats to coastal defense and diverted men and materiel to those areas where they could secure victory. But I suspect that American leadership also was blind to the most important strategic factor in the submarine wars of both sides.

I'd love to see a simulator that included the American boats in its world view. I think the opportunity to assume the duties of any single man in the crew is brilliant. I think the opportunity for cooperative play between players assuming different crewmembers is brilliant, although there are dragons there.

But most important is that the game have depth. Just about anything should be able to run on automatic, but have as much detailed manual control available by the player's choice, configurable on the fly, as possible. If you want to supervise the loading of food on the sub and decide where each item is stored, then you should be able to. If you just want to push a button and be supplied, that should be possible.

The dev team needs to be stable over a period of years, with evolutionary updates released every year or every other year. Income needs to continue to come into the company past the several weeks of introduction in order for this to happen. A game with the depth and customization we want won't be built in a year. Or two. Or five.

That's why an evolutionary model of a long-term team is necessary. The game won't be complete on release, but an overall vision of a schedule of implementation of announced goals, along with a strategy to produce a reliable income stream, not just a flash, of money to make this possible, must be found.

It will mean commitment beyond the comfort level of game company and player. It will mean foregoing the popcorn disposable sale of FPS games to millions in exchange for a grueling, slave to reality, long struggle for mere thousands. It's a tough sell. I don't see any buyers.