Silent hunter 3, best sub sim ever.

[SenorBeef]

I remember buying silent hunter 1, commander's edition, in what must have been 99 or earlier. It was a great game then - great realism, great atmosphere...

SH 2 I never got, but heard it sucked.

But I heard good things from SH3, and I was willing to give it a try.

And it's great. Best sim I've played in years, in any genre. It has great graphics - the water is great, the weather effects are great, and the lighting on the water is great. The 3d internal u-boat view is immersive. It allows for ultra-realistic simulation through a realism panel, or something a lot more (though not too much) arcadey.

The ships are really detailed, and the damage effects are awesome. Particle explosions create dynamic destruction. You can take out parts of the superstructure, and cause secondary explosions that light up the night sky... you can catch an oil tanker on fire and wait until it blows up and splits in half.

I haven't been playing it for long, but so far, I haven't found much to complain about.

[SenorBeef]

I figured I'd bump this once to spread the good news to sim fans who might not have heard about it - I almost missed it.

[Zebra]

I haven't heard of it but I love submarine games. I'm not sure why but I do.


I'll have to check it out.

[Incubus]

Are they worth it? For some reason they seem interesting, but really really boring. I mean what do you do? wander around, looking for a ship to sink. Then sneak, sneak sneak in, fire a torpedo...rinse repeat?

I had heard of a sub game that used voice recognition, so you could shout, "Thirty degrees to port!" and it would respond. That sounded pretty cool!

[SenorBeef]

Originally Posted by Incubus

Are they worth it? For some reason they seem interesting, but really really boring. I mean what do you do? wander around, looking for a ship to sink. Then sneak, sneak sneak in, fire a torpedo...rinse repeat?

I had heard of a sub game that used voice recognition, so you could shout, "Thirty degrees to port!" and it would respond. That sounded pretty cool!

I would imagine they wouldn't have wide appeal, so unless it sounds interesting to you, it probably wouldn't be. What I consider interesting would probably be tedious and boring to a lot of people.

I'll give you an example of a part of a hypothetical patrol.

It's mid-1940, very much the time of the U-boat. Allied anti-submarine tactics are still very lacking, but you're not invulnerable.

I'm assigned to patrol a grid west of England, sailing out of Wilhelmshaven. There are destroyer and aircraft patrols all over England, especially near naval bases.

I decide to take the route north of England, south of the Shetland islands, avoiding Scapa Flow as much as I can. The weather is good, so the planes will be out, so I plot out my course and speed so that I will arrive in the most patrolled area at the beginning of night, so that I can rush through the area when the visibility is low.

Every hour or so, I dive, shut off the engines, and listen to the hydrophone to pick up any patrol craft so that I can avoid them. The hydrophones can hear much farther than my deck watchmen can see at night.

At full speed, I make it past the most dangerous areas during the night, and proceed to my patrol zone.

I patrol the area in a zig-zag pattern for a few hours (game time), diving periodically to listen to the hydrophones, and don't find any contacts. Then a radio report comes in - spotted by another sub, or perhaps a recon plane. The report isn't exact - it provides a location, a general course, east-northeast for example, and a general speed. In this case, slow, which generally means about 4-5 knots.

I go to my charts, take a ruler, and plot out a projected course line for this target if he maintains heading and speed. He travels around 8.5km per hour, so I make a mark every 8.5km to track where he'll be every hour after the contact was reported so I can easily track his progress. I estimate that I can intercept him in 3 hours at full speed, so I draw a circle around my ship of 45km, roughly the distance I can travel in that time. Where that circle intersects his course line, I plot to intercept just a bit ahead of that position, so I'll have extra time to dive and get into position for the attack.

Zoom ahead to three hours, and my deck watchman spots a ship off my port bow, long range. Bingo. The day is overcast and the seas are a bit rough, so he won't see me for a while yet. So I move at full speed to a position in front of him to ambush him.

To get an initial course and torpedo solution, I take various measures of his ship. I identify him as a c2 cargo ship, 6700 tons, a fairly good prize. From my ship data book, I know that the distance from waterline to mast on that vessel is 20m. So, using the stabalized UZO targetting binoculars on my bridge, I use the stadia lines to measure that the angle from waterline to mast is X mils. Using simple trig (which the computer does for me), we can establish that the ship is at Y range.

I mark the contact down on my charts. Five minutes later, as I'm waiting him to come to me, I take the same measurement again, and plot it on the chart. From this data, I have an exact course, and an exact speed (the amount he moved in that 5 minutes). This, along with his bearing off my ship, is enough data to enter into the torpedo data computer to establish a continuously updating feed into my torpedoes which determines which direction they must travel in to intercept that ship.

Normally, with no escorts around, I would simply surface and take the ship down with my deck guns, but the sea is too rough for that in this case, so I must use a torpedo attack.

I submerge to periscope depth, and wait, double checking my measurements, for him to cross me. I know that the type of torpedo I'm using has a high failure rate with the impact detonator when it hits at too oblique an angle, so I wait for him to cross me, where I can launch a torpedo at him at nearly 90 degrees.

The time comes, I flood the tube, take a look at the computer to make sure everything looks right, and launch when he reaches about 600m away. 30 seconds later, I see a large plume of water rise over his bow - a hit. I had intended to hit him in the center of the ship, so my calculations were slightly off. I simply wait and observe him to assess the damage. He drifts to a stop.

He's severely listing to the bow, which is half submerged. I observe for about 45 minutes, keeping an eye out for any destroyer help he radioed in. He's listing severely but it appears that they've stopped the flooding, and that he's not going to sink. It's extremely simple to hit a stationary ship, so I target again for his bow area. Another hit. This time his entire front end explodes magnificiently and drops below the water line, no chance to survive a second hit. In a mere 5 minutes, he's halfway to the sea bottom. I surface, and radio in a report, and proceed back to my patrol area.

Of course, it becomes a lot more challenging to take on a convoy with escorts, and such.

[Declan]

Originally Posted by SenorBeef

I remember buying silent hunter 1, commander's edition, in what must have been 99 or earlier. It was a great game then - great realism, great atmosphere.

I loved playing red storm rising , it was fun choosing between a 688 LA class where you had to decide what the mix between torpedos and cruise missiles or the improved LA class , cause they had cruise missiles mounted in tubes on the outer hull, so you did not have to subtract torpedos from the weapons load out.

Doing knuckles in the water was fun

Declan

[RTA]

Fast Attack was my favorite sub sim, despite its frustrating bugs. Sneak sneak, wait, wait, shoot, run. As in life: lots of waiting, observed progress, short bursts of great excitement and panic.

Hopefully Silent Hunter 3 gets ported to the Mac; the best sub sim I have nowadays is standing in the shower, barking orders to the cat about stuffing the torpedo tubes with garbage.

[Khadaji]

About 7 years ago I passed up a job to work on Silent Hunter 2. I was offered money well below what I was making and even though I really really wanted to work in the game business, I decided that I wouldn't give up almost a third of my salary to do so. They told me that "Traditionally the game business does not pay well." And I replied that traditionally Khadaji made more money than that.