Looking for some tips on Silent Hunter IV

The Game Room
1

I bought a new copy of Silent Hunter IV: Gold Edition and, having very little experience with subsims, have proceeded to have a ball with the thing all afternoon.

Also, I’ve died a lot. The game came with a fold-out control guide in lieu of a manual, and since the basic tutorials seem pretty insufficient I’ve been having trouble working out a few fundamental aspects of gameplay.

Given that, I was hoping someone would know of an extremely thorough website or guide aimed towards beginners, or at the very least be willing to offer some tips and advise about the thing.

In particular, I was hoping to get a crash course on basic naval tactics: my biggest problems have been closing on a hostile fleet after my sonar picks up a contact, and on surviving a fight with more than one ship… every fight seems to go “Find contact, follow black line on combat navigation chart. Feel ship shaking and hear damage reports come in. Take that as a cue that I’ve been spotted. Find whoever is shooting me on periscope. Fire all of my torpedoes at them. Watch all torpedoes miss, hit and go dud, or hit, explode, and do virtually no damage. Die”, and repeat. ^^

2

First of all, you must go to Subsim (+ its forums), as there are tons of help files/threads and such there. Alas, if you are interested in downloading any mods*, today is a very bad day to be doing this as the main mod depository for many people there, Filefront, will die tonight at midnight.

As for your specific question, I’d need some more info. Basically, if you are attempting a convoy attack, and are running on the surface to get in position, while you will spot them before they spot you (depending on visibility conditions of course), eventually if you get close enough they will start shooting at your boat. You need to set up an intercept course-don’t set a heading to where the target is, but where they will be (i.e. ahead of their course). To do that you’ll need to get a visual on at least one ship, keeping him at the extreme limits of your spotting range so that they won’t see you, and marking his position on the nav map; after several sightings you should have his heading (tho escorts can loop and swerve around off of their base course).

An underwater intercept is harder because of the limited speed and battery life of a typical u-boat (the XXI being the notable exception), and if you go above 2/3rds speed and the escorts are near they can and will hear you.** The “black line(s)” is/are the contacts your sonar operator is giving you. The game is “kinder” than real life, because the end of the line represents the position of the ship (yeah, unrealistic, but helpful-at first I thought it was signal strength, but couldn’t figure out why it would get “weaker” the closer I got to a ship :confused:), so again you can mark the ends several minutes apart and get the base course.

Either way, what I do is get the base course, note where the escorts are (on your headphones/speakers their propwash is much higher pitched and faster than for the merchants), get ahead of the convoy, submerge at silent running (not too shallow or you’ll drift up to the surface!) at a point between/to the side of the escorts, wait until they pass, go ahead slow, up scope, try to get some 90 degree shots on the merchants as they pass you. It’s more complicated than that but you get the idea; early in the war your torps have some serious design flaws, hence all the prematures and duds (this based on historical records). Ask if you have any more questions.

  • The two best mods for SH IV are Real Fleet Boat and Trigger Maru. TM may be going bye bye because the mod maker got banned from the site and his stuff is all on Filefront. RFB is still being supported and updated and I’d go for that one, as it really polishes up the game, eliminating bugs and “odd” features that are in the stock game. Which version of vanilla are you running?

** You can always sneak into the convoy if you submerge under the thermal layer. It is almost always there, somewhere between 100 and 400 feet; down below it (as in your reported depth ~50 feet below it) the escorts have a very hard time hearing you. Of course you then need to get back to the surface in time to shoot the merchants.

3

Agreed with John. Subsim is heaven, I learned everything I know there. Their Silent Hunter III section is more thorough than the one for SH IV (or was, last time I played either), but both games are very similar (the only differences being the specs of each boat, the crew management, and the targetting computer). They also have lots of tools and gaming helps available. I don’t know what I’d do without the relative bearing paper wheel, or the on map protractor.

And yes, the general idea once you get a contact is to figure out where they’re going and when they’ll reach point A, haul ass to said point and lie there in wait, not try to catch up with them. Once you’re on their path, and already at 90° from their course, all you have to do are minute position changes and a couple of periscope sightings to get the perfect shot.

Here’s a very easy way to do this :

When you get a contact, you’ll be informed of its general course and speed. On the nav map, draw a line along that course, starting from the contact’s reported location, and following their course. Next, using the compass, draw tangent circles on that line, according to the contact’s speed (I don’t remember if the exact speed is given in the vanilla game, or only an estimate. Merchants usually make 12 knots, warships are 15-17). One knot = one nautical mile per hour. So if the target is making 12 knots, make tickmarks every 12 nautical mile. That way, you’ll roughly know where the contact will be in one, two, X hours, assuming it doesn’t change course.

Now, pick one tickmark, and draw a line from it to you own position. Divide the length of that line by the time it will take the contact to reach that tickmark. That’s the speed you have to make to reach that tickmark at the time the contact will. Add two or three knots to that (to allow for error, and to give you some time for manoeuvers, sonar detection and so on), and follow that bearing. Stop when you reach the line. And there you are, in a good ambush spot.

Now all you have to do is sight them, figure out their exact course and speed, manoeuver so you are at 90° from their real course, and about half a click away, line up your torpedo shots (forget about magnetic detonations under the keel : it didn’t work much for the Germans, and it never worked for the Americans - go for impact a few feet under sea level), evade destroyers and run away. That’s the hard part :slight_smile:

I’ve read stories of skippers managing some more kills after that first salvo, but I never got the hang of it. Once the merchants are zig-zagging and changing their speed at random, I can never get a torp to hit, so I just call it a day and plot another ambush further down their path.

4

Don’t know anything about SH4, so I can’t address the interface or the tools the game gives you to plot enemy courses, and haven’t played a decent sub sim in years.
But in general, the standard approach tactic in WWII sub combat is the “end around.” Develop an idea of the enemy’s base course (the overall course the foe is traveling, averaging out the zigs and zags). Some simulations draw a line on a map, others don’t give you such a nice crutch. Then fade back to a long range (experience getting spotted is the easiest way to determine exactly how far, and in some games it’s weather-dependent), surface, and run a parallel course on the diesels until you’ve pulled way ahead, then turn in and move close to the enemy’s projected path. Submerge and slow down as you get closer. Then lie in wait, ideally dead in the water, some reasonable torpedo distance (say, 2000-4000 yards) from the projected track.

Fire your torps before the escorts get too close (don’t want the launch sound to be detected) and then maneuver away from your launch position at low speed (to avoid making noise) so that when the escorts respond, you are not sitting predictably at the other end of the torpedoes’ track.

When I used to play sub sims, I considered it the epitome of the art (speaking strictly IMHO) to try and time several torpedoes to hit different ships as close to simultaneously as possible, before warning was given. :slight_smile: Fire the long range “solutions” first and count off the seconds to estimated impact.

Good luck! It’s fun if you can mentally divorce the game activity from the misery of the historical reality.

5

Too late to edit: speaking of historical reality, here’s an enormously detailed site for WWII sub info. It’s U-boat focused but does have some articles on the American and British experiences: Uboat.net.

6

My tactics were nearly always as follows:

Run hard on the surface to get around to the front or near-offbeam front of where the convoy will be.

Run hard on the surface until I have visual, and approach on the surface as close as possible weather permitting, still leading the convoy path. Start choosing fat targets.

When near (about 5km?) submerge and run at 1/2 at periscope depth. Start plotting torpedo solutions. At this point I try to be lined up so that the fleet will pass right in front of me even if I’m running at low speed.

Occasionally go silent and read bearing and look for escorts.

Fire! Unload on 1 or 2 targets, 2 torps per target. If your crew is snappy, you should have time for a tube reload to fire even more. Turn 180 away, and unload your tail torps on another target.

Dive at full battery for a minute or two, then run at silent and take a 90 degree turn away. Keep diving and creeping. Escorts will come, but you should be fine creeping and waiting until late-war (when they’ll probably get you).

Never tangle with the escorts. It can be exhilarating fun if you don’t care about your career and life, but the odds are always on their side.

After that, youshould have sunk a couple of boats, and at least crippled a few that you can wait around for and finish off when they lag behind the pack.

7

I must own this game. I have never played a subsim before in my life and, right now, it sounds like the greatest thing in the world.

8

It is, with the right mods (as I said Real Fleet Boat is the way to go, with a side dose of Run Silent Run Deep the Campaign), tho I do see to my surprise that they also updated Trigger Maru (see post # 1012 at link). You can’t go wrong with either one actually-for the uninitiated these are supermods, comprehensive almost complete overhauls of the vanilla game, with tons of changes.

9

Did they ever fix the bugs / missing features? I got this one on release day, but it felt really unfinished and a step back from SH3. The stopwatch device (forgot its name) didn’t work right, the sonar didn’t function, entire screens were missing clickable objects, sound would cut out, and that’s just the serious bugs. The developer was unsure that they’d ever get around to fixing them, so I shelved the game and forgot about it. Did they ever polish it up?

10

It is a great game, although it suffers from the same problem as all simulations : 10 minutes of hair raising combat for 50 minutes of waiting for something to happen, being in transit etc…:stuck_out_tongue:

11

Well I haven’t played with anything but the most recent patch, but if wikipedia is to be believed they managed to address most of the bugs with official patches. I know that I haven’t noticed any serious problems… the only real issue I have is that sometimes the timeskip feature gets buggy and won’t let me accelerate past 8x, which is kind of annoying on long missions.

By the by, sometimes I notice a red arrow on my depth indicator, usually at around 40-60ft… does anyone know what, exactly, that’s supposed to represent?

12

Isn’t that periscope depth ? Maybe it’s a “go up, there’s a radio message waiting for you” or “go up or we’ll all drown, you madman !” ? Just guessing though, I haven’t played the game in ages.