A little backstory. About a week ago, Janet started talking about this game
Silent Hunter III, and she made
an LP thread for it. It's a pretty cool game. I've just gotten into it, as other people have, and I want to talk about it. And there's no reason to stuff up Janet's thread, so here we go.
The
Silent Hunter series are simulationist videogames where you get to captain a submarine in great detail, and SH3 makes you Kapitan of an Unterseeboot in the Kriegsmarine. Hells yeah. The well-armed and ever vigilant warships and airplanes of the Allied Nations are your second greatest danger. The
first is your horribly inefficient and underwhelming 1939-model U-boat and technology within it. It can be a very painful game.
Among its good points: The immersion is great, and made greater by mods; you really feel like you're in the boat. The attention to detail is
almost perfect (there are problems). And the gameplay consists of two principle activities - blowing up unarmed merchants, and running for your life from things can easily kill you - which makes it rather satisfying when you're not actually dead.
Among its bad points: Sailing is the fine and ancient art of get soaking wet and deathly ill while very slowly going nowhere at great expense, and SH3 models the mind-numbing tedium of repeatedly crossing the North Sea in a floating can very accurately. You spend most of your gameplay mashing the time-compression button waiting for something to happen. The load times (especially with mods) don't help. On a different note, the attention to historical detail, namely the incredibly unreliable triggers on torpedoes and paper-thin hulls of the U-boats, will make learning to play the game an exercise in frustration. If you're into simulation or U-boats though, it does pay off.
I'll offer four pieces of advice on time-management. 1) Abuse time-compression as often and greatly as possible. 2) Just because your guys spot a ship doesn't mean you have to go chase it down and inspect it. 3) Multitask while sailing, such as watching a movie or reading a book. And 4) Don't try to sail the
Kaiser Wilhelm Canal or any other area of tight navigation. The game won't let you advance time by more than 4x if the water is shallow, which can make the 98 kilometer journey take about three real-time hours.
Desert Bus already fulfills this game-play niche nicely, so don't bother.
Finally, there's a mod for SH3 called
The Grey Wolves, which spiffs up a lot of detail issues and bugfixes, as well as making the graphics a lot prettier. I know pretty graphics are verboten on this forum, but when you're playing a simulation of an activity that heavily relies on the eyeballs (spotting ships on the ocean, specifically), you're going to be staring at the graphics quite often. It's only sensible to make them kinda pretty, especially since stock SH3 looks rather ass for a 2005 game.
And now I shall regale you with my so-far brief and nearly uneventful career.
After completing most the the training missions and failing a few scenario battles, I decided to dive into career mode. Very gently. I joined the 1st Fleet in August, 1939, which is basically easy mode - you get the smallest, crappiest U-boat (Type IIA), and nobody's actually shooting at you yet or really capable of shooting at you. The first two patrols are completely quiet of course, since war doesn't break out until you're halfway through the second one on September 1. Naturally, I passed several big fat British cargo ships in the Skagerrak on August 31, and all I could do was wave at them.
Sailing with the 1st Fleet kinda sucks at the start of the war, since your patrols are near Britain, and you have to go all the way around Denmark to get there. This lead to my terrible mistake of navigating the Kiel Canal and wasting three hours of my life I'll never get back (not to mention I accidentally deleted my career and had to sail the first two patrols again). My third patrol was quiet again, although there was apparently action going on all around me, including a destroyer convoy in my region and a sub-on-sub duel to my south. Never saw anything though.
Patrol number four was where it got good. The Type IID upgrade became available, and I snapped it up. Although technically slower, it has three times the fuel of the IIA, which let me red-line the engines through the whole mission instead of creeping along at an economical 8 knots. Upgrade took a month, but it's not like I was going anywhere. The patrol sector was near the Shetland Islands, which didn't sound promising. I did spot a few possible targets, but the IID still isn't very fast and couldn't catch them in a reasonable timeframe. I also found out that if you're ordered to patrol a sector for 24 hours, they have to be consecutive. Bugger.
But then, I finally spotted my mark, just south of Lerwick in the dead of night. I got within 700m before I could see it was a cargo ship, running dark. Cautious loser that I am, I still wasn't sure if I should shoot at a ship I couldn't identify. Then I facepalmed right through my cranium when I realized it was an unlighted boat off the north British coast. So I saddled up along side and fired a torpedo. It hit the bow dead on and exploded quite nicely (I was goddamn shocked that it worked), but the boat didn't sink. Well crap. Fire two! Clang - dud. Fuck. Then we nearly ran into each other, before I slammed the reverse and wound up circling him from the other side.
Third torpedo was a dud too, and even with every man I could spare for reloading, this late in the patrol my entire crew was half-exhausted. ETA to reloading one tube was almost ten minutes, and there were only two torpedoes anyway. So I grabbed a mate, who I qualified in Flak Gunnery out of my terror of air-attacks, and manned the puny deck gun. By the time the fourth torpedo was loaded, I had circled the ship twice, and probably fired about 200 rounds on 20mm AP shells into the engine room, blowing every extraneous feature off the the hull. I could see that the original torpedo had done enough damage that the waves were breaking over the bow, but I didn't want to wait for it to take on enough water by it's schedule, in case it self-repaired or called for help.
Then the fourth torpedo was a dud. But after a few more flak rounds (from about 100m), I guess I'd done enough cumulative damage to sink it, and the nameless unidentified cargo steamer nosed into the water like an old man climbing into a bath. Shouts of victory and satisfaction resounded all the same as I signaled the return to patrol. Followed by a gut-wrenching scream of metal scraping on metal. Yes, I actually managed to run over debris from the ship I just sank. Okay, so it was dark and I didn't correct enough and I was eager to leave, but what a perfect fucking way to end my career.
Nonetheless, I assigned as many least-exhausted men as possible to damage control, to save them and me from the most ignoble of all possible deaths. Every single compartment on the vessel was considered damaged, including the flak gun and conning tower somehow, as well as knocking out the radio, the hydrophone, and the air-compressor. By the grace of an incredibly forgiving God, nothing flooded though, and all damage was repaired enough to sail after a few minutes. We very cautiously headed home on the quietest voyage ever, not unlike riding an elevator with a new ex, a friend you just saw naked, or similarly awkward and humiliating social situation. The crew and I agreed to call it battle damage from a desperate act on the target's part, and to never speak of the incident again.
While I'm here, there's some oddities I should ask about, from people who actually know what they're doing. Is it normal to get unannounced contact-signals of ships on your map, from dozens of kilometers away that you couldn't possibly have spotted? How am I supposed to find these ships sending distress signals by map-coordinates, when there are no coordinates on the map, and the coordinates sometimes point to real-world locations far inland where only an airship could have sailed to? Why do the reports from other U-Boats list locations like "AN4192" or such, with more numbers than they're supposed to have? And somehow, after my last patrol I returned to base with two torpedo-qualified pettyofficers that I didn't leave with, bringing my crew compliment to two above full.
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Topic: Silent Hunter III - Damn These Torpedoes! (Read 17375 times)