Training The Acadamy training is something every sim needs, what they are are practice missions. Yeah, boring ya say. Oh no I say back. See the game gives you reknown points that you use to convice better crew to man your sub and to "sweet talk" the Kriegsmarine high command into letting you have new shiny things put in your sub. You start a career with 500 which is enough to get a good officer and a couple good Petty Officers convinced that they want to sail for you. But if you go through the Acadamy training missions not only do you learn about the game, but you also build up some reknown points there too. So they actually made training not only good from a learning how the hell to play the thing point of view, but from a Captain Kirk-esque "Pulled a Kobiashi Maru" in the Acadmy kinda thing since if you go beyond just passing your different tests you build up even more of these oh so good points. I like that.
The AAA training mission was the most annoying, simply because I can't hit crap with a AA gun from a rolling sub, the naval gunnery mission was very fun, the navigation one was...well it could be dull if you really know what you're doing, but me...well I ran aground the first two tries just getting out of Kiel harbor, I misjudged the depth ya see until I learned how to give very finely tuned depth orders and get a good sounding. Which is what a training mission should do, ya know, train you.
The torpedo and convoy attack drills were predictably the hardest. Nothing says "I hate you Krupp" like having 3 torpedoes in a row actually hit a merchantman but not go off because of dud detonators. So I had to switch to impact fuses, which aren't optimal because it takes more torpedoes to sink a ship with waterline hits than under the hull ones like you get with the magnetic fuse...so it's use more torps or pray that the fuse works. Kinda neat once you get down to your last few reloads, I was always asking myself if I could spare 3 torps on a tanker with impact fuses and risk missing with 1 or 2 or firing single mag fused ones and risking them not cooking. That was just on the shooting range, it gets even more interesting when you do the convoy attack drill and have a DD and armed trawler looking for you while doing all these guesses.
Campaign Anyhow off to the campaign, I tried a couple just to basically see how the different years and such impacted things, I haven't started one "for real" yet but they seem very cool. When I left Rochelle in '41 and was pulling out of the sub pen (trust me steer manually allllll the way out to open sea) I heard "Deutschland Uber Alles" playing by a brass band, looked over at the quay and there they were...a full brass band, along with some dock workers, a bunch of nurses and what looked like the naval version of Col. Klink all waving at me and the womenfolk throwing roses to send me on my way. Now that is indeed cool.
The oompa band is appearently resistant to everything up to and including 88mm AP rounds. Yes I had to test this too, yes I know I'm a bad man. Appearently the damage model on land based objects isn't there, at all, because even shelling lighthouses and apartment buildings didn't do any damage to them. This isn't really a deal breaker though because even though I'm sick and twisted and had to try shelling the docks and whatnot once it's not something that you'd ever need to do in a campaign.
Sailing out of the one Italian port was neat, no bands, appearently Mussolini is keeping them all to himself, but there was a sea wall with a gap at the end of the harbor flanked by two working lighthouses. Since it was daytime that wasn't as neat as it could have been but hey. On the way out just to see if I could do it I unloaded my AA gun at a seagull...he went splat. I am a mean man, but yeah there's even seagulls in this thing. (My seagull kill must have been a fluke, though, because I haven't been able to kill another one since. Yes I am a bad man, no I don't care what PETA thinks, it's war man! Either I killed the one seagull in the world in 1939 who wasn't issued a flak jacket or I really need to improve my flak gun skills...)
I went down by Sicily to wave at my grandpa's old house and sink some Brit ships and ran into a lone merchant ship at night. I decided to do a surface attack and just because I'm mean I used the deck gun to papercut him to death, night is dark, very dark. So I loaded in some star shells and they are bright, very bright. They also come down on parachutes like they should. So I sink him with my mighty 88mm deck gun and sail off to get to my real patrol zone. Ran into another lone merchant ship and did a torpedo attack from the surface, the magnetic fuse actually worked and it broke his back.
And it looked good, really good. With the various training missions and my 3 or so test runs of the campaign I've sunk about 15 ships with guns and torpedoes they all die spectacularly and they all seem to have a very complex damage model, I rarely see ships go down in the same way. The most interesting was a tanker that I hit with a spread of torpedoes, the first one broke it's back and the bow was bobbing while the stern was going down fast, the 2nd missed but the third hit the floating bow and rolled it over capsized and then it sank very fastly.
Enemy AI: The enemy AI is incredible. I never thought I'd ever say that about a sim but it's true. They're very smart, very cunning but they also make mistakes you can exploit if you recognise that what they just did was a mistake and figure out how to exploit it. Here's what happened, I was doing another "test" campaign to try different boats, years and ports and was sailing from Kiel in '39 on a Type VII boat. My mission was to patrol the Western Approaches off the coast of Ireland which meant I had to sail all the way around Denmark to begin with and then once I hit the North Sea I had a choice, either run around the northern tip of Scotland and take a risk of running into major warship action around Scapa Flow while also using up more fuel and time or trying to shoot through the Channel and deal with heavier shipping concentrations, the naval bases at Dover and Portsmouth but get a faster time to station and save fuel. The weather report said stormy weather so I went for the Channel option figuring that all the chop should hurt the Brit DD detection abilities and the low clouds should keep the RAF from bombing me into little tiny U-boat bits.
Everything was going fine until I got into the Straits of Dover, my lookouts yelled out (and yeah they do sound excited when they yell too) that there were warhip contacts at long range, closing very fast. Great, this is all I need, the straits are too shallow to allow for a real crash dive so I went to periscope depth as fast as I could snap orders and brought up the scope to see what these fast moving warships were. Did I mention it was stormy? Not only was the bridge getting sprayed when we were on the surface but the periscope would occasionally get overrun by a wave and the view would blur out from the water, a very nice touch. Anyhow I stare through the scope until I see two boats low on the water, and they were moving very fast, when they got closer I saw they were Elco PT boats and they seemed to be running to and fro all excitedly. This was weird I thought, I was going to just stay there and let them pass me by but they were doing what looked like a search pattern. Now I know they weren't searching for me, no PT boat could have detected me in all that muck but they were looking for something and even worse they weren't leaving the area. I didn't want to waste a torpedo on a puny PT boat or two so I figured that I'd go all brass ones on them and surface the boat and take them out with my 88mm.
Big mistake. Yeah I knew it was probably a bad idea getting into a gunfight with warships, even PT boats, but what made it worse was the storm. I'd forgotten that the gun crews won't man the deck gun in one because they'd likely get swamped and drown or get washed away. So there I am, on the bridge staring through my binoculars at a PT boat and silently fuming at myself for forgetting the "no gun in a storm" rule. They opened up on me with their machineguns and the bridge got raked. When I say raked, I mean raked. Guys were screaming and the screen did a "Saving Private Ryan" where time seems to slow down and my vision went blurry. Yep they MG'd me, ME! Okay now I'm mad, but no way to fight back and a sitting duck up here so I dove again.
The PTs didn't prosecute me very hard, they really couldn't, but they did keep up that odd pattern deal. I went to full stop and just watched them, finally after a few hours (time accelerated of course) I saw what they were doing, another PT boat came into view from the direction of France, and it was smoking. They must have been on a patrol off the coast of France and gotten hit by another German unit, I did see a few friendly armed trawlers off Holland so maybe one of them lit him up. No matter who did it the two that were by me sped off to him and formed up with him and then all proceeded off towards Dover together, at the speed of the injured PT. Now that was pretty cool.
Whew, now while that was cool it was also a lot of time with me standing still waiting for them to bugger off. I had to be on my way, mission to do ya know. So I started back west again, and thanks to the shenanigans it was about 2 hours to sunset so I'd be crossing the big Brit naval bases under cover of darkness which was good, especially since the storm had almost blown itself out so I'd lose that protection. So off I go.
About an hour west of my PT boat position the lookouts go bananas again, more warships, high speed screws, multiple contacts. I figured more Elco boats maybe? Wrong. Seems those PT boats called the Royal Navy and told them I was around because not one, not two but three Flower class DDs were making turns for me. I immediately went to periscope depth and chopped the engines but they were moving in a 2-up and 1-back formation with the two in front doing all sorts of radical bearing changes and the third staying back. They were using the two up front in a search pattern at high speed to try to spook me, and the third was staying back and listening to hear when I got spooked. Oh and yes I was spooked, so spooked in fact that I froze up and didn't touch the controls which probably saved my life. I watched the first two basically run right over top of me in a search pattern but they didn't see me. I tried to creep off to the side to avoid the third but as soon as my motors started he shifted bearing towards me so said the hydrophone operator.
This was bad, to make a long story short...yeah I know, too late....they realised I was there and all three of them went into attack mode, they were dropping depth charges left and right and then when it got darker they even turned on spotlights. They really wanted me dead. I was going this way and that, using flank speed to avoid attacks and then reversing course and chopping back to almost a dead stop to try to hide. They were good too, really good, they were reacting to my movements but not in the "AI God Mode" I mean they only seemed to have a firm idea of where I was when I did something that gave them a shot of knowing it, like running at flank speed or taking an ill-advised aft torpedo snapshot at one of them that'd come so close with his depth charges that it broke that valve that always gets broken in sub movies and water started spraying in the control room until Dieter fixed it.
This went on for quite some time but then they made a mistake, after one of my flank speed runs they all converged on the spot and dropped depth charges one after another, but I'd done a double knuckle move that put me off to the side of them, I went back to silent running and went as deep as the navigator said the Channel was here and made turns for slow (and quiet I hoped) speed, after a bit of this I killed the engines and came shallow again, got a periscope fix on them still working in that one area where I'd been very noisy, washed, rinsed and repeated. Finally I got far enough away from them that I figured I could surface and then I ran like hell.
Whew, that was a long story, but it shows the AI is pretty darn good and you really have to think like a sub commander to outfox them. Doing dumb things can get you killed fast, acting like Jurgen Prochnow from Das Boot will work, eventually, but you have to give it time and be patient, the AI will make mistakes but they're the kind of mistakes that a human manned boat would/could make so you have to bide your time and look for your openings.
I never did make it to the Western Approaches, Windows has some bizaree thing that if you keep a shift key pressed for more than 8 seconds it brings up a "hey don't do that or if you want to then tell me so" box which crashed the game right out. Bummer. The only torpedoes I fired on that test patrol, aside from the snapshot at the one DD that annoyed me, were 3 on a nice fat merchantman. 2 hit, 1 didn't explode because the fuse didn't work, but it was a calm night so I finished him off with the deck gun. Used star shells and everything, and to my dying day I'll deny that I saw the Norwegian flag flying over him, nope never saw it Admiral, looked British to me...
(I just wanted to blow the crap out of the first merchant ship I saw, I knew it was a neutral one but hey I didn't care, yeah I know I'm a bad man).
This is hands down the best sim I've ever seen in my life as far as immersion goes, and that's even including EAW's campaigns. I hope flight sim companies pay attention to how some of the little things can make all the difference in the world.
Based on the little I've played it I'm impressed. Very, very impressed.
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