StarDestroyer.Net BBS

CaptHawkeye wrote:Dangerous Waters is a great sim, with excellent attention to detail, a good UI, and lots of scalability in difficulty and realism.

Dude, what?

There's no scalability in difficulty, other than ridiculously easy/ridiculously hard (depending on whether or not you want contacts to show up on the map, or try and find them by sitting at the sonar for hours), the UI is horrible (map tools? what's map tools?), and the damage model is something out of the nineties, with ADCAPs being god-torpedoes, while Russian torps can't even kill a frigate with one hit.

Add to this time compression which is about ten times too slow for the game's tempo, horrible mission scripting which can't tell you if you've beaten the mission or not and really shitty automated station AI that makes you cannon fodder whenever you use it...and you get a really great sim there, buddy.

CaptHawkeye wrote:It's just such a boring game. Playing it feels like purely wasting time. Do ships get into huge, tight formations with eachother, wildly manuevering to change distance and heading with the enemy and vainly hoping the next salvo will hit home?

Nope. It turns out Modern Warfare is 98% Stealth and Detection. The last 2% being firing weapons of unavoidable one hit kill power. That little dot you were watching for an hour has sunk...and all you had to do was press a button. Yay for realism?

Boredom isn't some inherent quality of modern warfare, it's an inherent quality of a game that focuses on making sonar work with 100% realism without bothering to think what would make the game in such an environment fun.

Here's a hint: if a game is 99% about doing a single repeatable thing, it's not fun.

If a game needs you to traverse hundreds of miles at five knots and only has 30x time compression, it's not fun.

Etc - a sim about commanding a nuclear sub should concentrate on simulating what the commander actually has to do, which is...making decisions. Crew manegement to a point, too - but no game has managed to get it right enough so far.

CaptHawkeye wrote:Every time someone asks for a "Modern" sim on the Subsim or Ubi forums I reach for my browning. Their is honestly a huge impetus amongst people to ask for games which are not fun.

Well, subsim is full of complete crazies. Some of them do SHIII patrols in real time.

Seriously, dude. They'd come all over themselves if a modern sub sim would let them sit at their computer staring at waterfall displays marking contacts.

Oh, wait. They already did.

I took SH3 out for a spin last night, and MY GOD, crawling across the atlantic at 1048 was slow; so I changed it to 4000x max compression, thinking that might fix my problems; the game locked up as I entered the bay of biscay.

At least that's something SH4 improved on, higher time compression that works -- it's just that the distances in the pacific are so goddamn huge....

PeZook wrote:Add to this time compression which is about ten times too slow for the game's tempo, horrible mission scripting which can't tell you if you've beaten the mission or not and really shitty automated station AI that makes you cannon fodder whenever you use it...and you get a really great sim there, buddy.

It's actually a evolution of the Fleet Command Engine, and before it; the 688I engine; take a look at the maps in them for example.

You've hit the nail on the head - horribly pathetic time compression = game is not fun. ESPECIALLY a subsim.