The Wargamer

Time, And A Couple Of Patches, Heals All

It's a good thing The Wargamer does not rush its reviews nor its reviewers. Frankly, Silent Hunter 4 was released in buggy state, and its reviews suffered accordingly. Which is a shame, really, as Silent Hunter 4's bugs were not the product of bad core design, as is the case with many other games, just some sloppy final testing. After couple patches this well designed game has become the finest submarine simulation ever released, enjoyable for players of varying levels of experience with simulations and naval games.

Improvements

Not everyone would agree – but Silent Hunter 4's interface is in my opinion much improved over Silent Hunter 3. It takes a minimal amount of time getting used to, it's reasonably customizable and moddable, and everything is clean, organized, and at the player's fingertips at any given moment. Submariner's habits are hard to break, though, which is just about the only reason some players may still prefer the old Silent Hunter 3 interface. Another notable improvement over its predecessor is the crew management section. I almost wrote "mini game" instead of "section", because in Silent Hunter 3 that's what crew management originally was – a game within a game, it was that complex and time consuming. One of the most modded things in Silent Hunter 3 was crew management (made simpler through mods) – the development team took a hint, and made crew management easier, but still quite realistic: the player feels like a captain of a fully crewed boat that needs some tweaking and managing, not just some virtual entity that always performs with 100% efficiency.

Still, the crew now performs their biological functions automatically, watch changes go without any intervention from the player, whose task is only to fine tune his crew, should he wish to do so, like assigning the best gunners to man the gun when it goes into action, or filling in the slots for the damage control team manually.

Yet another huge improvement is in the area of mission design – instead of the boring repetitive "patrol grid XY" campaign missions from Silent Hunter 3, we now have diverse and interesting missions, varying from photo recon of enemy harbors, to rescuing downed airmen, to dropping spies onto enemy controlled shores, or supplies for Philippine guerillas. Regular "run of the mill" area patrols are also represented, of course but they are now much more varied. The campaign design combines best of both worlds – truely dynamic campaign of Silent Hunter 3 and scripted campaign of Silent Hunter 2.

The damage model of the player's sub is subtle, and in my opinion quite realistic, even if it's very poorly documented in the game manual. It takes some getting used to, so players should make sure they have damage control teams assigned to their duty, their crew fully alerted, and absolutely have flooding levels under constant control (flooded compartments fill in with blue color, which is easy to overlook, unless you look carefully). Unless players "baby sit" their sub until all the damage is repaired, sudden flooding and death may occur. Also, hull damage is not repairable without docking, and is not shown anywhere in the game interface (apparently, this was done on purpose, for added realism). Players should assume that when their sub is hit by a depth charge some systems will be broken but repairable, but hull damage will limit the sub until it reaches port and spends some time in dock.

Some players have voiced irritation with what they call "forced retirement". As we know, historically the US Navy silent service rarely pushed its captains to the stress levels German or Japanese submarine branches did, which is also one of the reasons USN submarine commanders never reached the kind of sunk tonnage records German Kaleuns did. After 5-6 patrols US submarine captains were retired to a relatively safe desk or training job somewhere. That's how it works in Silent Hunter 4 as well, and I for one fully support this decision by the developers. Still, there are players who wish to spend the whole war in the sub, doing patrol after patrol after patrol, no matter how unrealistic it might be. Currently the only way around occassional "forced retirement" is modding or "hacking" the save game files. Having a "forced retirement" as toggleable option would be nice, even though I would continue to play under the realistic retirement setting allowing a sub commander only a limited number of patrols in the war zone. (Yeah call me coward but I play under "dead is dead" rules, never reload old saves, never take missions that are too risky, and always accept the opportunity to retire!)