Some Photos from SH5 Mission #1 - OPERATION DRUMBEAT
This will be a rather long tome on my experience with SH5 – The Wolves of Steel (TWoS) mod. I played a game to the North American coast with Real Navigation and the following MODs:
The Wolves of Steel 2.0.0
TWoS DeckGun Friendly Waves
TWoS UI cmd_Auto Target ID
The Wolves of Steel 2.0.5 Update (later upgraded to 2.0.9 Update)
TWoS Real Navigation
Although interesting, realistic, and very time consuming, SH5 (even with Wolves of Steel) is still NOT a game I personally enjoy playing very often. If you want to know what real U-Boot boredom sprinkled with small moments of real excitement was like, this game is for you. Here are my observations:
-- Lack of a Users Manual is the biggest deficiency of Wolves of Steel.
-- I hate the change in keyboard layout from SH3; enough said. You will find you have to use the mouse a lot more in this game, and a lot of actions require multiple mouse clicks.
-- Highest TC is 512. This is determined by a configuration file, but not sure how the game would respond to configuring a higher maximum TC, so did not mess with it. TC=512 makes crossing the Atlantic a long, boring, and tedious process. In SH3, I do Atlantic crossing at 1024, which is bad enough; found that higher TCs in SH3 can cause save file issues.
-- You cannot change heading or speed at TC greater than 64. Crew will respond to your command at higher TC, but the change will NOT be implemented. Sometimes would work at TC=128, but not always.
-- The radar has 3 range settings but no markings – was hard to tell which settings are short, medium and long range. Turns out the default is short range. Radar performance was marginal at best – the only thing I detected with it was a friendly resupply ship in good weather.
-- My first objective was to refuel with U-459. Never saw the U-Boot and got no fuel, but somehow was told the objective was met. Tried to refit my U-Boot later from several Resupply Ships – finally got a docking symbol from one of them and did get refueled and rearmed. KSD summary says I resupplied from 3 different ships on the same day – although I tried to rendezvous with several resupply ships on different dates, was only successful with one.
-- Using the map is painful – this was true of SH4 as well – as the numbers for Lat/Long and the tools do NOT scale with higher resolutions. At 1920x1080 display resolution, you really have to squint to read the numbers.
-- The recognition sheets in Wolves of Steel are pretty useless; better to just use the standard SH5 recognition manual.
-- There is no TDC “fill in the blanks” using the Watch/Weapons Officer with the “TWoS UI cmd_Auto Target ID” mod. Target identification is just known, but range, speed and AOB are left to your own devices. You can ask the Watch Office to determine speed, but he is slow and not very accurate.
-- When at Decks Awash, you cannot do a lot of things on the bridge like lock the UTC on the target to track it.
-- Patrolling within 40 km of New York for almost a week, I was surprised to get no contacts the entire time I was there.
-- If you save and reload a game, your weather may be different. Reloading the game again sometimes fixes this.
-- If you have installed some of the Wolves of War Automation scripts for use in your game (like real navigation), they will no longer be in your active list when reloading a save file unless they were running at the time of save. Even then, when the game is reloaded, the script may be there and indicate it is running, but actually is not. For best results, I had to remove and reload my active script list and restart the ones I wanted running at the moment.
-- Submerged, the speed indicator reads one number less than your selected speed. For example, if I command slow speed, the speed indicator will read “0” instead of “1”. On the surface, it is okay.
-- Recharge batteries on surface is NOT the default; must command it from the Engineering Officer.
-- Auto torpedo reload is NOT the default. You must check the box on the torpedo status form. Your selection to auto reload is NOT saved.
-- Returning to base with Real Navigation in bad weather can be a real treat! Radio Detection Finder found no signal for Lorient.
-- When loading a saved game, any setups you did – like display compass, display clock, auto torpedo reload, radar on and range selection – ALL revert back to their default (and not displayed) settings.
-- The in-game Enigma is interesting – fun to try once – but deciphering messages one character at a time is once again – boring. Using our DEF Enigma where you can copy an entire message for encryption or deciphering all at once is much easier and quicker.
-- The FLAGS display in Wolves at War has no friendly/enemy dates associated with the flags – only neutrals are indicated. I sank a Columbian freighter knowing it was not an enemy at the time (based purely on looking at the SH3 flag placard) and think that penalized me in the next comment.
-- I completed all required objectives sinking 9 ships for over 51.000 GRT of shipping (50.000 GRT required), but the results on return to base said I failed the mission; did not meet all objectives; and displayed no ships sunk or tonnage. KSD Commander showed only 47.950 GRT sunk even though adding up the tonnage from the ships listed in the KSD is 51.000+ GRT. Think I got like a 4000 ton penalty for sinking that Columbian freighter; but then, I should not have been told all objectives had been met. No way I would be inclined to redo this mission all over again, which is exactly what SH5 wants me to do.
