Notes on Playing Silent Hunter III

The interface has some clunky bits.

Loading and saving careers is weird and makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong and about to delete everything. Just read the interfaces carefully and you should be fine.

While playing the game, the most important keyboard shortcut to know is F1, which displays the rest of the keyboard shortcuts.

I use a lot of the on-screen controls, but some of the shortcut keys are faster (and easier to remember) than the on-screen methods. Off the top of my head:

Sadly, the time compression shortcuts need a numpad, and I use "tenkeyless" keyboards.

The on-screen submarine interface is pretty discoverable.

A very important, but non-obvious thing is that when you click your mouse in a view (first-person camera, periscopes, binoculars, or the "free camera"), the view will follow your mouse movements. To exit the mouse follow, you click again. Now you can use your mouse as a normal cursor to select controls in the interface.

The award, however, for the least obvious interface element in the whole game has got to go to upgrading your U-boat! When you’ve earned enough renown to do so, you upgrade by: double-clicking on the upgrade name in the left column (which is a menu of all available upgrades for the tabbed category).

Rumor has it double-clicking also has special actions for some things when you’re playing the game as well.

For some reason, my Steam copy of SH3 now pops up an "Error: Can not initialize 3D engine" message when I try to run it. The solution was to bump down the resolution to 1024x768. (Feel free to experiment with other resolutions, but I remember the time when 1024x768 was the resolution and it seemed like the obvious choice and it worked.)

I assume Windows is to blame. I blame Microsoft for everything. I did not have this problem running the game on Linux (see the bottom of this page for more about that).

Play the Academy missions first. Go slow and take your time with the navigation, deck gun, and anti-aircraft gunnery missions. There’s no shame in restarting them as many times as you need to - it’s training! Once you’ve got 'em nailed, take your exams.

The torpedo missions, however, gave me no end of trouble. Continue down to my torpedo notes below for advice on hitting targets.

I would argue that the time compression feature is the only thing that actually makes this simulation a "game" at all.

U-boats travel slowly and oceans are very big.

Finding, stalking, and lying in wait for enemy craft can take anywhere from hours to days. You can either sit through everything in real time (which you should definitely try just to soak in all of the atmosphere), or you can speed up the action and compress those hours into minutes.

The time compression controls are the little +, - and P buttons in the lower right corner of the sub interface.

Important things I’ve figured out through trial and error:

Don’t be afraid to go all the way to 1024x as much as you want and rely on the game to drop you into realtime as needed. In some circumstances, you’ll be dropped into 4x instead (I think this happens when you’ve already spotted the craft in question?), so prepare to mash that Backspace key to pause the game completely until you get a feel for when this might happen.

At first, I found it difficult to get my U-boat where I wanted it and turned in the direction I wanted it. But with some practice and the Naval Academy missions, I eventually got the hang of it.

The friction of moving through the water will eventually slow you down, but don’t forget that your U-boat will continue to travel for a while even after ordering a full stop from the engines. I nearly rammed into stalled cargo vessels a couple times before I learned to stop just ahead of my desired destination (or reduce speed before reaching the destination). If you overshoot your destination, don’t forget that the boat can go in reverse! An emergency "reverse full!" once prevented an aforementioned ramming within a handful of meters. It was very exciting.

Initially frustrating, I now find this to be one of the best aspects of the game. Torpedoes are very powerful and can take out huge targets, but you have to set up the conditions correctly.

(Note: these instructions are for automatic targeting, but I reckon the same advice applies for manual targeting as well.)

Once you leave the training missions and start a real campaign, you will run head-first into the challenges of SHIII crew management.

As mentioned before, your crew will fatigue like Real Humans when you’re playing the game at time compressions of 32x or lower. Unfortunately, in this vessel of war, they will remain at their posts until they are personally dismissed by you, their captain. Yes, they will remain at their posts until they are exhausted and no longer able to perform their duties until you, the captain of the U-boat comes to carry them off to their bunks and read them a bedtime story, one by one.

When I first encountered this problem, I didn’t realize what was happening until I finally spotted a small convoy in my appointed sea square and was unable to fire any torpedoes at it because my crew were all just shy of unconscious from sleep deprivation at their posts. I rage-clicked each little sleepy sailor one by one and hauled him off to bed. Then I read Hansel and Gretel over the intercom as we floated there in the North Sea, watching the convoy drifted blithely off the horizon through the periscope. Soon the whole boat was filled with the sounds of snoring.

How to manage your crew without losing your mind:

It would be really neat to sink a warship. But that’s not gonna happen. Remember how hard it is to hit a huge cargo ship going in a straight line?

You are a mouse to the warship’s cat. They’re faster and deadlier and they will eat you.

Run from cats. Pursue only the unguarded cheese.

As the years go by, the Allies get more aircraft and better radar. U-boats became the hunted rather than the hunter. Most did not come back.

Silent Hunter III is brutally realistic in this regard. Eventually you find yourself going a few kilometers on the diesel engines to recharge the batteries and get some oxygen, crash diving to avoid aircraft, and then repeating again and again and again.

If you would like to continue having fun with this game rather than enduring a realistic simulation of an unpleasant era of U-boat life, try editing the AirStrike.cfg file. Shown below is the path where I found this file for the game installed on Linux. (To locate the same on Windows, perhaps try searching your file system for the filename.)

The contents of the file after I edited it:

All of these are worth fiddling with, but I think these two are the most relevant in terms of decreasing the annoyance of aircraft:

A higher Default Air Strike Probability means a greater likelihood of an attack.

Higher Logic Steps Between Air Sessions will increase the time between new waves of aircraft.

Does this reduce the realism of the game? Absolutely. Do I regret it? Not a chance.

As a side note, I’m playing this on Slackware Linux via Steam’s Proton (which, in turn, uses Wine for Windows compatibility). It has been very stable. I did experience a few crashes early on, but I’ve since been able to play for hours straight with no problem.

I had more artifacts and crashes with Silent Hunter IV via Proton, or I probably would have wound up playing that instead just because it’s more recent and I own both games. I also owned and played Silent Hunter II back in the day, but I don’t seem to have it on Steam. At any rate, I remember all three of these games crashing on Windows. So the Steam experience is pretty good.