Limited batteries and oxygen will limit your time underwater, and going too deep will put too much pressure on your submarine and literally crush it. Limited fuel means you need to sail at the lowest speed or risk not having enough fuel to get home. Where you it matters as well hitting certain points on the ship's side may destroy their engines, destroy the propeller, leak the ship's fuel, or on warships, ignite the ammo bunkers. Even after all this, you may not want to fire, because if a torpedo hits an enemy ship at too steep an angle, it'll harmlessly deflect off the side and will only reveal your presence to the enemy. On full realism, you even need to find the torpedo solution (aiming the torpedo) yourself by finding a mess of information about the target's speed, direction, and distance through mathematics and geometry. Everything else- moving the submarine, changing course, firing torpedoes, etc.- is done by ordering the crew to do it or through a series of actions. The only part of the submarine you can directly move or activate is the periscope, hydrophone, and radar. You can give these medals to your crew, and unlike your own personal medals, they have an affect on the gameplay by improbing your crew. Crew medals, however, are awarded just based on tonnage sunk. Like real life, getting the medal depends on the circumstances sinking 50,000 tons of enemy shipping is only expected if you're the capitan of the top-of-the-line submarine, but sinking even 25,000 tons in the smallest submarine would get you Germany's highest honors. Getting these awards are not like most games, where getting X amount of kills on a level will give you Y medals.
Throughout your career, you will earn awards for your deeds as a capitan. Since ships are always sailing around throughout SH3's virtual world, you can completely neglect orders and sink ships wherever you want- so long as you have enough fuel to get there. Sinking a 30000-ton battleship will give you much more renown than a 30-ton water trawler. Sinking enemy ships gives you renown as well based on their importance.
SILENT HUNTER 3 GAMEPLAY UPGRADE
Patroling your grid only adds to renown, which you use to purchase better crewmen, upgrade your U-boat, or purchase a new U-boat. There are no specific missions, no scripted events, just patrolling the random patrol grids, managing your U-boat, and sinking enemy ships as you like it. The game sets you out on war patrol after war patrol where you are ordered to reach and patrol a grid the map of your operational areas is split up into grid sections. The main part of the game is your career in the German navy. You play as the capitan on one of eleven German U-Boat types in one of six different submarine flotillas at any time in the war. Silent Hunter III is a submarine simulator set in World War II Europe and the Atantic- even reaching into the American eastern coast and the carribean. Silent Hunter III is the difinitive submarine simulator. If enough interest is gained, we may do something like this. If you have a question, the answer is probably there.
SILENT HUNTER 3 GAMEPLAY MANUAL
An SH3 community manual from Wikipedia. Because these only serve to make the game look better, they are highly reccomendable.
SILENT HUNTER 3 GAMEPLAY MOD
It is a mod manager, so you can uninstall mods without having to uninstall the game.
Before you get any mods, get "jsgme.zip" from this site.