Silent Hunter III
Silent Hunter III is a submarine simulation focusing on U-boats of the German Kriegsmarine (Navy) during WWII. SH3 was released in 2005 by publisher Ubisoft after development by Ubisoft Romania. At the time it was met with generally favorable reviews, but screams of agony from the user community. Numerous bugs and steep system requirements that brought even modern systems to their knees at the time of release were the biggest complaints. Four years later, the user community still strongly supports this game with handfuls of free mods and add-ons available. In short, it has become the definitive submarine simulation, and not just by default.
Of the major mods available I like to play with the Grey Wolves Expansion v3.0 and combine it with the add-on SH Commander v3.2. I’ll try to convey the depth of added simulation the Grey Wolves Expansion brings to SH3. The manual for all of the additional content, with appendices is over 550 pages long. The astounding news is that you don’t need to read much of any of it to be able to play SH3 with GWX, but it contains valuable tips and information as well as interesting history about this part of WWII.
SH3 Commander is an add-on that allows you to customize your commander careers a bit and also adds things like names, cargo, and crew stats to the ships you sink. In short it adds the little details that spice up the somewhat vanilla career mode in the default game. You can play GWX without SH Commander and you can play SH Commander without GWX, but using both combined is absolute immersion for me.
SH3 can be difficult to find now because of its age, but I’ve seen it for $5 on sale at some places. I know it is available via digital download from outlets like Steam and D2D, but I’m not sure if these versions are compatible with the GWX add-on. Best to do your own fact finding.
I’m going to start posting some After Action Reports (AAR’s) for my patrols and careers with SH3. I’ve also archived some current and past careers under the WWII Simulations/Silent Hunter III pages.