A Uboat goes nowhere without officers. They're essential to many basic functions, with the crew incapable of navigation, controlling the engines, engaging enemy vessels or even loading torpedoes by themselves.

Officers come in three types which dictate their skill tree and limit the things they can do onboard and in the HQ.:

• Leaders : These run the boat, man the guns, do the navigation and use the periscopes
  
• Engineers : These maintain the engines, fix broken things and do everything related to torpedoes
  
• Radio Specialists : These use, erm, the radio. They also specialise using hydrophones and radar detectors, and are the onboard medics that will heal injured sailors

The individual tasks aren't necessarily exclusive - for instance any officer can man the radio and send messages.

Officer selection becomes far more interesting once you have 'spare' officers, whether to send to the HQ or just too many to fit on board. As an example, if you select an officer from your crew with the Merchant skill before selecting the warehouse in port, the prices will drop by 25%. That adds up a lot over the course of a career.

Although you can micromanage the tasks your officers do every minute they're on board the game allows you to set specific roles that prioritise given tasks for them.

This screen is where you can easily change roles:


It's accessible via Management menu option on the top-right of the screen.

Which roles you assign is a personal choice, but some things to consider:

• I greatly prefer 'Technician' to 'Radio Officer' as this prioritises hydrophones rather than the radio, and if you have two radio specialists on duty at the same time they'll cover both stations anyway, and you will now get crew covering the radio if required
  
• It's always sensible to have at least one Watch Officer on duty at all times
  
• If you have one engineer make him a Mechanic so that he'll look after your torpedoes, and make the second one a Chief Engineer
  
• Manually add any additional tasks that you don't want to have to micromanage
  
• If you have spare officers roles like 'Chef' or 'Medic' add some flavour but I haven't found those necessary during normal play

To manually change tasks just click on a cell in the grid and enter a number from 0-10 to set the priority for that officer to perform that task. An example may be telling a Technician to also maintain the diesel engines, if you have only a single engineer on board.

Some things in the game aren't possible without manually telling an officer to equip an appropriate item. Select the officer (by clicking on their icon), press F2 to use the side view of the submarine (or go into first person, if you prefer) and find the cabinet by the officers' bunks.

It's the 3D box icon to the right of the bunks in this screenshot:


In the bottom left of that screenshot you can see that Jürgen Gänge has a rebreather equipped. Just right-click on the cabinet icon and you'll be able to drag and drop items between the cabinet and the selected officer's inventory.

The two items I've found most important to equip this way are:

• The rebreather. This lets an engineer repair a leak in a flooded compartment. Admittedly by the time it gets that far I'm usually doomed anyway, but this does give you more of a chance to survive.
  
• The Sonar Decoy. This needs researching (in HQ) first but an officer carrying one (or more) of those can deploy them by clicking on the appropriate icon in the rear torpedo room.

There are two ways to acquire new officers. Some missions (usually medium or hard ones) will show you as one of the rewards for the optional objective an officer type icon.

The other approach is to promote members of your crew - this is particularly useful if you've done 8 patrols and still had no offers of a new radio officer (which happened to me in my latest career).

Crew can be promoted via the same management screen that's used to set tasks and roles for officers, on the 'Crew' tab.



Click on a crew member's name and a 'Promote' button will be shown on the resultant screen. Pressing this asks confirmation of the type of officer you'd like to promote them into, although the actual promotion will require a reputation point (earned by completing mission optional objectives).

That crew tab includes an icon to show the crew member's temperament. This isn't applicable to officers, but your other crew members will fall into one of three (that I've found) categories:

• A red heartbeat icon, which indicates the crew member scares under pressure. That's bad, as it causes noise and if they're under that much stress you probably really don't want noise.
  
• A red heart icon, indicating that the crew member had a heart attack. I'm not sure how this impacts their future performance because I always invalid them out of the service once this happens.
  
• A green icon showing that they're made of sterner stuff, a true hero of the undersea flotilla.

In short: click on the crew members with a red icon and select the 'Disband' button on their crew page. Replace them with fresh recruits (available from the recruitment officer on the docks). Over time your crew will become entirely capable of withstanding high stress.

Note that the same 'click on name' option works for officers too. This lets you disband them (but I've yet to find a reason to do this) but is also how you access their skill trees. Be aware that changing their skills may reset their role, so remember to check the task assignments following any skill selections.

As your tenure as Captain progresses your crew will collectively get better at being a Uboat crew. This is reflected in the crew specialisations.
Remember to check and assign specialisation points, with Silent running being a favourite due to its frequent benefits. Target crew members that already have a green icon, as they're ones that you know you wont be trying to discard any time soon.

The specialisation applies irrespective of the crew member's role on the boat.

The Tab key is your friend. It's how you get things done in the submarine without needing to scroll left and right and up and down and click the right bit.



Ultimately all of the things that appear when you hit Tab are geared towards giving orders to someone. If you click the buttons on the left, that order is given to the selected officer, or if none is selected, to whichever crewman is awake and nearby.

I try to always give such orders to the crew, as my officers tend to be engaged in more important tasks.

The icons in the middle show the current activity of the officer and a range of other activities that they could be instructed to do. This may be manning a deck gun (or flak cannon), fixing the sub's location through their navigation skills, listening to the radio or any of the other options listed.

Note that some options (e.g. warming up torpedoes) have sub-options, and nothing will happen unless you're precise and choose the sub-option too.

Here it's not sufficient to tell Alfred to play cards (which will boost crew morale), you also need to tell him which card table he should play at. We can also see from this image that he's a radio specialist and is currently operating the radio.

The things you can turn on and off are:
The gyrocompass is important for knowing your position on the map, along with officers engaging in the Navigation task - they'll get nowhere if this is switched off. The reason to switch it off is that it's very noisy, so if you're hiding from warships turn this off until combat is over, then remember to switch it back on.

The searchlight can only be switched on and off while surfaced. I haven't found a way to direct its beam but it can help if you're trying to shoot an unarmed freighter with your deck gun at the pit of a dark night.

Ventilation is covered by the tutorials and will replenish the air in the sub without surfacing (or snorkelling). The tutorial doesn't mention that this consumes potassium scrubbers, something you have to buy and replace (but can't buy without completing the relevant HQ research).
Remember to turn this off as your air quality reaches max or you'll waste potassium.

If you have a leak, turn the pump on. If you're nowhere near enemy contacts and haven't turned the pump on for a while, turn the pump on. Keep those bilges empty! It'll turn itself off when it's finished.

The tutorials cover using these. Once you have a snorkel you can enable them without surfacing, but I tend to just hit Tab and turn on the diesel compressor every time I surface. (If that would cause enough noise to draw danger to me I wouldn't have surfaced in the first place). This means you just don't need to worry about your compressed air supplies.

The snorkel needs to be researched in the HQ and dramatically changes your options. Instead of having to surface frequently you can lurk at periscope depth for the entire patrol should you choose, and this is particularly helpful when slowly targeting and engaging a heavily escorted convoy.
The snorkel is however quite visible, as are the diesel exhaust fumes. I'll often switch to electric engines while attacking a convoy but keep the snorkel raised for much of the engagement to retain the supply of fresh air, but if I'm attacking a port and need to get closer I'll lower the snorkel and be quick about it.

There are four lighting options, only three of which are shown here. (The fourth is 'switch them all off by cutting electricity' but I've yet to need to do that).

• Normal - everything in natural colours; the default state
  
• Red - everything turns red. This allegedly helps the crew and officers improve their night vision. I'm not sure if that's the case. Running with red lights reduces natural morale replenishment by a point.
  
• Blue - everything goes ice cold. The crew are supposed to be quieter and use less oxygen with these lights on, but it hurts their morale so it's best to restrict this to when you're under the surface and trying to be quiet.

The alarm can be toggled here; the use of the alarm has its own section in this guide.

Silent running for much of the game's pre-release life needed manual steps. This is now possible to set (and unset) via the Tab menu orders. It's a bit of an 'all or nothing' toggle, so there may be some occasions on which a more nuanced approach will be needed. This too has its own section in this guide.

Stop direct orders is a nice reset, particularly following combat. It frees officers and crew members from specifically assigned tasks and lets them resume normal watches and rotas.

Close all bulkheads at once. Definitely a boon to survivability, and your officers and crew will all help get them all closed.
Be aware that 'Open all bulkheads' afterwards will result in no activity - your officers and crew will open them as they need to move through the submarine and leave them open.

A toggle between electric and manual dive planes is one I haven't yet found a use for (although I haven't run out of electricity while submerged either).

There are multiple lockers and cabinets on the boat:

• Officer's cabinet - holds items such as rebreathers, sonar decoys, firearms, coffee and hats
  
• Main store room - stores consumables such as food, potassium scrubbers and ammunition
  
• Ventilator - holds up to 40 potassium scrubbers. If this is empty the ventilator will not work
  
• Flak Gun ammunition store - holds ammunition, including if desired deck gun ammunition
  
• Deck Gun ammunition store - holds ammunition. I've never tried putting flak ammo in here
  
• Kitchen - has a cabinet that holds foodstuffs; filling this can apparently help with morale
  
• Torpedo rooms - each room holds the spare torpedoes for that end of the submarine

Right-clicking on any store or cabinet will show you its contents, and let you transfer items to the main store room, or to the selected officer. Note that transferring ammunition requires an officer to be instructed to carry out that task.
The ventilator and guns don't have a separate icon for their cabinet, just right-click on the sprocket.

Whether it's large (30+ ships) convoys or a solo freighter begging you to surface and shoot it (and be glad the game doesn't have WWI style Q ships) finding targets seems to be really easy or nigh-on impossible.

In short, a lot of traffic passes just North of Ireland (heading to/from Belfast or Liverpool) and just South of Ireland (heading to/from Bristol and the Channel). So both are good spots to lurk and hunt.

In the Mediterranean ships and convoys will sail East from Gibraltar then angle NE ish to pass halfway between Tunis and Ibiza. More ships and convoys can be found by loitering two-thirds of the way from Crete South to Africa, in the Grand Harbour at Malta or halfway between Algiers and Sicily.

The best way to find them is to move slowly (or stop entirely) at periscope depth with an officer at the listening post using the hydrophones - a large convoy can be detected 100-200km away!

I'd use diesel engines at a fast speed to close on an intercept course, then slow down again so that the hydrophones become more effective, switching to electric engines for the final stalk and attack, but the key is that initial detection.

Targeting can be left fully automated but even without going fully manual there are some ways to make it quicker and easier.

Officers can plot a firing solution (i.e. aim the torpedo) if they're

• listening on hydrophones
  
• using the observation periscope
  
• using the attack periscope
  
• using the targeting thing on the Conning Tower (shown in the icon as using binoculars)

Here we see that two officers are manning the periscopes, while a third is at the listening post on the hydrophone.

As long as the target vessel is inside the hydrophone circle, the icon on the left of the officer at the listening post can be clicked to start tracking the target. Similarly the 'visible range' circle applies to the two on the periscope.

Beware that changing conditions (e.g. heavy seas swamping the periscopes, or a change of officers as a shift finishes/starts) can cause the circles to shrink, and all previously determined information can be lost. This is highly frustrating.

One way to accelerate a firing solution is to manually enter any or all of the target heading, target speed and direction. Using the first-person view tools (provided at the attack periscope) to do this is not covered in this guide but if you're aiming at static ships (in a harbour for instance) then entering speed 0 is an obvious choice.

To manually enter any of those numbers just click on the relevant field.
This snip shows more clearly where to click: the 2km (distance to target), 6km/h (speed of target) or 75.1° (target heading, but don't ask me how to calculate this because I'm all at sea on this one), all three of which have here a red background - if manually entered they'll turn green.

Note that the small target window also includes target status indicators - the Empire Lagos has been alerted to my presence, probably because I've set it on fire with two torpedoes.

Torpedoes are fun if you remember to stay behind them. As long as you have an officer assigned to the Mechanic role (or manually set to look after them) he'll automatically reload and warm them for you. If no officers are assigned (or the assigned ones are asleep) no torpedoes will be reloaded; I always have at least two officers with the Reload Torpedoes task, one of whom will be my main Mechanic.

Warming the torpedoes is explained by the tutorials as a way of reducing duds. It helps a lot, and a higher level Engineer can select a skill that pretty much eliminates duds.

If you have a mix of torpedoes and don't want the officer to automatically load whichever he chooses then immediately after firing pause the game, open the Torpedo room store and manually drag-drop your preferred torpedo to the empty tube. (You may need to right-click on it to clear the officer's chosen torpedo first).



Having unlocked T3 and T5 torpedoes I like having a mix of both in my forward tubes as this gives me more flexibility and options ahead of knowing what my target will be.

T5 torpedoes need caution: They're acoustic homing torpedoes, which means they detect and steer towards sound. As a result they can actually circle around and come back at you, lock onto your own engine sounds and sink your submarine. Yes, I've sunk myself.

Avoid this by cutting your engines a second before you fire, diving to over a hundred metres below the surface immediately after firing, or both. It's very likely that at low speeds on electric power you'll be quiet enough not to get caught, but be ready to turn even those off if the torpedoes turn.

What a T5 torpedo often won't do is target the ship you were aiming at. This is one reason to mix T3 and T5; if you really must sink the target the T3 torpedoes will go where you aim them. Always assume that a T5 may deviate and strike another ship. That's seldom a bad thing, and it's always fun to sink a Corvette by accident.

You can minimise this by using T5 torpedoes from behind the target vessel. That way they're following it rather than trying to intercept from an angle, and this gives a far higher success rate (and greatly reduces the number that come back to you).

Remember to wait for the light telling you the gyro angle has been synchronised before firing!

Until you're ready to surface next to a helpless freighter and mock its crew as they scramble into little dinghies, you really don't want the enemy to know that you're there.

There are four ways you can be detected:

• Radioing a contact report can be picked up by the convoy escorts. They won't actually know it's you though, or where you are, just that someone's broadcast near to them
  
• Shooting or torpedoing a ship will alert the convoy to your presence, but they won't immediately know where you are
  
• You can be heard
  
• You can be seen

In this screenshot I appear to have been spotted by.. everyone.


Avoid this. 'Run silent' is almost a cliche, but it's also just sensible. To reduce sound the basics are hopefully obvious:

• Turn off the gyrocompass. That thing's noisy!
  
• Reduce speed, or ideally stop entirely. The faster you go, the noisier you are.
  
• Switch to electric motors - even if you're using a snorkel at periscope depth. Uboats used old clunky noisy diesel engines.
  
• Avoid using the pump and air compressors. Unless you've already been spotted you shouldn't need these.
  
• If you're going to run out of air, plan when to use the ventilators. Time it so that you're not scrubbing your air while a destroyer is 40m above you
  
• Defer loading torpedoes. This isn't the noisiest activity but sometimes every little helps
  
• Switch on the blue light. Any time you expect to dive below periscope depth this is worth switching to anyway, to save air
  
• Silence any panicking crewmen. Some officers may gain a skill that lets them knock someone out or any officer can subdue a crew member. I have had a Corvette detect me because of the screams of a poor crewman that had mentally broken, in just the few seconds it took to (non-lethally) silence him

Being silent isn't going to help if you're sat on the surface waving a flag at a British cruiser. To reduce your chances of being seen:

• Don't attack on the surface. Kind of obvious really
  
• Don't attack at periscope depth if you're too close. Even merchants will see you
  
• Go deep. Nobody can see you at 120m
  
• Stay shallow but drop your periscopes. They stick out of the water even 4-5m below "periscope depth" so select the officer using them and on the top-left of the screen there's a "lower periscope" button (and the corresponding raise button to use it again)
  
• Stay at periscope depth but lower the snorkel. This is a very situational option, but if you just need to avoid detection for a tiny while longer to finish a firing solution and launch torpedoes, this can buy you that time. It's also useful when working close in to an enemy harbour. Remember to raise the snorkel again after or your crew will asphyxiate. (Please don't ask how I know this)
  
• Attack at night. Don't use a searchlight.
  
• Attack in bad weather. This greatly diminishes your own view range too but between manual targeting and hydrophones you have an advantage if they can't see you.

Be aware that in heavy seas (high waves) your conning tower may breach the surface even when you're trying to maintain periscope depth. (Similarly your periscope may submerge, causing you a loss of sight - annoying if you're establishing a firing solution for your torpedoes). To mitigate this porpoising assign an officer to the depth keeping station.

You can get a clear understanding of your current level of stealth by hovering your mouse over the crossed-out-eye icon. This will not just give you high level summaries but also reveal explicitly the factors influencing your chances of being detected - try turning the gyrocompass, pump and compressor on and off to see the difference these make.

If you are detected this icon will highlight the detection method in red, so use this to learn and improve your stealth. (This suggestion applies very much to me)

Disclaimer: When detected by enemy warships I almost always die. This guide highlights the things I should be doing and that others assure me work. My success rate has been mixed (but improving).

Here you see a depth charge that's about to explode and send my sub to unmanageable depths, with the crew mostly already drowned or dead anyway.

What I should have done is

• Dodge the depth charges. The moment a warship drops depth charges on you, accelerate to maximum speed, turn so that you're across its path (rather than along it) and ideally change depth by 50m or so too. This will help you dodge most attacks, but remember to switch off the engines again 10 seconds later or you'll be detected in your new position
  
• Advanced option: Now surface to periscope depth, manually set a firing solution and torpedo the ship that just tried to sink you. I've yet to successfully achieve this.
  
• Plug leaks before repairing them. Select any non-engineer officer, right-click on a leak and select 'Plug'. This drastically reduces the flow rate and the officer can continue to plug it while an engineer repairs it
  
• Manually assign your engineers to repair leaks. Left to their own devices engineers might prefer to fix the engines, or the compass, or anything else that isn't pouring 60,000 litres of water into your submarine every minute. The only thing that takes priority over a leak is fixing the pump, and even that one's not an automatic choice
  
• If necessary evacuate a compartment and shut the pressure door to seal it from the rest of the submarine. This is particularly helpful with the fore and aft torpedo rooms.

The control for doing that is not obvious. There's a green button on the UI (rather than part of the boat) for each compartment: click this to set the compartment to an evacuated/out of bounds state.

(The other two icons are to cut the power, something I've yet to need to do, and to do something with bilges. At this stage if managing individual bilges is important you're probably already doomed).

Alarms automatically trigger when you're about to enter combat.

This increases your crew effectiveness and stops your officers from stopping for a nap midway through plotting a torpedo track but also causes your crew stress so my preference is to keep it off unless I'm taking on warships.

Turning it off uses the telegraph; select Achtung (just to the left of Stop) to toggle it - you can turn it on manually the same way. The alarm can also be toggled via the list of orders on the left when you press tab.

Inspections are in this section because to perform them, you must have an alarm happening. The warning you need an inspection may occur after taking damage (so I'm chuffed I discovered this new feature; it means I survived depth charges!) and appears as an orange icon.

To perform the inspection use the TAB command menu to tell an engineer to begin damage control. He'll go to the Command Station and begin the inspection if he has crewmen assigned to him.

Other officer types offer varying other bonuses when at the Command Station, and bonuses stack - just make sure each officer has crew assigned to help them, as those are where the bonuses come from.

You can see the current activity at the Command Station by mousing over its label, just by the Depth Steers station. It's only visible while the alarm is active. This screenshot shows two Leader officers and an engineer; the engineer's contribution is greyed out because he has no crew members assigned to help him.

As joyful as a well aimed torpedo is you can only carry 14 of them and that's just not going to win you medals.

So instead, surface next to unarmed freighters and sink them with your guns. You have dozens of rounds for the deck gun and thousands for the flak cannon.

That flak cannon isn't just for birds either. AP rounds aimed at the waterline will sink small and medium freighters, with the smallest going quickly (aim for the bow) and the larger ones needing a lot of firepower at the bow, the stern and in the middle.

The deck gun is quicker and works out cheaper in ammunition costs but you'll run out of shells quite quickly. As with the AA gun, target AP shells at the waterline, make some nice big holes for water to flood into. However you can use AP or HE shells effectively, and absolutely use HE shells on a tanker for pretty fireworks.


What you really shouldn't do is let your officers shoot the guns for you (except apparently officers on the deck gun with AA ammunition are highly effective against aircraft).

Instead use the Tab menu (or first person) to direct one of your Leader officers to the deck gun or flak cannon and take control of him, then choose 'manual' to control and aim the gun yourself.

Click the 'eye' icon at the top right of the officer portrait to take control. The location symbol on the top left merely takes the camera to him (as does right-clicking) and the icons at the bottom show his type (this one's an Engineer) and current task (who's asleep).

The two rectangles (one of them here filled in brown) show how many crew members are designated to assist this officer. A high level officer can take a skill that lets you assign a third crew member to them; the guns reload much much faster with more crew members assigned.

The boxes can be green or brown. Green means that your officer is benefiting from the assigned crew. Brown indicates that the crew member has been (or if it's an empty box, could be) assigned but the officer's current task does not benefit from that assignment.

Missions typically have two components: the primary objective and a secondary optional one. Always try and achieve the optional one as that's where you pick up Reputation points and additional officers.

For 'standard' patrol missions the optional objective is often to sink a certain tonnage of "trade" vessels. Freighters of any size and either class of tanker all count towards this. The mission can be completed by sinking ships that are outside the patrol area (which is sensible, because often you'll detect a convoy while inside your patrol area and intercept it outside) so absolutely take targets of opportunity: If you have ammunition, sink it.

Espionage missions on which you're trying to deploy a spy will fail if your submarine gets spotted prior to dropping him off, so avoid trying to sink anything until you've completed that initial part of the mission. Obviously if you bump into a capital ship then grab yourself a nice battleship or aircraft carrier and head home for plaudits and a new mission - there's no actual penalty for failing a mission, you just don't get the rewards.

Mid-mission you may receive a radio message requesting you to scout a port, sink a named ship or find a missing Uboat. (Apparently there's a wreck diving one too but I've never seen that).

If you're asked to spot air defences at a port then carefully avoid corvettes and MTBs patrolling near and inside it, man a periscope within visible range and just point the periscope at the air defences there. Simply swivelling it at the height of the jetty will pick up 3-4 of them, automatically marking them in an obvious way, but you may need to look higher on a dock wall or move your boat to another vantage point to spot them all.

To sink a specific ship just plot an intercept course and, well, sink it.

Finding a missing Uboat will likely result in a surfaced boat full of dead crew. Once you're close enough the game will tell you to send an officer across to it; select a Leader officer and click on the Conning Tower to send him over. Things become self-explanatory from there.

Once you've completed your mission objectives you're free to do whatever you choose, whether that's crossing the Atlantic, raiding Scapa Flow or just sailing around using up your fuel, torpedoes and ammunition until you're ready to head home. You could even just head straight back to base to resupply and take a new mission.

Some of the Atlantic region missions require a long patrol some distance from port. Increasing your maximum range basically relies on two principles:

• Slower speeds are more fuel efficient
  
• Going hybrid (some time on diesel, some time on electric) saves fuel

Since the slowest speed is the most fuel efficient and also the best for detecting enemy contacts on the hydrophones it's often best to spend most of a patrol at a slow speed, using the faster options for closing with a contact or escaping prosecuting warships.

HQ upgrades will also increase the capacity of accumulators, giving greater range on electric-only, but it's not clear whether that requires a corresponding increase in diesel to charge so it may not actually help.

Save cash: In port, load the free food, stock up on ammunition and torpedoes, replenish other supplies. Now skip time to complete the loading. The warehouse now has more free food so load that too. (This takes more time but that's fine because you'll probably be managing your torpedoes too).

If you've unlocked T3 (and T5) torpedoes but the warehouse doesn't have enough of them, load as many as you can then fill the rest of the torpedo room with T1 torpedoes. This will force the warehouse to restock so once everything's finished loading, unload those T1s again and replace them with the superior T3 or T5 options.

Even if you're not doing that, remember that if you return to port with empty tubes you'll need to requisition torpedoes from the warehouse, and either wait for them to transfer to your boat, wait for them to be loaded into torpedo tubes, and then requisition replacements for them to fill your torpedo room, or requisition them straight into your fore and aft torpedo tubes. Don't go to sea without 14 steel cigars of doom on board.

Remember to right-click on everything in the boat, to see the options it offers. E.g. manually controlling ballast is only accessible by right-clicking on the valves.

Use slow speeds to maximise your hydrophones and range but use fast speeds when heading home. If you have enough fuel then it's so cheap that you're better off burning it to save time. You can save more time by travelling fast in 'local' areas, whether that's close in to shore or while leaving the scene of the carnage you've caused.

If you lose position you won't be able to access the main map. The map controls on the bottom left of the screen will let you select the 'local area' map so that you can complete an engagement. The game seems to reset back to the main map once you've returned your navigation level to around 40%.


The navigation level is shown in the information panel at the top-right of the screen. Getting it back up tends to involve making sure the gyrocompass is switched on and assigning an officer to the Navigation task. Be cautious about travelling at maximum speed on accelerated time while doing this, you may end up discovering land in a quite unfortunate way.

After detecting an enemy vessel and having it appear on your map, select it and use the 'Centre camera on the vessel' button to give yourself a sneak peek at it. This is very useful when initially encountering a small group of merchants to determine whether they have a C3 or Liberty ship with them, or if it's safe to surface and go to gun them down.

After an encounter (or any other time) hit Tab and select "Stop direct orders". This will release your officers from specific tasks you've allocated to them, such as manning a gun, listening on the radio, etc.

Turn on full scale crew management, try the 'first person only' mode, interact directly with each of the controls, try different tactics, die a horrible death.

The game gives you all the choices, so play the way that you want. Have fun.