Silent Hunter 4

• Avoiding being depth charged is pretty much the entire game, so you should get a feel for it after a while.

• In general you want to avoid tangling with destroyers if you can, they're your worst enemy. You definitely don't want to be wasting eels in trying to sink them, since they're very low value targets.

• If you detect destroyers in your vicinity you may want to consider going to Silent Running and Ahead Slow, or you risk being picked up on Hydrophones.

• If you do get detected and hunted by destroyers then you want to go deep and silent and make regular heading and depth changes to avoid cans. There's a little move that I like when being attacked with depth charges, which is to accelerate to Ahead Flank and make a hard turn as soon as you hear the DD pass overhead, then throttle down to Ahead Slow after a few seconds. If you're lucky he'll lose track of you while he circles around and will keep dropping cans on your previous course and heading, while you slink off to the side and freedom.

• Apart from DDs your next worst enemy is shallow water. You have to be careful in anything shallower than 100 meters because your ability to hide is severely compromised. Always be aware of the depth of water you're in when making an attack on escorted convoys or military task forces. Sometimes the reward isn't worth the risk.