It’s possible to defeat enemy submarines in “duel” scenarios, but Soviet surface vessels and aircraft are almost impossible to defeat because no matter how quiet I try to be they always immediately start up with the active sonar and then they start dropping torpedoes right on top of me. Two, three, four, five of them, it’s pointless to keep doing all the evasive maneuvers because there’s always another one being dropped directly on my position until my luck finally runs out.

I knew a US Navy submariner from the cold war, he was contemptuous of the Soviet navy’s abilities both on the surface and underwater; he simply said that if the balloon went up, there’d be two kinds of vessels in the water: “Submarines, and targets.”

The history of the cold war suggests that he was right; so many stories of how US and British submarines were able to crawl up the Soviets’ butts to record sound signatures and to send out divers with cameras to take pictures of their hulls and screws, and going undetected the whole time.

Cold Waters grossly overrates the ASW abilities of Soviet surface warships and aircraft, and again there’s no point in having all that advanced passive sonar and Mark 48 torpedoes with a 30,000+ yard range when the scenario starts you off with the enemy right on top of you with their active sonar starting up right away.

“Torpedo in the water! Torpedo in the water!” Yeah, right.