Cold Waters: Understanding Combat 

USS Boston SSN-703. The Barents Sea, North of Murmansk. 20th of December 1984 - 2000 Hours. Today's video is less of a combat report and more of a lite tutorial to help you understand how some of the systems in Cold Waters work and how the UI displays that information. I wont be going over all of the UI elements in this video just the key points that you will need yo be efficient in combat. I hope you enjoy! Remember To get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial simply create an account at: ►► www.audibletrial.com/MagzTV Grabbing your free account will give you over 180,000 available titles to choose from and will also help support the channel. If you would like to help support the channel directly, Please consider donating a small amount on Patreon: ►► www.patreon.com/MagzTV

If your anti-submarine patrol gets wiped out by a single submarine, it officially fails at being an anti-submarine patrol.

"elite was getting a bit too easy" Mags you show off

Launching wireguided torpedoes straight at enemy combatants when you are undetected is a mistake. You should launch at an angle and the turn the torpedo into the target, so that it appears to come from another location. It was standard Soviet tactics to counterlaunch towards an incoming torpedo, which can catch you if you are indeed directly behind it.

I feel like this game actually teaches me about my job

Hahahah that computer voice was funny. Nice video as always mags

I luv the newspapers at the start;it just gives u a feel of how tense the cold war really was.and of course magz-ur videos-are just incredible

THANK YOU COMPUTER

One thing I do appreciate is that the sound waterfall does encourage visual ID of surface ships. A couple of ships (the Krivak 1 and the Kashin being the prime example) look very different, but have very similar sound profiles (the 4 easiest to detect bars are the same on both classes only the 5th is different). In the above example the ships also have very different capabilities, the Krivak having towed array, better sonar and SS-N-14s (the Kashin doesn't have stand-off torpedoes).

I bought this on steam when it first came out and i'll be honest , I just couldn't understand its control system. Recently I've been watching your vids on it Mags and you got me to re- purchase the game & now im loving it. . Im no good at it yet but im learning. . So I just wanted to say a huge thank-you for your excellent content and explanations. . . Awesome You-tube Content ! PS Like most Im also guilty of bringing out my old "Hunt for Red October" dvd

Well done It explained a lot. Only thing I would change in the game is the response time of the opponent. Example Helos up within 10 min game time or when on patrol 1 helo up at all times dipping for every 2 ASW ships. Active pinging as soon as ASW vessels detect the torpedo; Communication between ASW vessels as to your location or estimated location; One ASW vessel sprinting while the other is listening etc. In this case you caught the vessel with a tail in its sprint good job.

From "Refresher Training" at Guantanamo in 1971 (before it became a prison camp). . . I was on a Coast Guard High-Endurance Cutter - about the same size as a frigate, but a bit slower and much less heavily armed. We had a pretty good hull-mounted sonar but no towed array, and only ship-launched Mark 46s as anti-submarine weapons. The training sub (maybe the last "conventional" i.e. diesel-electric in the Navy inventory) had us from the time we left the dock. AKA no chance in Hell. The conventional wisdom was that for surface ships to have a chance against about any submarine you had to have two ships with towed array plus one aircraft. (A helo with a dipping sonar would do.) And ASROC - by the time you got close enough for a ship-launched Mark 46 is was way too late

Many thanks for taking the time to put this together magz.

Started playing Cold Waters after watching your first vid on it mate..... good stuff!!!

Idk if anyone has ever said it before, but that active sonar noise is so relaxing..Kinda eerie, but relaxing..

the help about the waterfall im sure will help me. Iv always just. assumed what thier capible of based off what i know about them my ship weather and speed. but didnt know i could actually track that. time to test how the layers effect it.

LOVE your logo, with the Southern Cross and angry roo.

Also - great tutorial. I remember a lot of that from "Red Storm Rising" on the Commodore 64, but obviously a lot of your viewers will not have had that advantage. It was a good game - Cold Waters is better, and not just the graphics - but the basics are very similar.

The sail with dive planes from SSN-703 is preserved at The Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park . Too bad some 688 boats were scrapped without midlife refueling. I bet the Aussie's could make use of a few to train up on nuke boats. Good video sir.

Actually, the fleet was responding to an ASW patrol plane report seeing as you were overflown on the way in. I do find it curious that the responding ships aren't more alert seeing as they're responding to a sighting.

Awesome vid magz. Can you do a couple more of these looking at other aspects of combat and the UI in cold waters?

Totally incredible video and welcome back ..by the ASH. DID AN AMAZING JOB WHEN YOU WERE GONE TO...INCREDIBLE VIDEO AND THE WAY YOU EXPLAINED THIS GAME DIFFERENT THING'S EVEN THE MAP TO.. I DO GREATLY APPRECIATE YOUR VIDEOS TOO..THANK YOU SO MUCH...

Excellent vid. I would much like for you to expound upon various tactics used by both US, Russian and other countries. I'm going to be buying this games soon.

Hell fucking yes, another Cold Waters video

hmmm....In real life I'd call You very cowboy'ish captain... my first shot would be on bearing about 270-280, under layer.... then when fish had a bearing to target about 40-50 bring it to course to target (still he knows nothing about torpedo and you) and as close as possible to him move fish over the layer and acivate sonar on it. Why? You still have cable contron on it, torp under layer is much more hard to detect, when its finally detected - enemy captain sees is from wrong direction so even if he shots his own "thats all i can do" torpedo - he shots it in completely wrong direction, and finally IF he even do radio-com and pass your suspected position to his friendlies - he gives wrong one. Anyway - love your Vids and greets from Poland (Europe) - keep up a good work!

I'm ALWAYS getting detected when I launch a torpedo, and I just play on normal difficulty. I guess I'm too used to ww2 subs and needing to fire as close as possible.

2:52 Crew's being annoyingly hilarious.

This is Red Storm Rising all grown up :D

Good Explanation! ^^

Magz, one major note: ships cannot deploy helicopters. The ones on the deck are for decoration only. The helos for each "battle" are set in the game files, no ship deploys or reloads anything. 1-2 for battle groups with up to Kara ships, and 2-4 for groups containing Moskva or Kiev. In over 25 finished campaigns, I have not ever seen a ship launch or reload a helicopter. Ever.

Finally a new Cold Waters vid :)....and thx for the explanations, I still don t get what the numbers in the contact section mean though: when it says -50 or -37, does that mean they have a chance of 50%/37% of actually detecting you...I kinda doubt it. Otherwise plz don t use the voice mod for future vids, that d ruin the entire atmosphere, that computer voice is rly annoying.

Surely the Kashin would have heard all the explosions aboard the Kara, right??

Those certain areas of the submarine are almost 100% of said submarine, thus double hull. :D Well, screw you can safely hit. The problem was with MK48 having the biggest warhead size in the game (funnily enough, the only torpedo in history that WELL described on the web) and that kind of made balancing between subs and surface really hard to do. Now they almost all go down with one hit, safe for capital ships.

"All hands to battlestations!" What does this mean in-game? I had hoped it meant that it would dump me into combat immediately, at max range. However in my experience it seems to have me spawn very close to the enemy, anywhere from 8000 to 15000 yard range.

Now i know why are there many torpedoes around me when I just started battle less than 2 minute ago because i go so fast on campaign map so they know where i am when i join battle and thx for tips

Nice video. Just got this today.

about torpedoes.. since most torpedoes have enough TNT equivalent to a paveway bomb(250kg+of tnt) the boom is very destructive,even one torpedo could "break the back" of even the biggest ships if it hits the right place.. even modern day depth charges have roughly 180kg of tnt, and as we all know getting a direct hit with a depth charge isn't the point of them(although would be a bonus), but to literally pummel the sub with shockwaves to break it apart..and movies aside where you'd find a uboat surviving wave after wave of depth charges is quite unlikely, since with movies it has to be entertaining and not like real war where the munition used is actually designed to kill its target quickly and effectively, its quite logical to assume that the slim chance the sub has to survive is if the torpedo detonates next to it(even then it could cause multiple compartments to flood or worst case scenario the bulkheads to collapse and the sub is instantly destroyed)...OR if for whatever reason the torpedo is a dud and puts a sizeable dent in its hull..but a direct hit, even in the perfect scenario with all compartments shut would definitely cause flooding in some compartments and others would be instantly flooded due to water pressure/size of the damage etc and the buoyancy of the sub would be FUBAR, could blow ballast assuming the tanks weren't damaged, but in the end the sub would eventually be sitting at the bottom of the ocean floor..long story short you do hear of people surviving a gunshot to the head but its really, really, reeeeally unlikely, so 1 torpedo should easily down any sub no matter the size..and if it does somehow survive,most of the crew would be dead and the sub so burdened with water, you could count it as a kill since itll never see the surface again

The sinking ships don't break up enough

this or Dangerous Waters/Sub Command, whats everybody's preferences? this has obviously more modern 3d but i never cared about that in a "hardcore" sim. game; Also missing the full screen station screens. TMA ftw! those little windows not doing it for me, i feel like i need magnifying glass lol

I wish you had control of the towed array like in the original game.... In that if you didn't reel it in during evasive manuvers ...you'd likey lose it. Also wish you could see ur noise levels without having to be locked on to something.

That is the beste realism if I see for these game, even like that I miss dangerous Waters.

5 year;s :/ eye feel old , yah must really like this game

Well explained and well played

*"Conn sonar, regain contact."*

Why not do a tutorial video series for WarThunder, DCS, Star Citizen and IL-2? You are really good at explaining things and most of the games featured in the channel are really complex in a way that even if you know what you are doing, there's still a very high chance that you will fail horribly.

Hope you are having a good night

Hey, can you tell me your mod list for cold waters please? Thanks

You missclassified the Krivak I... How could you miss the freqency line way to the left? But anyways... Great video man!

The thing that always happens to me is the second i get into a engagement and I hear them pinging me I think they hear me and I freak out and fire all of my torpedos and hope to god that their torpedos doesn’t snipe me

I have tried to load the new mod and it wont unpack any ideas

Can anyone tell me why at 9:41 the contact stopped being at 95% solution, even though it has a detection of over 30 on both the towed array and the passive sonar?

I don't know if I'm very unlucky or what. Any time I go into combat from the campaign map, I go in slowly, and instantly go into silent running as soon as I spawn in, but pretty much always get instantly detected, it's getting frustrating at this point.

Isn't the voice over done by FPSChazly by any case? It sounds familiar.

before the notification squad !

I really need this. I suck badly at this game. I prefer WT if I'm honest

Cheers mags coz im struggling with this

really funny with the computer voice ;) good video

what's the mod that you can automatically change your depth etc? ty

GEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Make a tutorial of how to evade detection, or go into hiding?

Has the realism mod been updated?

"Elite was too easy" Stfu, I'm trying man... I'm here for a reason.

lol the sonar operator is such a troll!

The instant I got into my first game I turned off the voices. Abrasive like sand paper. Fuck all that noise.

3 mintutes in and i am allready lauthing like shit and asking myself how a submarine could even maintain silent running wive all that interfierence and volume level

‘Shut uuuup’ - well said.

" shut up!" Lol :D

i really am against the use of mods for various reasons, but some of the mods i see for this game really should just be checked for balance and realism and implemented into the game. the reallism mod though sounds bad though, if a sub is designed ti be able to take a torpedo hit provided it doesnt hit certain places, but the reallism mod just says fuck it lets ramp up the chance of a one hit on your sub regardless of where it hits, thats not realistic and so the name "realism mod" is stupid and misleading

"Kiloyards" broke my tiny tiny American brain. Because of is wacky metric-English system nonconforming. On one hand it's like, "hey why the hell not?" But on the other hand it's like, "how dare you!" One thing's for sure, no matter how obvious it may be, that is literally the first time I have ever heard someone say it in my life.

Measures in yards? Really? I was interested buying it. No more.

No one gives a shot about the mods you have on dude.