Just Remember, F6 Fires the Coax!

PC based simulations of NATO vrs. Warsaw Pact forces are, by and large, refined versions of map board based gaming. The level of sophistication is amazing but this is simulated combat reminiscent of the dim white interior light of an M577 as the radios buzz and the counters move across the map boards. Warfare at the soldier - tank and platoon level is a distinctly different sub set of the computer gaming industry.

“ First person shooter “ style games have come to dominate the market, every major developer has dozens of products available configured for both portable gaming devices such as Game Boy and desk top PCs. Only a year or two away, versions of these games will be available for the new generations of cell phones featuring gaming options.

The look and style of these games is familiar to anyone who has even casually wandered through the local Walmart or consumer electronics meglo - mart. On the screen, you see “ your hand holding the weapon “, using the controls, you maneuver the character through alley, street and battlefield, firing whenever the enemy appears. Some games are more realistic than others, the opponents range from the Wehrmacht to the Soviets to the Taliban to space invaders; as you blast away, it ’s a fire fight, a free for all, a gore for all! Kids and young adults love these games, new titles are always appearing but it’s not quite “ gunner - SABOT … !!”

A noteworthy and sophisticated variation of this type game puts the participant in command of a tank. Game designers have been tinkering with the format for years with varied results. Two of the more popular titles, Panzer Commander and M1 Tank Platoon II, are on my shelf. Ancient by the standards that electronic games are judge by, they nevertheless still offer some entertainment value.

Panzer Commander is dated and feels it, but it’s fun to choose to be either a Russian, German, Brit or American and have your tank modeled as a Sherman, Panther or T 34. The game clatters along, the terrain modeling is cartoon - like but the tank on tank fights are really pretty good and, actually learning to operate the sim is a fairly simple process. I keep an old PC around just to goof off with this game. A few years later in the developmental cycle and decades forward in the scenario, M1 TP II provides a “ quick and dirty “ trip down memory lane if for a minute, you may have forgotten just how difficult it can be to lead a platoon and fight a tank, even if just in simulation - in your home for only half an hour before supper.

A great history and review of PC based tank on tank combat simulations was recently posted at George R. Bradford’s AFN News web site. “ Pete “ really knows his stuff and the review is a fascinating insight into the development, strengths and weaknesses of these consumer oriented simulations that are several steps above the “ first person blaster “ Nintendo style games.

“ Pete “ on PC Based Tank Combat Simulations

I played my share of tank sims and here's the run-down with info based on my experience and what I’ve gathered from the gaming magazines and other gamers. Your best bet if you're unsure, is to run each game by Amazon.com and see how they rate. I like Amazoners because they can be fairly blunt and honest. I usually don't buy anything three stars and below. I played all the below, not anymore though. I bought the below because they were by far considered REAL TANK SIMS, not action games or arcades. I played all sims with a joystick...first a simple two-button one and then Microsoft's ForceFeedback Pro joystick when that came out. All the below tank sims have artillery.

* M1 Tank Platoon: This is by far, IMO, the best tank sim ever made but most likely won't work with Microsoft XP. The graphics are extremely dated though (EGA), but the physics, AI ( artificial intelligence ), gameplay, and manual were top-notch. I could've sworn that the enemy USSR AI kind of had a brain of its own, never attacking from the same direction or splitting up when not expected. You can really shoot straight and on the move and M1s seemed to really have the true first-hit-rate of 90%. Tanks take damage, etc. There is weather, fighting at night, fog, horizon differences, etc. You can award medals and crew performance increases (like 120mm reload times) as your crew survives more missions. Yes, crewmen die. Best of all, I won many times with just four M1s, two M2A2s, and artillery against 35 T-80s and BMPs. The enemy AI gives you a good fair clean fight...hey, these were the 286-386 PC days. The enemy was literally in red-colored tanks and APCs, but no one really cared at the time. Thumbs up for this “ oldie but goodie “! Microprose was the developer.

* iM1A2. Interactive Magic's (defunct company) iM1A2 also probably won't work on XP. iM1A2 was a "step-up" from "M1 Tank Platoon" and some designers of M1TP went to a North Carolina game startup and worked on iM1A2. The graphics are way better than M1TP (no red enemy tanks), but the AI not. Most enemy AI would just drive straight for the objective, no maneuvering whatsoever, and if your driving the other way, you'll be literally two tank columns passing in the daylight (if you see them, that is). Even the last enemy AI APC would just drive to the obj (usually a hill) and just sit there waiting for you to come by and kill it. With like 100 hills in a map, it'll take a long time to find that lonely enemy APC and kill it to end the game if you drove off somewhere! So, yup, the game boiled down to drive somewhere else, wait for about thirty minutes, find a far hill overlooking the obj, and then fire away! If you sat on the obj waiting for the enemy to come, you'll be shredded due to sheer USSR numbers.

The game physics were pretty watered down from M1TP with shots often missing unless you were stopped or at a crawl. This game had NO effect on crewmen performance (believe me, the flat-rate 120mm reload time could be pretty annoying). The platoon AI was okay, but the enemy AI sure stinked. I think there were only one A-10 and SU-25 and they almost always got shot down quickly because the game designers wanted you to do the most tank-killing work, not CAS. Thumbs down (unless you can get it cheap)!

* M1 Tank Platoon 2: Microprose went "belly-up" and was bought over by Hasbro (yes, the Mr. Potato Head maker ). M1TP2 was an attempt to revive the glory days of M1TP...oh...after five years elapsed. Hasbro cobbled up what was left of the M1TP team (but like all winning Super Bowl, NBA Champs, and World Series teams, the M1TP team scattered to the four winds). The fact is, M1TP2 had a lot of hype with awesome 3D graphics: AH-1s, USMC LAVs, troops that moved, A-10s, AH-64s, AAV7s, Humvees, etc. The problem is, M1TP2 WAS NEVER COMPLETED! THE GAME WAS SHIPPED 80 -85% DEVELOPED --- BUGS AND ALL were packaged up and sent to retail! Hasbro knew this...they sold it anyway and boy did that piss off the M1TP2 players! Worse of all, Hasbro offered no patches or additional versions!

I played it and to say it wasn't complete was putting it lightly. For instance, say your Humvee scouts spot the enemy tank column (USSR again even though the Cold War ended) 3,000m away on the overhead map at the bottom right corner of your screen. You're on the top left corner. OK, so you start to moving into a position and 10 seconds later you look at the map. The enemy moved to the top middle of your screen! Enemy time warp! Enemy teleportation! Wow! Now they're shooting at you on your flank! Not only that, the AH-64 and AH-1 had a hard time finding their targets, and even when overlying them, they wouldn't shoot! The A-10...what a dope! It would fly up the vulnerable rear of the enemy column only to U-turn and fire into the front of the T-80s (and into the thickest part and frontal ERA armor, doing no damage...duh!), and only fire two Mavericks when you can see about eight Mavericks on the wings. The A-10 never fired its gun at tanks, only at SU-25s (of course never hitting it)! After firing two Mavericks, the A-10 would just fly around until it got shot down...some air support. Really dumb AI on both sides.

And never tanks mind shooting straight. Your M1TP2 M1 seemed to lack any form of stabilization and you had to stop to fire and hope to hit. Even then, each shot missed wide, giving the M1TP2 M1s an amazing first-hit-rate of like 10%! Insane! Even worse, one of the first enemy hits was almost guaranteed to damage your fire-control computer and laser rangefinder...NOW a legitimate excuse on why your shots go wide, eh? These are just some of the gripes gamers had and boy did they flame Hasbro for releasing half a plate despite all the hype. M1TP2 quickly disappeared as junk to many of these games. Thumbs WAY DOWN although some patches were later developed to solve some of the problems!

Then came the long hiatus with no tank sims, I guess it was part of the peace dividend. Many thought EA Games and Jane's would make a tank sim. They never did and Jane's no longer partners to make games. In reality, small start up company or large developer, new games are expensive to create and the lead time requires that a splash occur and plenty of copies are sold at the initial retail price. It began to look as though tank on tank modern combat games weren’t on anyone’s developmental table. First - person - shooter sims like "Rainbow 6" and fantasy games like Warcraft and Starcraft had come to dominate the market but developed on a kitchen table, a very interesting new product, Steel Beasts, appeared.

* Steel Beasts: SB is made by a VERY SMALL company. The entire game was programmed mainly by two guys (one full time!). Wow! For one guy, this game's pretty darn good. Best of all, IT WORKS AND IT'S FINISHED.

But the "Army of one" shows: no air support, no weather, no night fighting, none of many of the features found in the other games. But what SB did was make a playable game and add true physics. You can command a platoon of Leopard 2A4 or M1A1s and even fire the TC's MG from an open hatch! Troops realistically MOVE and shoot and (dis)/re-embark from APCs, something the previous games didn't, which used symbols or cardboard cutouts to denote infantry. The game had 3D forests of trees that you can drive through and mow down or hide in. In previous tank sims, there were no forests and you had to go around the few 2D trees that were there.

But being so real, you'd quickly find out how vulnerable tanks can be. Artillery and RPG fire can immobilize tanks and many times I was stranded before even encountering the enemy. Situational awareness was often pretty bad for the US too. The enemy AI often attacked in four-five prongs/groups and there's no way four M1A1s, two M3A2s, and four M2A2s can defeat five huge groups of T-80s bearing down on three objs!

Enemy AI was so great, I often thought what Civil War General George McCellan often said, "I need more men!" If you killed off five-out-of-six Sov dismounts from a BMP squad and destroyed the BMP in a forest, that lone enemy soldier would then fire his AK-47 RIGHT into your gunner's sight, rending you blind! Hooray for him and the game's enemy AI! Boo-hoo for you because you have to kill this lone soldier before he plinks out something else, not to mention five T-80s bearing down on you too...and oh, yeah, the soldier just called down artillery too so after he took off your sights, he's running deeper into the forest! ( Have a nice day :-). That one Sov soldier deserves a medal!

Realistic, yes, but fun...so-so. I found that with my Micro Soft Forcefeedback Pro joy stick combo control, I had to literally track the T-80 with the crosshairs even AFTER firing, meaning that the sabot kind of acted like a TOW missile. In M1TP, the sabot flew so fast that once I pushed the FIRE button, it'll fly to target...not so with SB. I also found the COAX not that accurate compared to M1TP, and with smart enemy AI soldiers, this could get annoying.

Another issue I have with SB is the lack of a campaign or story. You play single battles from a list of maps and you have to achieve objectives in each battlemap. After you win, so what? You just get stats so SB has a "hollow" feel to it because there is no war to win, no bragging to tell, just survive and win the objs. I often found SB a "mission impossible" compared to the other tank sims I've played...M1TP even on "USSR elite" setting.

The graphics are decent (what'd you expect from one programmer?) and there's MOUT towns, (often "Monopoly-like" houses), to fight in. Too bad the moving soldiers don't shoot out windows though. But you can roll over houses and fire HEAT to set them on fire (just like M1TP). The other tank sims often had one or two houses, not a town like SB.

Thumbs way up, and given the choices out there, this is the tank sim that will probably work on a new PC. Check to see if it can run on XP though. So … you can see that many criticisms over realistic game play have been addressed but other aspects of the sim lagged behind where M1 Tank Platoon had advanced the state of the art.

But wait...

For a couple of years now, there is talk of a Steel Beasts 2 from the same company which will have air support, weather, night fighting, etc. We asked for a lot in SB2 on their on line discussion group ...a whole laundry list...everything from paradrops to UAVs to 18-man AAV platoons to thunder and lightning. This talk has been going on for a long time and IMO, it'll be ready when you see it in stores. I no longer follow up on the talk because with one programmer, who knows when this game will be ready. Nonetheless, my advice is to wait for an online review before buying. SB2 is supposed to be such an advance over SB1 because the tank gameplay physics and AI is pretty solid in SB1. SB2 is meant to add the eye candy and more units. Will it work, remains to be seen.

As far as I can see, Steel Beasts 2 is the only realistic tank sim in development.

“ Pete “ certainly deserves 7 / 5s coverage on the topic area. Things have come along way and as game designers continue to exploit new technology available to both develop and play the sims, hopefully, the market will support their efforts. This takes us back to 1978.

As a new platoon leader in Bad Kissingen, we were actively training for Level 1 gunnery at GTA. The “ dry “ TCQC Course, mechanical training, crew drill and discussion were identical to gunnery prep training as it would have been conducted twenty years previous … with one exception. At Ledward Barracks in Schweinfurt, they had a very recently installed “ computerized “ gunnery simulator and in a miracle of cross Corps cooperaton, the tankers of each Eaglehorse platoon had been allocted a brief training window.

On the appropriate day, we stacked the gunners and TCs into the back of a duce and made the drive over to Schweinfurt. If you are of a certain age, you may well recall the popular bar - then home version of “ pong “, sort of a computer version of ping pong. I am convinced that the gunnery trainer we used was developed by the same design team.

The device was a large TV screen consol with a tank gunner’s Cadillac control attached to the front. Superimposed on the screen was the M32 primary sight reticle and parading by, ducks in a row, were a series of tank target silhouettes. There were two variable adjustments, one increased the speed of the duck parade, and the second created a random rocking to the sight picture, to simulate movement over rough terrain. As I recall, to register a “ hit “ required placing the reticle somewhat in front of the target but, as my NCOs quickly pointed out, the gunner’s sight picture was no where close to what was really required to hit at GTA … or anywhere else. We arrived, we fired, we signed off on the attendance sheet, we complained and we left.

In the modern day, at the major troop installations, the complexity of computer based simulation for M1 - M2 - M3 gunner training and TC / platoon leader, platoon sergeant battle environment training is astounding in terms of realism and ability to actually train, review performance, re - train and then modify the scenario. Back at the meglo - mart, we will keep patrolling the aisles and checking out the on line topic boards for the “ next - big - tank - sim “ … one last tip, game realism is always enhanced by eating cold chill - mac prior to booting up!