Sunday, December 13, 2015

Three Good Habits of Effective Steel Armor Blaze of War Players

Steel Armor is a realistic tank simulation with tons of virtual hulls in insanely immersive battlefields.





Despite widespread coverage in grognardy hubs across the world, Steel Armor didn't catch fire. Yet (?!).

The language barrier, the obscure conflicts featured in the sim and possibly the war in Ukraine (the developer is based in that country) may be holding back Steel Armor. But who knows.

Let me share with you these habits that I took from players very well versed in Steel Armor.


  • Deployment in 3D

    • The ease of use of Steel Armor's battle generator is well known. With the recent release of the Basra DLC, there is a fan base for desert battles. The desert's vision we have in mind is a featureless expanse with no cover or fold in the terrain. Well that is not the case in the Iran-Iraq war maps in Steel Armor. A small rise or depression may be the difference between life and death. And you know that your own death is featured with almost gory detail in Steel Armor.
See that small rise in front of my tank? That saved my virtual hull. To deploy your units in 3D just click the globe at the top left corner of the screen. You can even put your units in dug-out defensive positions.

    • There is no substitute for a virtual reconnaissance of the area of operations so you can develop an attack or defense tactical vision.

  • Can you see me now? Zoom Your View

    • The capabilities of the human eye are difficult to represent in a computer simulation. Monitors just don't have the resolution of the eye. So, zoom in your view and make that gunnery vision port as big as you can.

Press the Ctrl key and with the resultant cursor click on the zoom lens at the button. Select zoom and scale.

  • Go There! (and Don't Ditch my Tank)
    • When it hits the fan, everything goes south really fast. When you want to get into or out of trouble as a tank commander, the least you want is to be driving by voice (left, left, forward, left) to avoid those enemy trenches or natural tank traps. So use the "go to" function: press the Ctrl key and with the cursor you just enabled, right click into a piece of terrain you are looking at. A little flag will appear. That flag indicates your destination. If you are commanding a platoon, that's a move order for all the platoon. The drivers will avoid obstacles and drive you there.

Let's move!

  • Debrief Like a Champion

    • Under the odd name of "statistics", the end of battle screen can show you what, from how far away and what damage was inflicted by each round that landed on a target.
This Iranian Patton tank was caught pulling out. Look at the ricocheting of a 115 mm round that went into the engine after ricocheting from the lower part of the gun tube. Mobility kill.

    • Spend a good time learning what worked and what not. There is no silver bullet in Steel Armor, that's for sure. But if the right angle and the right spot of an enemy tank is hit ...


Cheers,









7 comments:

NW said...

I did not know that it was possible to zoom in the optics view. Perfect!

Rongor said...

I played for 2 hours then got the steam refund.
I agreethis sim has lots of potential. Unfortunately not only do Russian voiced crews in arab and American tanks kill the immersion but also the devs don't care to improve anything about it. They replied they don't know how to implement other voice sets and they simply leave that work up to the people to mod stuff like that in.
I find such an attitude by a game dev questionable.
Also they outright state they arenot competent enough to implement multiplayer.

Missing MP and the unfinished immersion might be the reasons we won't see this game draw any remarkable attention. Not now and not in the future.

Sad...

JC said...

Glad to help NW. :)

Rongor, I'm sorry you feel that way. It's a small development studio and all, but I feel they have delivered a good simulation. Again, language barriers are very high. I don't mind the tank drivers speaking any language as far as I have captions. But that's just me. :)

Cheers,

JC said...

And, if anybody notices, those were four habits, not three. :p

Cheers,

NW said...

I find the Russian less immersion-breaking than English; at least it isn't English. And that's with me speaking it and understanding the crew dialogue. I do not mind that they're not speaking Iraqi Arabic or Farsi, it would be nice, but I don't expect an Eastern European dev studio with all of their attendant sociocultural and socioeconomic issues to pick up the necessary voice actors.

I would like for multiplayer to be a thing, but given that they've built everything off of the Kharkov engine I can see why it isn't. I think that the value for money is there. It hasn't stopped me playing SB Pro PE at all, especially since I can network on that, but this I find to provide a very satisfying SP experience.

Nought wrong with that. There is a major problem in game design nowadays for it all to boil down to a simple SP campaign and then MP capability; this is a bit of a throwback to the older days of game development for sure.

Anonymous said...

I own and extensively used Steel Beasts Pro. SABOW has a lot more going for it. It has better realism, physics, a campaign, a great hit model and decent AI. Steel Beasts does not compare. I am not trying to argue. Like i said i have used Steel Beasts a lot and it is very buggy. Especially in multi-player. You can see this in the support forum. Yes i have 3.028 the latest.

Just my honest opinion after owning both for many years. Thanks for posting SABOW posts JC. You the man.

Cheers
Brian

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