‘Steel Panthers’ Is Still a Kick-Ass Tank War Sim

Venerable hex game is free to download

by SEBASTIEN ROBLIN

It was the mid-1990s. The roar of Russian tank engines, the whoosh of anti-tank missiles and the buzz of low-flying Havoc attack helicopters filled the computer room of my suburban home. After a few hours of play, a column of Russian tanks lay smoking on a highway and a Ukrainian airfield was in flames.

No, this wasn’t a fast-paced, real-time strategy game like Command & Conquer: Red Alert — I’d just gotten hooked onto Steel Panthers, a turn-based tactical simulation.

Simple to play yet full of depth, it remains a great way to learn about real-world tactics and equipment — especially because modern incarnations of Steel Panthers are available today … for free.

The controls are simple. You command individual vehicles and infantry squads of six to 12 soldiers across a hex map, with each hex equal to 50 meters, two hexes being roughly the length of a football field. You can move your units around the map by left-clicking, or right click to rotate the unit and check its line-of-sight.

When you spot an enemy, left-clicking attacks it until you run out of shots. Once you’ve moved all your units — and you have to be careful, because moving your units in sight of the enemy can cause them to take snapshots at you — you hit the End Turn button, and the opposing side gets to move.

There are only a few additional commands. You can call in air strikes and artillery bombardments — they take several turns to arrive, and are not always accurate — load or disembark troops onto vehicles and rally suppressed units to get them back in the fight.

The first Steel Panthers game deals with World War II, and in addition to dozens of stand-alone scenarios, allows you to play a campaign lasting the entire conflict commanding a company-size force for any of the warring nations.

The sequel, Modern Battles, features new equipment such as attack helicopters and wire-guided anti-tank missiles and virtually every conflict after 1945 — Korea, Vietnam, Arab-Israeli, Iran-Iraq, Angola, Desert Storm and many, many more.

Finally, Steel Panthers 3: Brigade Command spans both eras and changes the scale of the game to commanding platoons instead of squads, with hexes equivalent to 250 meters instead of 50.

The graphics are hardly award-winning, but compared to the flavorless tactical symbols of other realistic war games, they do a great job of conveying a diversity of equipment, while the top down topographical maps depict a variety of environments and conditions — whether the sandy berms of Iraq, the ruined street blocks of Stalingrad or the frozen woods of the Ardennes in the Battle of the Bulge.

Smoke, flames, and shell craters quickly deform the landscape and heavy artillery punches holes in buildings, eventually causing them to collapse.

Steel Panthers does an excellent job of teaching combined arms — the hard and fun way. The game doesn’t require you to understand every tactic and weapon system — you learn through your failures and occasional successes.

For example, it’s easy to charge your awesome Tiger tanks ahead on a map, confident in their superior armor and firepower — only to discover that tanks are really bad at spotting infantry hiding in ambush in the woods, ready to set your invulnerable tank on fire with a Molotov cocktail down the driver’s hatch.

So the next time, you send infantry alongside the tanks to spot the enemy ambushes — but they end up getting chewed up by entrenched machine guns. So then you start pre-planning an artillery bombardment or even a smoke barrage — but it takes several turns for the artillery to begin the fire mission, and the bombardment may be inaccurate if you don’t have a good spotter in place.

And so it goes.