Download Now - Steel Beasts

1. Installation 2. Finding online games 3. Tactics 4. Sharpening your skills 5. Goodies 6. Etiquette 7. Credits
Situational Awareness - Some Tips
Acquiring good situational awareness (SA) is for newbies to Steel Beasts often quite hard...
"...What's happening ?...Where am I ?...Who's firing at me ?...CLANG..."
I guess we all remember the confusion we went through during our first virtual SB-battles.
Good SA is also an extremely important matter, to be successful in SB.
Therefore, to make things a bit easier for newbies, I collected on several forums some quotes about the do's
and don'ts concerning SA. You'll find these quotes below.
I hope it can be useful to someone.
BTW As you will see, most of these quotes are from the hand of Mekhazzio. So hats off to you, Mekh !
Degree of difficulty of SB
What strikes me about playing SB, having been used to flight sims, is the suddenness and surprise of death. In
most flight sims, you are often aware of your predicament and you grapple. Perhaps, you make some wrong
moves or you are overwhelmed, etc... In SB, I often find that I am alive one minute and dead the next. Only in
the AAR, do I finally see that tank at 3000 meters in my deep right flank. Not being someone with military or
combat experience, I believe that SB provides a good sense of combat. In many games, the player is rarely put
in a position were "sh_t just happens". In SB, you can look and scan ... and yet just simply get caught and dead.
You get the feeling skill can only keep you alive so long when surrounded by threats and death every where.
Markshot - 10/2001 SimHQ
Ok guys I'm a flight sim guy first off... so I'm used to radars and such. now I want to rave over SB like
everyone else, really I do.... however, I can't identify crap. Anything going on around me.
rpommier - 10/2000 Shrapnel Games Forum
Answer 1:
1. To show facing, there's a 'tank clock' in the lower right hand that, at all times, shows the orientation of the hull
and turret, as if overlaid on a compass (up is north, down is south, etc)
2. Enemy detection is a matter of looking in the right general direction (so you need some overall battlefield SA
as well, if the enemy's coming from the north, look north).
3. After this, general detection is a matter of having someone (yourself, another platoon, whatever) on a position
that can see a lot of terrain (as even a fairly small dip or rise can hide a tank for a significant area).
4. After that, there's in-tank acquisition...and the biggie there is the TIS (Thermal Imaging System). Vehicles are
very, very hard to spot with the naked eye, particularly, say, a hull-down T-80 at 2,500 meters with a treeline
behind him. However, he glows a nice bright green in thermal, and a quick sweep in TIS 3x (wide FOV) will
usually let you see whatever there is to be seen. TIS, so commonly referred to as a night sight, is just as