#sabow

Also, have some interior shots from SABOW because I haven’t posted any yet. I didn’t fire the game up to take any, these are just ones that were sitting in my screenshots folder, hence two of the three M60 turret interior shots being of dead/wounded crew. On wounded crew- you can swap out a wounded/dead crewman if necessary, but it takes time, and usually if you’ve taken a hit that kills or wounds a crewman enough that they can’t fight anymore, you should either bail that crew out or pull the tank back. It’s also possible to repair the tank’s tracks mid-battle, but unless it was a lucky artillery round or an air strike that blew it off and you’re out of the line of fire, you should really just bail the crew out and have them fall back to friendly lines.

Also segues into how oddly in-depth the driving mechanics are in SABOW. There’s really no reason to crew the driver’s position yourself unless you can’t get the AI driver to do something specific (and usually, if the AI driver won’t do it, it’s because it stands a very good chance of getting you stuck, which is something I’ve found out the hard way), but it’s quite possibly the best representation of driving a tiller-steered tank I’ve seen. It’s not so complex that you have to worry about clutching and all, but you do have to worry about gear selection (unless you turn on automatic gear shifting, which is just sort of a game aid), and you can actually use your mouse to pull the tillers either individually or in unison, with the amount of pull dictated by how far you pull the mouse back. That means you can have pretty decent amounts of control over exactly how much you turn and how fast.

I loaded up SABOW earlier to do what were the equivalent of berm drills, mainly to re-familiarize myself with some of the controls. In SABOW, you can order your driver to find hull down and turret down positions (for firing and reloading respectively) with a single command. The driver will then pull into the turret down position while the gun is being reloaded, and the hull down position to allow the gunner to engage targets.

For the inaugural post on this blog- Steel Armor: Blaze of War (SABOW)

SABOW is a tanksim by Graviteam, who primarily make real time strategy games like their most recent game Tank Warfare: Tunisia 1943 (which is something else I should put on this blog but I’m even worse at that game than I am at this one), so there’s a fair bit of RTS DNA in this game as well. You spend as much time ordering your forces around (from a map, your in-game views are limited to what you can see from your tanks optics or what you can see with your head stuck out) as you do fighting your tank. The two crewable vehicles are the T-62 mod. 1972 and the M60A1 (’62 spec, so no AOS/RISE/whatever).

This game is hard. Not only are you having to try to spot tanks, infantry, concealed weapon positions, what have you at often very long ranges with crude optics (the only stabilized optic in the game is the T-62 gunner’s sight), you’re having to do that while smoke and dust waft over the battlefield, where the smoke from your own engine may obscure a tank or recoilless rifle that’s sighting in on you. Then you have night battles, relying on the piss poor visibility offered by your gen 1/2 night vision, and yeah. It’s hard, and I’m bad at it, but it’s always an experience.