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Back to the Russian Front with 'WWII Battle Tanks - T-34 vs Tiger'! The year 2008 was a promising one for tank simulation enthusiasts, with two new WW2 tank sims released around the same time. One was Steel Fury - Kharkov 1942, which found most favour with players, continues to be modded and played, and has been featured in three recent mission reports here at CombatAce. This time it's the turn of 'the other sim' - the aptly-named T-34 vs Tiger. Strangely, this was released by the same publishers - Lighthouse Interactive - as Steel Fury; my T34 - vs Tiger manual even has a 2-page, centre-fold spread advert for SF! As a fan of the Tiger tank in particular and something of a tanksim nut since discovering Panzer Commander, I was keen to try out the new sim. But with sub-par AI, no interaction with other tanks or vehicles in your unit and a very limited set of heavily-scripted (and questionably realistic) missions, I soon realised why most players seemed to gravitate (sic) to Graviteam's 'Steel Fury', instead. Still, 'TvT' has some really good features and in particular, is in most respects a very good simulation of operating the two featured tanks. And if you like it enough to hanker for more, there's an ongoing payware mod by Zeewolf which adds vehicles and missions. Having fairly recently taken some time off combat flight sims to play Steel Fury and report the results, I thought I'd dust off T-34 vs Tiger and do likewise. Will a fresh crack at the sim after the passage of several years change my first impressions? Let's find out! The mission If you're single-player only like me you won't be too bothered that the sim's apparently promising multi-player capability never seemed to have been realised. But the single-player option also had its issues. There's only six missions for each side. There are no training missions - it's all on-the-job-training, as it were. Together, the missions form a campaign of sorts but they seem to be no more than a loosely-sequenced series of small operations in the same general area in the same timeframe. The area is between Smolensk and Vitebsk in what is now Belarus, in the northern sector of Germany's Army Group Centre. The timeframe is summer 1944, during Operation Bagration, the Soviet summer offensive for that year. This was a major disaster for the Wehrmacht and a great success for the Red Army, with large swathes of Soviet territory being liberated and much destruction being visited on Army Croup Centre. I was tempted to try out the T-34; but for better comparison with both my early efforts with TvT and my recent forays with SF, I decided that I'd let the Tiger off his leash once more. As for my choice of mission, this was limited..to one mission in fact. Irrititatingly, it seems you have to 'unlock' the missions by winning them. There may have been a cheat to unlock missions but if there was I can't find it now. [EDIT - found it! it's here] I don't know if this approach was a crude attempt to make the best of the twelve missions by forcing replays but I find this pretty hateful - and unrealistic, to boot. Unless you get the chop in one sense or another, life goes on, whether or not the powers-that-be deemed your last operation was a success. It doesn't help that mission success in TvT seems tightly-defined in terms of things you must kill, down to the last tank...and I mean 'you must kill' because the AI may be little help. But more of this anon. So - this report deals with the first of the six German missions, because that was all I could get at, readily. Except that there will be two flavours - stock and ZeeWolf. This is because ZeeWolf's TvT project, though subscription-only, includes some freebies. And one of them is a new mission, which seems to replace the original first mission, when you install it (at least it did for me). The package seems to make some other changes, too; it may be a different time of day in each mission is fooling me here but I get the impression that the very harsh lighting is softened, losing the too-dark shadows and warming up the colours. And the Tiger is back to the full set of rubber-tired roadwheels (it started like this but the TvT official patch changed these to the resilient steel-tired roadwheels with the outer row removed). Top pic is stock+patch; bottom is with ZeeWolf's freebies installed: Kurtenki - the stock mission I'll keep this one short, not least because if you have ever played TvT, you'll know this one off by heart; there seems to be little-to-no variability in TvT missions, with friends and enemies identically scripted and positioned each time...unfortunately. I didn't get a screenie of the briefing but...it's brief. Basically, drive down the road/track towards a 'blown' river bridge and destroy any enemies seen massing (or doing anything else, for that matter) on the enemy bank. I don't find it easy to tell the lie of the land from the little briefing and in-game maps in TvT - that they show forests, the 'rides' between them and the roads is their most useful feature - but we're starting between the village of Kurtenki and the river, on a sort of plateau from which the ground falls away steeply to the river, then rises just as steeply on the other side - terrain perhaps more suitable for a mountain lion than a tiger. Anyway, here we go. There's two of us in Tigers, on this job. See what I mean about that harsh lighting? Apart from that, these are mostly very nice renditions of a fairly late-production Tiger 1. Apart from the steel roadwheels, distinguishing features for mid- and/or late-production vehicles include the commander's 'low profile' cupola with episcopes instead of the older 'dustbin' type; the ribbed 'Zimmerit' anti-magnetic mine paste on vertical surfaces; the lack of turret-side triple smoke dischargers; no 'Fiefel' air cleaner filters on the rear plate; and spare track stowage moved from the lower nose to the turret sides. Are you the boss on this operation? Or just a 'wing-man'? Search me. But never fear, it doesn't matter. The AI, including your boss (or 'wing-man') pay you no attention, unless the mission designer has built in triggers which provoke them into action when you (or others) do a certain thing. You have no way of controlling your fellow tankers and playing as a platoon/troop commander. It's hard even to co-operate with them, as their actions seem hasty, unpredictable or silly - sometimes all three at once. As is my wont, I switched to the gunner position then turned on the AI driver and AI tank commander (TC). The former I can give driving orders W-A-S-D fashion, from the gunner's station. I can also tell the loader whether to load HE or AP rounds. The AI TC will spot targets for me. Another advantage of playing in the gunner's sattion is that you can orient the turret to cover likely threats, instead of just driving around with the gun at twelve o-clock all the time - with the Tiger's slow traverse, this can help you get onto targets faster. I could equally have stuck to the commander's station and let AI both drive and gun. The AI gunner wil engage what he sees but if you're playing TC you can also mouse-click targets to designate them. In SF the AI crew will open or close hatches as they see fit but not in TvT. As only Soviet TCs fought entirely buttoned up I briefly switched to the TC position, unbuttoned, and then once the TC had popped into position, left him there and went back to the gunner's station. For some reason the TvT Tank Commander insists on standing tall in his cupola, instead of sensibly operating with just his head exposed. But I still prefer this to hatches permanently closed. There are well-rendered tank interiors in TvT but I never use them. External view, TC hatch open, or gunsight/binocular view, that's my style As I passed the other Tiger he sprang into life. After that, he did his own thing. I drove south towards the river, past some grenadiers with an SPW manning a flimsy barricade. The sounds of my Tiger rumbling along and my TC calling out my driving commands were well done; sound effects are one of TvT's strengths, to my ears. After I passed this little barricade the other Tiger rumbled past me. The terrain - a wood on one side of our track and a steep slope on the other - seemed designed to funnel us in a certain direction. No Operation Flashpoint-style wide open sandboxes, here. Making the most of it, I was planning to creep up to the crest line - beyond which the terrain looked to dip down into the valley. Scan every inch of terrain as it revealed itself in front of me. Hug the woods on the left and watch what emerged across the river to my right. My fellow tank commander, bless his cotton socks, had no such concerns. He drove right up to the crest, stopped, and started shooting. He then drove on down the other side, out of sight. 'Bloody Hell!', I said to myself. 'There goes Plan A. Now what?' ...to be continued!