Captain_Colossus

once again you see the piecemeal way in that the tanks are committed without infantry or IFV support, detached from a platoon or any sort of parent organization, not because of incompetence but because in the most blatant way cheap DIY drone kits have broken the game. smaller groups racing around the track under constant surveillance have less risk exposure along poor road conditions surrounded by minefields where there is less room to maneuver

a relatively new bradley video likely from from ukraine's counter-offensive last year in zaporozhye

👌 if it were tied to the mission editor logic, then it can be a flexible user defined option rather than subject to user complaints of any hard set limitation or imterpretation- just like currently surrender if, or disembark if, now you have eject crew if

the current battle of avdiivka is underway where these bradleys are operating, and ukraine is losing. from what i saw in the follow up to this particular event, this same bradley was knocked out either by artillery or a mine last year there was video of a russian t-90 killing a bradley. no one was saying that the t-90 was a supertank that had completely determined the outcome of the war. we have seen again and again on both sides that the attacker faces challenges that you will simply risk losses whenever you try to gather a large effort- which means shortly after you have formed up in columns you are drawing attention to yourself for the artillery and drone spotters- the fact is that vehicle vs. vehicle engagements are still very rare, any particular action you see is not demonstrative of the big picture. most tallies are accounted for by mines and drones and artillery, the latter having the most overall effect, including some unique tools available only to russia- the TOS systems and the fuel air bombs obliterating neighborhoods. and so this is a war of attrition where numbers matters and whoever cannot put up the numbers has to find creative solutions. but there is only so far that can go, and eventually it starts looking like the end is in sight- not perhaps in the next several months but perhaps a year from now the situation will have shifted to some inevitable conclusion. it is just taking time to get there in a slow roll so again, these vehicle profiles don't mean much except to prop up what people people already want to believe. in the larger scheme of things ukraine is deep trouble no matter what people want to believe

and so i will add, and this not meant to discredit the idea that substance does matter, but what i am saying is that graphics do matter, and it is largely subconscious that they matter, you do not have a choice of it. if you were not born blind, your brain is attempting to map the world around you by estimating what it thinks is out there based on the information coming in through your eyes- therefore the external world you believe that you see is an experience inside your skull. your mental map of what is 'out there' is inside your brain. and what you see is your brain attempting to make sense of the world visually, combined with your sense of hearing and smell and balance and other tactile simulation. i had not played many computer games or simulations outside of steel beasts for the last 20+ years. as such i did not realize how far computer games graphics had come since then, because i had not been paying that much attention. then i played dcs and skyrim for the first time and i was quite astonished what i was seeing. flight sims without special cockpit simulators cannot replicate g effects and the feel of the aircraft and the feel of wind currents buffeting and things like this to really get an appreciation of what real flying is like- however what i saw in dcs and microsoft flight simulator comes as close as they can just with graphics techniques however they are doing that- without the aforementioned aids in the real world to orient your sense of movement in the environment that you would have in real life- nevertheless say what you will about the simulation or whether it is fun or not, i found how far they come with a sense of scale and distance which i never saw before. take the water in the below screenshots- you intuitively sense how close or how far away it is visually at different altitudes and distances- whether it is the lighting or texture results or rendering techniques at far distances or whatever it is- it looks like real water at the distances and altitudes they are trying to represent. this is much different than i remember where in the past the water really looked the same at any distance but for perhaps at a few simulated meters distance from the ground level, you may see some pixels or a few lines flash by to try to give the impression of the surface beneath the player's point of view. so this is not to put steel beasts down at all, because i will argue that the steel beasts terrain engine has improved and come far so that there is more plausible representations of an actual environment than what tank sims used to be doing.20 or 30 years ago. just look at m1 tank platoon 1 and compare it with any game which is released now and see immediately how utterly artificial those environments were and therefore could not generate results that would look anything like reality

i admit my question is rhetorical and that i am already certain of what i intend already, nor do i think i have made myself clear. i will try again- when i say that graphics matter, i do not necessarily mean a particular thing like lighting (although in a game like doom back in the 1990s that was extremely immersive and important to the gameplay- the long dark corridors with malfunctioning lighting flickering and this sort of thing with the monsters breathing somewhere around the corner was what that was all about- not per se the violence and the killing which would have been just another wolfenstein 3D, but it was the environmental lighting and thoughtfulness of the game design which was different from anything else at the time. clearly it was not a detailed simulation of shooting, the gameplay is rather shallow- so doom was a very rare case where graphics and sound were more important than the gameplay or the accuracy of the ballistics or whatever. no one complained about that in doom and so of course it went on to fame and fortune). i mean by graphics as they relate to a 'simulator' just the overall impression of what you see on the monitor somewhat resembles reality. i would argue that in the 1980s and 1990s this wasn't really possible, and the kinds of home computers available to consumers at that time outside of research institutes or military simulators could scarcely if at all be used as a training aid or tool- some may point to microsoft flight simulator was actually used by flight students for instrument navigation and familiarity but still- flight sims in those days could not render environments where a user could discern the difference between 500 meters or 5000 meters above the ground- hence why landing and take off or low level flight would be entirely more difficult than it should be in real life, nor could night flying really be trained in this manner. from a ground level perspective, you could not render an environment which would not look anything like reality- so a game like electronic arts' seal team released in the 1990s could not render thick forest jungles and all the information content needed to replicate special forces operations in vietnam, that is, enemy parties could clearly be seen at any distance and there simply wasn't enough cover or concealment that personal computers at the time could render to make that a more realistic experience. so graphics are related to function in that respect- better graphics mean the potential for a better or more functional experience for lack of a better description, if of course there is the rest of the content to go along with it. and so there is a false dichotomy which often arises when someone objects and points out the such and game is pretty but it is a shallow game or whatever- and of course they are right, but that does not mean that graphics simply do not matter. again because if graphics do not matter, then you could render your entire vehicle fleet in 50 triangles and then your m2 bradleys will probably look no different than an m1113 and then when games in those days did look like that when their objects were almost indiscernible looking masses, they often had to use artificial cues like labels of the vehicle type somewhere on the screen or in the HUD or whatever to inform users. so again this isn't to say that graphics alone matter, i will also point out plenty of cases where mainstream games are completely shallow and boring at least in my view which are really just graphical experiences (which is in my opinion what games people play on their smart phones are) so that's not what i am saying. there are two extremes: graphics either don't matter, or only graphics matters, and either of which i think are wrong. now of course you will often see visitors on steel beasts channels on youtube complain about the graphics and so on, and then other users bring attention to esim's purpose and business model being military client driven first and then graphics second, but this doesn't mean however the extreme case that therefore graphics do not matter to a simulator to steel beasts at all- so for example more terrain detail naturally lends itself to simulation results rather than simply looking better. they coincide. and so of course the more detailed terrain in steel beasts as it is now is clearly better looking and more functional than steel beasts version 1

but if you are trying to make the argument that graphics is unrelated either to fun and entertaining or 'realistic' or is somehow at odds with these things, i fail to see it- and which looks like to me some kind of over used fallacy. of course you certainly can compromise one or the other with limited budgets and resources, and if you can creatively get around this sometimes it works for the better (take for example the early star wars films- the low budget practical effects, set designs and look of the costumes and rubber muppets are superior to the lackluster computer generated scenes of later films- the designers used props which they bought in hardware stores and possibly apparel stores modified for the look). i am not really a huge fan of flight sims, but falcon 3.0, one of the few i spent any time with was in my view something special even by today's standards. but i returned to it just a few years ago and it does not quite capture the same experience as it once did. however the point i make is that if anyone argues that graphics is somehow icing on the cake at best, then why does esim periodically update its render engine- what purpose does it serve if not also to achieve more parity with the world it attempts to simulate? if that were not the case you could replace all the models with rasterized sprites or perhaps every vehicle with a 3D wireframe block with the words 'tank' or 'pc' inscribed on them, and render the ground terrain as a few shaded terrain tiles and a few tree models every square kilometer or so matched with the few sterotypical pyramids like you saw in those older programs representing hills and have no different experience than what you have now- if that is what you mean

i do not dispute that at all- rather it is implied that the relationship between graphics and sim-like fidelity is not antagonistic, but converge with several factors in play, one of which as you say depends on the audience and popularity of the subject matter to begin with, certainly you see that in other categories, say the resources committed to racing simulations vs golf simulations. but certainly better graphics does contribute to better simulation results if all the other ingredients are also present. we can compare the barren environments of 1980s DOS games to see just how poor they were in modelling the subject matter that they purported to represent. i think in large part player's imaginations filled in the gaps, and probably explain the strange nostalgia players still have for games like M1 tank platoon I & II when they clearly are obsolete

dcs and microsoft flight simulator have the graphics and the meat of 'simulation' and which i think disprove the argument that users are forced to compromise one or the other. there are console action flight combat simulators developed in the same generation (like call of duty are more similar to interactive movies than 'games'), but even these no longer have any advantage in graphics- if they ever did at all. flight simulators always had the most resources in graphics and presentation relative to their generation; if you go back to the simple flight simulators from 40 years ago, as crude as they were, there were never anything close on anything on a console, and flight action games scaled roughly similar in terms of visual results- only the most advanced arcade boards and home computers could do anything like that and were quite similar to one another visually with vector or flat shaded polygon models. for my time however, dcs and ms flight simulator just are not practical to get into. and so there is the niche that MMO tank games fill- though i have to wonder about the effect that the "free to play, pay to win" schema psychologically manipulates the player base to grind and invest more money and time into them. the game experience without that is actually quite shallow, it is the fact that players are psychologically invested into it because a carrot is constantly dangled in front of them with the vague hope of 'winning' which is also the meat of the experience. you could replace the tanks with elves and dragons and fantasy creatures to get a similar effect

watching videos of world of tanks / war thunder / armored warfare / my impression is that even if they used the same figures as steel beasts, they would still generate very different results because their assumptions about what happens behind the armor are a bit different- hits exchanged between same tier vehicles are usually critical and kill outright. the graphic window they use to visualize the results serve the purpose to titilate the player, but the results are nearly always the same. subjectively, two of the toughest vehicles to ko in steel beasts are the MRAPS and the pirahana based 90 and 30 mm gun carriers, not because of their armor values, but because perforations do not do much to them- as a result i have seen tanks deplete their ammunition loads while they still remain in play; every imprortant component might be damaged, and they might be immobilized, but the attempt is hopeless . still, with the mission editor, i often work in a destroy if condition attached to all vehicles in order to approximate crews bailing or incapacitated and so on, so that opposing units do not spend all their efforts on disabled but still live targets which refuse to die

already goes without saying

if you have not tried it yet, you can specify different styles. this was a specified request in pencil sketch style. bing's algorithm is sensitive with its content policy though- i requested nothing more than ' a modern tank battle ' and my request was blocked. but that is microsoft; other image generators without the corporate liability are probably better for that

common objects for city scapes, civilian and military infrastructure: construction cranes water tower (already present as a custom object in some of the optional map downloads, but not available for any other map). flagstaff for all parties with national standards support structures to create refineries

created through bing image generator, 2 iterations. another iteration did not quite match the given parameters. rather easy to use for your steel beasts scenario marquee adverts and so on within limitations- violent war themed images by whatever metric the AI deems too much out of line with its standards can prompt warnings about your account being flagged. it is not necessarily easy to know specifically beforehand what does that, you are just playing with fire if the description alludes to actors destroyed and blowing up and so on in a way however it does diminish the perceived value of art- because it is too easy, requiring no skill

i know that you look at me and angelina and brad and you cannot help but admire us. well we feel the same way about you. you look so carefree and content. it looks different to us

hodges, hr mcmaster, petraeus, milley, austin- all must really be reflecting on their attention their own past statements except that no one holds them to account, that is, how they were wrong- the mainstream media itself has demonstrated how unreliable it is and is blatantly manufacturing the correct narrative no matter how bizarre. the textbook russian defense that the media, encouraged by pundits and political hacks to believe was a farce and something left over from world war two just underscoring how primitive and incompetent the russians were- tore up the roughly what- somewhere between one and two ukrainian corps intended to break through and push on to the azov coast. you have a multi-echeloned defense stretching for miles- well the first line is intended to be penetrated - because then an attacker finds itself raked by fire from multiple directions, while the russians re-seed minefields behind or around the attacker. then the problems are just starting to become apparent- because behind that is the second line, which is the main russian defense- again., the same problem as before if they get this far but even more intense; then behind that is typically where the reserves are which counterattack any forces which are dithering in kill zones and so on. depending on the sector, there could be more defensive belts depending on the importance signed by the russians. and when you looked at the maps when all of this happening you could practically see where the russians were enticing the ukrainians to penetrate- because you would see what looks like a relatively weak pocket separating trench positions as if there was some kind of lax oversight. now of course the ukrainians never got that far- the stories abou ukrainian making breakthroughs never happened- instead the ukrainians fell apart among the russian screen positioned in front of the main defenses- these groups did not expect nor intend to hold this territory, but just to wear out the spear through a push and pull seesaw action- attack, retreat, fall back, displace, lure attackers into minefields and fire sacks and so on. keep attacking then displace, give up infantry positions then retake them again, the repeat and keep this pressure going. throughout all of this ukraine captured maybe a dozen or so small settlements consisting of small farming communities in the forward area- but that was all, other than a few small infantry groups which made into the russian defenses for a photo op before having to pull out again before the drones and the artillery started zeroing in. but of course this was all being played up as some kind of breakthrough which was going on. and so i think the real problem for russia wasn't a ukrainian breakthrough but that ukraine would have gotten smart all of this and called it off too early, preserving its forces for the next round of the russian offensive, which is not going to look like the long parked columns. the problem was the public and i think many of the leadership do not understand what they are dealing with- ukraine capturing ground is not per se winning for ukraine, that is certainly not the russians are viewing it, as if you all that is needed to score points mean getting past the defense in a hocky or football analogy or whatever- which mean next to nothing in this conflict, instead the russians view trading territory for attrition on ukraine as intentional and desireable. and so in a similar way it was a trap like bakhmut was intended to draw in as many ukrainians as possible, then cinch the trap and destroy as much of the ukrainian armed forces as possible- which you saw similarly in last year's ukrainian counteroffensive which was eventually shut down by the fall of 2022- and which resulted in the destruction of the best the ukrainian army. and so it is not a stalemate and never was a stalemate, which is a misunderstanding of how russia is grinding down ukraine because it is not proceeding as quickly as desert storm or iraqi freedom, so therefore it is not understood too well how the russians view the progress of the war and how to win differently from the west- which looks like reality to starting to catch up and more and more the public is now realizing this

i was never going to attempt a 1:1 reproduction of the basra area, which would prabably take me several lifetimes. this is map is an amalgamation of varying urban and regional geography into a 10 × 10 km map are with the goal of also running smoothly (as such i already had to pare down details from my initial plans)

i reject the premise that it was ever russia's intention to conquer ukraine. it was russia's intention to coerce ukraine to bargain. if you recall this actually began to happen early on in 2022 until boris johnson complicit with washington torpedoed any sort of agrreements of the kind (as if it were without our permission to grant , ). in the first weeks and months russia deliberatley left kiev and the ukrainian's political class intact instead of triangulating zelensky every time he nakes a public statement in order to leave some kind of poltical process in place. if you dont know that ukraine is getting fucked up badly and russian forces fighting now are not the same inexperienced, thinly streched battle groups like in the beginning, while i cant fault you given the astonishing level of propaganda and wishful projections, that ukraine has not contrary to the company line broken through russias layered defenses. try this and really get with it: zelensky just wrapped up his washington tour and has stated openly that if ukraine doesnt continue to receive more support, ukraine cannot win the war. again, this doesnt come from me but zelensky. how does this square with this other movie we have been watching where ukraine wins all battles, russia loses all battles, putin is a shakin in his boots and russia is collapsing. it doesnt- there is something wrong here because only one of these stories can be true, but not both. in fact i would say that you are seeing the two most experienced militaries in this type of modern warfare playing this show out- it is ukraine and russia. forget this nonsense that russians are fighting with shovels or something. it isnt true at all. if you notice for the last several weeks the ukrainians keep breaking through the russian sectors in either robotiyne or bakhmut, which is either a distortion of tge picture ir pkaying loose with semantics. generally speaking there have been no large armored units which have broken through, there are small infantry groups supported by a few vehicles which are forced to move back and forth and trade positions with the russians, any large effort cannot move undetected and are attrited rather quickly. and by the way, the target of reaching the azov coast some 50 miles still away in the southern front require the capture of tokmak and melituopol, which have defensive belts ringing them as well, and ukraine, now committing its most elite reserves into the breach when they were supposed to have broken out already, have to do all of this before the bad weather returns in a few weeks. really do pay attention to what zelensky is saying right from his own words when he admits what he just did

i do not have the time to disentangle it in order to do this. i have altogether stopped running DCS because of the lack of time. of course steel beasts appeals to the type of user willing to put in the time and effort, but this is where i drop off. other users might spend more effort, but there is notable lack of community created operations. that might suggest a steep learning curve. while i am not a developer, from a user standpoint, i might suggest a drag and drop graphical interface in some future build- that might perhaps make an operations creation tool more accessible. it is probably more for the benefit of the solitaire PE user, that is, in itself it is likely not the highest priority for eSim from the business end of things. which is understandable

i see tremendous value in development of the campaign creator in steel beasts- it should be more intuitive, more user friendly, easier to generate a campaign where results from one action carry over to the next- then the user can experiment where fast and slow might work or not because the user sees the consequences of preserving forces at the expense of gaining ground or vice versa as the next phase develops. i don't know if this is meaningful for mil customers, but for the PE user it is a different experience than compartmentalized scenarios where there is no real sense of this sort of basic dilemma other than perhaps a scoring formula in a single scenario but which is still sort of separates the user from his decisions.

it depends on the scenario- a scenario with a particular time limit conceit worked in such as capture the bridge before the opfor blows it up probably entails the player forced to rush and adhoc solutions which means a fairly easy opportunity to present obstacles and challenges and rack up casulaties against the player. there is probably no escaping the fact that a scenario is a reflection of the designer's ego, as you can imagine mamy are designed to be artificially difficult where the enemy never routes or surrenders but simply fights to the last, in which case it can be difficult and time consuming to create and exploit a breakthrough. what is called thunder run was a unique chain of improvised events rather than a single action of the typical steel beasts scenario, precisely because at this phase iraqi restance began to melt back into the cities and morphed into an insurgency, which is what bogged down occupation forces and which was the intent rather than to throw everything into one final battle. this is far away different from near equivalent forces fighting in ukraine where settlements and small villages repeatedly change hands, where attacking forces rush in with suppressive fires and displace quickly before artillery missiles and drones start zeroing in. still those same rushing units might blunder into minefields and anti-tank killzones- so in reality there is no either or solution for all cases in this type of warfare. there needs to be more context given before a rule like that can be applied

if it is a bot, interacting with it is probably teaching it- and when i say it, i do not mean just the bot but the collective AI development effort to be more sophisticated in its responses. there was a report (or with a caveat- a rumor) some several weeks ago that an air force computer program went rogue during an exercise and began interpreting its own human controllers as obstacles to its mission and recognized attempts to corall it in as hostile- which was a 'correct ' but creative solution to the very problem it was given- to accomplish the mission, leading to a HAL like paradox. all of this- whatever this is- simply is improved the more we interact with it or attempt to get it under control, much like viruses are never eradicated but co-evolve with us in our attempts to stave them off. we are essentially paying these developers to further develop this kind of technology when we buy their smart devices and install them at home and whatnot or use their services, even if unwittingly. so all of this was inevitable and attempting to stem the tide only further evolves their sophistication

road intersection tool in the map editor - user can quickly add a + x or T type junction which can be rotated - and a tool which aligns nearby connecting roads that the user selects or defines

i give credit where credit is due. if you have something valuable to add other than heckling- which i admit is part of the show, and only helps to elucidate my points, since all heklers are inherently at a disadvantage and provide the opportunity for strenghtening a- position then i will admit a good point when it is not something i have considered. ill even cut you some slack. but no- i think i have seen all there is to your show. in several posts now what have you said to rebut the substance of what i have said or offered any competing theories- none. and so i think this is what you are about.

you are wrong- i wouldnt say that i am original at all, but i would say that i tend to agree with critics who apply some common sense to all of this, and of course collectively you can csll us right wing and russian shills- which is all you have done as if that is some kind of rebuttal. well good for you. however i come from a tradition where we used to admire the methods of voltaire and so on- the west is imcreasingly throwing out rational debate and criticism and replacing that with a form of authoritarianism of its own- "you cant say that because my feelings are hurt" or you cant disagree or you are an extremist. you can only stick to the script so that no one is triggered. i watch our public institutions increadingly grow these kinds of citizens and exporting this tendency of dismantling free exchange of disagreements abroad, which i definitely regard as rot as much as any kind of evil you may find in russia or china or iran ir north korea