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Will SB run under XP?
We haven't specifically tested and verified that Steel Beasts is XP compliant. However, we positively know that some of our customers are playing Steel Beasts under Windows XP. The best way to find out is to download the free demo and see if it works for you.  Be sure to set the compatibility of SB to Win98/Me. (Right click on tanksim.exe, select Properties > Compatibility, cliick the box "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" and select Win98/Me. 

Where can I buy Steel Beasts?
Steel Beasts is now in retail stores in North America.  It will soon be in retail stores in Europe, as well.
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What are the system requirement?
You can find that information here.
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Is there a demo available?
Yes!  You can find it here.
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Will I like Steel Beasts?
Steel Beasts is aimed at the serious sim fans.  If you want an action shooter, you're probably better off with a different game.  There are a lot of tank action games on the market by some big name publishers.  If you like a simulation that gives you a precise impression of what our tank crews have to do to successfully end their missions, Steel Beasts is the right thing for you.
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What's the easiest way to learn Steel Beasts?
Play the tutorials. We have created a large set of tutorial missions to keep the learning curve relatively low.  There still is a lot to learn (and there are good reasons why it takes the Army more than a year to forge a tank commander out of a recruit, and a couple of years to make platoon leaders out of tank commanders). However, we feel confident that if you're interested in modern day armor combat, you'll want to ride the "Steel Beasts".  
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Can Steel Beasts really be used by the military for training?
There are certain limitations of technical nature that a PC based simulation cannot overcome for technical reasons.  One of the most obvious things is the keyboard as an input device.  Where a tank crew has a lot of switches to operate in various locations all around the individual crewman, a PC tanker has a joystick at best, and the keyboard and his mouse at worst as his main input devices.  You cannot perform basic gunnery procedures with that.  Still we can see some value in Steel Beasts even for military training:
- basic gunnery rules (like operating the laser range finder, dumping the lead after an engagement etc.) can be presented and trained.
- tactical behavior can be trained either with the multiplayer feature over a local area net (and also WAN via internet) from the scale of the individual tank to platoon and company level.
- it could be employed as an evaluation tool to find out what kind of tactic is most appropriate and promising under various conditions.
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Which vehicles are currently modeled in Steel Beasts?

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Can I make a detailed plan before the battle starts?
Yes. Each mission consists of three phases: planning, action, and debriefing. During the planning phase you can create a detailed set of routes and checkpoints and control logic to implement your desired plan. In addition, a line-of-sight tool allows you to find good tactical positions by exposing danger areas (areas from which another tank can fully see your tank), as well as hull-down areas (areas from which another tank can only see the turret of your tank.) You can also get a 3D preview of the terrain from any point in the planning phase (similar to a preparatory visit). 
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What languages Is Steel Beasts localized to?
Currently, in-game text is localized to Danish, Dutch, English,  French, German, Spanish and Swedish. In-game voices are localized to Danish, English, German, and Swedish. The manual is available only in English.
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I want to help you translate game messages and menus into a language of my choice. How can I do so?
Send us an email.  Translating takes a lot of work, so this is not for the faint of heart.
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I understand that enthusiastic players might create new scenarios.  I have a slow modem connection. Won't downloading them be a big pain?
The most complex scenarios we've designed so far are no bigger than 700K. When zipping them, they usually shrink with a ratio of 1:10 - so don't worry. Most missions will have a size of about 30K (compressed), so it'll be a bearable effort to download additional ten missions, which will give you about 6 hours of additional game play
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Why doesn't Steel Beasts support 3D hardware acceleration?
The development of Steel Beasts began in 1996.  3D accelerator cards were neither popular nor available at that time.  Historically it all began with the development of a new rendering engine that allowed better terrain display from close to the ground with stunning results at little CPU expense.  Unfortunately our team consists of just one full time programmer, Al Delaney.  The development of such a detailed and accurate tank simulation took more time than expected, and so the engine became somewhat obsolete over time.  We currently have plans to upgrade the graphics engine in a future release of SB.
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Why is there no air support?
There are two reasons:
a) It would have chewed up too many scarce resources (manpower)
b) It doesn't fit into our desire to make things right once we decide to do them.  The current Russian air support doctrine, for example, will send not only one HIND to ruin your day, but at least six to ten of them at the same time.  Steel Beasts focuses on the platoon level, and chances to survive such an encounter are slim at best (let alone winning such a scenario).  Having only a few choppers would be fun, but also feed the widely spread illusion that tanks can defeat HINDs with ease.
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Why are missions scripted?  Dynamic mission creation offers infinite missions!
While dynamically created missions indeed result in almost infinite numbers, you need an extremely sophisticated algorithm to put together a battle plan for the computer controlled units that really makes sense.  It is easy to scatter a number of enemy vehicles more or less at random over a map, and coordinate their behavior to some extent.  Still, we haven't seen a truly convincing solution yet that would make sense to military educated personnel - and that is our quality ruler.  Our scenario editor makes it very convenient to put together such a mission script.  These scripts allow a wide variety of behavior for computer controlled vehicles.  In fact, sometimes we've been stunned how smart our own creations acted, and how badly they kicked our butts!  A well designed scenario is a real challenge - but on the other hand there is of course the danger that a mission that was made in a hurry turns out to be less convincing.  There is a very complex randomizing feature that allows almost unlimited control for the scenario designer.  If you want, you can have AI units select different paths, and operate according to various triggers and preset decision statements.  The depth of the mission editor is unparalleled so far, and gives you the opportunity to play the same missions over and over again, with the possibility of different AI decisions each time.
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Why are there no campaigns in Steel Beasts?
There's two basic approaches to creating campaigns.  They can either be dynamically generated, or be a set of missions that are linked together as a mission tree, where the outcome of one battle will determine what scenario will be presented next.  The Steel Beasts game system is fully based on scripted missions.  This doesn't allow the dynamic generation of scenarios, they have to be created manually.  Due to our limited manpower resources, creating a mission tree that would satisfy our demands to quality currently is out of the scope of this project.  This may change in the future.
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