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This is the seventy-third in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to master post.

I did something wrong.

After a long hiatus, I picked Steel Panthers back up for another Vietnam tank battle. I was surprised to find that there was no sound.

After figuring out what I was seeing, I was a bit perplexed about how such an old program suddenly quit working right. The problem (I don’t think) is with Steel Panthers, at least not directly. With some reflection, I realized that one thing I have done recently is clean up some of the older, larger files on my machine. I have this vague yet non-specific memory that I tried clearing out some of the oldest versions of Microsoft substrate software… the DirectX, the dot-Net, etc. It might make sense that, if WinSPMBT was using an old version of something and I ripped that version out from underneath, some interface for the sound card could fail.

What I’m assuming is that, to fix the sound, I’m going to need to uninstall and reinstall. I’m always a bit fearful of this process. Will I mess up my save games? Will I fail to install any extra scenarios I’ve downloaded? Then I thought some more. One of the more annoying things about Steel Panthers, especially in the larger scenarios, is when the AI turn goes into a 15-minute resolution cycle, repeating the same sounds over and over. Does the sound actually contribute to this game, or am I better off without it?

In all of this, I remembered that I’d seen a 2020 update to the WinSPMBT install – one that I’d yet to download. This lit the way forward for me. I would leave my future sounds in the hands of the Steel Panthers development team. If the latest update (version 14) also fixed the sound, I’d be noisily back to where I was last year. If not, I’d simply welcome the silence. Well, to make a long story slightly-less-long, I installed and still don’t have sound.

So be it.

– The enemy quietly awaits, quite dug in. (old version)

This quiet battle represented by the scenario Team Hocker (166) is remarkable in that it was one of the larger of many summer encounters between the a battalion of the 35th Infantry (4th Division) and the VC forces in the area south of Quang Ngai. Of the roughly 300 kills and captures over the course of the summer, most of them were in small actions which Combat Operations: Taking the Offensive terms “hole hunting” – the tedious process of rooting out hidden enemy arms and combatants. Contrast this with August 20th, 1967, when the battalion (which had attached tank support) responded to reports of a helicopter drawing fire from the village of An Thach. The fighting claimed no U.S. lives and resulted in only two wounded. The contemporaneous after-action report credits the “aggressibe [sic] tactics” of the American forces with the decisive victory.

Maybe it is the easy availability of the after-action report that prompted this scenario to be created for Steel Panthers (although the scenario text credits three commercially-published books as references). Victory in the scenario will demand employment of those aggressive tactics as the player has only 12 turns to traverse the map and seize the village. The scoring system also requires the American victory to be gained with minimal losses. Having tried this a couple of ways, this seems* like a really tough nut to crack.

As you can see from the screenshot, the VC are well dug in to defend the village. The player has the use of a spotter plane but many enemy positions won’t be realized until you identify them through their incoming fire. It is my general experience with Steel Panthers that if the enemy has hidden RPG teams, you’re going to lose an AFV or two rooting them out – no way around it. Given this, it is very difficult to win this scenario (maybe a feature – players like a challenge) and impossible to reproduce the one-sided victory of that day’s actual fighting.

Return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles. For a flight simulator article that was a long, long time coming, click here.

*I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m a mediocre player at best. I have no doubt that some of these scenarios which I find impossible are the same ones that other players consider to be too easy. What I don’t understand is whether they can be beat through a realistic application of the strategy and tactics of the Vietnam War or by taking advantage of the weakness of the game’s AI.