How about giving a Tiger it's stripes?
 

What the hell is the deal with the Tiger Panzer? Why the hell is it so weak? I played through the Russian campaign(except the last board) lookign to fight one of these beasts but to no avail. Then i play the German campaign hoping to actually use one. I get to the last board and FINALLY i get to use one. Not only that, but if you save up enough points you can call them in as reserves,

Well forget about it! Those things are as weak as any other small tank in the game. I got 56 mm shells hitting we front on blowing me up! What the hell is up with that? Not to mention, it should take one shot from a Tiger to take out a small tank, well i had a couple of times where it took two shots, and at good angles and at good range! Then i do the dumbest thing of all, i actually saved up points to bring one of these not so bad boys in up from the reserves. What a waste!!!

So how about giving a Tiger its stripes? Are there any mods or patches that gives this beast the credit it deserves or what?

Thanks for the help.

I find it interesting you didn't find the Tiger strong enough, I was very pleased with its performance. For example, in bonus mission The battle of Vernon, a single Tiger can hold the entire middle defense. Or the final mission in the Allies campaign. The Tiger in the last German mission gets a lot of punishment from different sides, and at low ranges, increasing the chance one of enemy shots will penetrate the armor, especially having in mind that multiple hits to the same spot can weaken the armor.

The problem with modeling Tiger's (and other heavy tanks') strengths in games are ranges. A big part of its power comes from ability to engage targets at huge ranges, at which his own armor is impenetrable. Its 88mm KwK36 L/56 gun is rated as able to penetrate a 100mm tick homogeneous armor plate, at 30 percent from vertical angle, firing from 1000m (84mm from higher range of 2000m).

So the main challenge of an opposing tank is how to get near enough to a Tiger for its own gun to have any chance of penetrating Tiger's armor, without being destroyed.

Since the games usually don't try to represent these kinds of huge ranges, tanks like Tiger (as well as high caliber guns) lose a big part of its advantage.

At low ranges, like 100m and below, the situation changes significantly.

So the real challenge for developers is how to balance more powerful tanks properly. If you try to compensate for inability to represent huge firing ranges in a game by making a tank too powerful even at shorter ranges, you will have balance problems, because it will be invincible to anything except similarly armed tanks. You can see in mentioned missions (Vernon and last Allied) how Tiger's survivability increases significantly if engaged in duels at its maximum effective range, and in these conditions it can really take a lot of punishment. This, however, also means that its survivability decreases significantly as range does, since the maximum ranges in the game are not that great to begin with.

EDIT: Another interesting example is the British Matilda (II) tank. With its armor value which was higher then most other vehicles at that moment, the only thing that could knock them out in the desert (before more powerful tanks entered the theater) at respectable range was the 88 Flak. Its other disadvantages, like low speed, are not really relevant in most games, since game maps are not big enough for any serious maneuvering. But if you tried to represent this (armor advantage) even at (low) game ranges, you will produce a big balance issue, since many gamers (and you can't target only hard core WWII fanatics) will have problems if at the beginning of their campaigns they start facing "little invincible British tanks".

The mentioned 88 is at a big disadvantage in games too. Similar to Tiger's problem, once the enemy tank is in range, it doesn't take long until the 88 is under fire as well. Difference being the gun crew doesn't even have comparable armor protection.

Brandbll you are misstaken.
You do realize that that this game tries to focus on realism and make all tanks as close to what the were in real life.
Tigers are fine. Just don't suicide attack with em. Make sure you keep good range and your front armor facing the enemy.

Had a tiger that killed 12 tanks in multiplayer. And human opponants are normaly better then the computer.

I agree with the OP. After many frustrating online games I have had Tigers knocked out by frontal shots from Russian 85mm guns and even the T34/57 at close range. I have also had my 88mm shots bounce off of KV-1s /T34 76/85 tanks at <100m. I don't want uber, knowing the small scale (perhaps 1/10th of actual) of the game, but the allies should shudder a little when a Tiger appears in front of them. The Tiger's 88 was able to take out enemies at 2000m!

The Tiger also had superior optics to its counterparts, that should be reflected with increased accuracy.

I'm sure someone will be able to mod in a better Tiger, people can always choose whether to use them or not. I, however, cannot resist a good tank discussion.

There is nothing wrong with 85mm guns being able to pierce a 100mm armor at medium range. If Tiger's 88mm gun (essentially the same as 88mm Flak gun, with required modifications) can penetrate 100mm armor at 1km, why wouldn't a similar (meaning length and muzzle velocity) 85mm gun be able to do so at shorter ranges?

As a side note, Panther's 75mm KwK42 L/70 gun actually has better armor penetration (except at extreme ranges) then a Tiger, due to a higher muzzle velocity. So, shell caliber isn't everything.

About the T34/57 I'm surprised to even see it in the game. As dedicated tank hunters, only a small number were ever produced, and most took part in the battle for Moscow. A few were in operation in late 1943, but were destroyed before any documented larger scale encounter with German heavy tanks happened. One thing that would work for them is a reported high muzzle velocity (around 1000m/s with special ammo) which should allow them to endanger even a Tiger from a short distance. For comparison, a 50mm L/60 gun of a Panzer III ("J" version and later), firing an advanced pzgr40 shot, with muzzle velocity of 1,180m/s, was able to penetrate 130mm armor at 100m.

And of course, we have to consider game balance reasons. If a Tiger is invincible to a 85mm gun at mid range, then what should be able to destroy it? Not to mention that an even more powerful King Tiger would then be able to take on entire tank armies by itself. The biggest problem here is that many major factors in tank warfare, like speed, visibility, movement range, realistic combat distances, technical equipment (like radios) simply cannot be represented in a game of this scale.

I'm sorry, but in the one board of experience i've had with the Tiger in this game, their lethality was not reflected a bit. All three Tigers i had were put in effective positions and ended up getting destroyed very easily. They are most definetely not worth the extra 20 points you have topay for them. The thing is, they should be an extra 20 points, but they should reflect that 20 points in their strength and i did not see that.

BTW, are there any King Tiger's in the game?

I'm not even talking about other tanks with guns in the 80's caliber. I'm talking 56 caliber tanks giving me one shot, to a dug-in Tiger from a decent distance and blowing me up. Not even just damaging my turret, but blowing the whole thing up. That's ridiculous! I had one time where i took out an allied tank and then rotated my Tiger so the front faced the next tank i was going to take out while i reloaded, and BOOM, i got blown up again from a reasonable distance. We're talking about shells below 80 mm.

It can be done
 

It could be done but would take more personel then the devs have or so much time by the time they were done the software and hardware they made the game for wouldn't even be around for anyone to use.

What I am saying is simple math

the US air trafic control system was built to maintain the planes in the sky.. It took 2 years with 500scientist to build the system. Today the system is old and their are no companies making the hardware to fix any equipment failures. It would take 40,000 scientiest today 2 years to rewrite the program for todays computers... the reason it needs to be rewritten is because the CPUs and hardware Motherboards and such of the time the system was built use an entirely different computing language then PCs today. example DOS programs do not work in windows. you need an emulater like DOSbox to run under windows. which takes ALOT of proccessing power to just change the language to something windows can understand..

So it can be done just not on a game budget.. So unless you wanna pay about 3 times the cost of windows vista today (the cost would vary based on how many purchase the game and demand for it... Microsoft mainly works on making bill gates rich) then you won't see a trully realistic game you speak of.. maybe 50-100 years from now those figures will be easier to place in game cause the human brain will devolope by natural means or gynetics to proccess more information at once to need less scientists...

or we may be able to create a comupter that thinks for itself.. and it can proccess all the information for us... but that's not any time soon

The game is as realisit as it gets for todays or the day they started making the game... :P

My problem with this game realism wise is the over the top strenghthening of the USA forces,ive found that the Tiger does preaty well against the USSR tanks & British forces,as you would expect,but i played a multiplayer game vs the USA,& they took out ,Tigers,King Tigers,Jagdtigers,& Elephants with apparent ease,which is just crazy as if you look at the real war in the west German armour killed 3 to 4 allied armour peices for every one of there own,& then most of the german armour taken out was due to air attack or artillary not allied tanks or SPG's so its stupid that they have done this.:evil::o

Also ive noted some people have been using this method of taking out big tanks by rushing jeeps at tanks,is it possible to throw nades or anti tank explosives while in a jeep i wonder,cos that's what seemed to be happening.