I haven't gotten too deep into IFL yet, mostly learning to use the tanks in a practice map. In your experience so far, have you had many engagements at historically accurate ranges (800 - 1200 meters)? Also, the aiming reticle seems to not line up when you are using a zoom-able gunsight. Was this historically accurate to your knowledge? As far as you guys know, can you use the ticks and strich on the gun sight to calculate range? Or are the reticles largely cosmetic?

The game so far seems like it has amazing potential for tank sim fans. I'd love to see created (or create) large scale matches in which one team has to defend a dug in position against attackers.

Thanks!

I think the strongest part of the game is the tank combat, the advanced damage model and features like the adjustable gunsight reticles work great. The longest range I've personally seen a tank battle take between the AI is at 600-700m which isn't bad, but this all varies on things like the skill settings of the AI and the surrounding terrain which influences the time it takes for them to detect an enemy.

I'm not sure which gunsights you are referring to. So far I've spent time playing missions in the Panzer IV H and the T-34/76 and both tanks had adjustable reticles that worked historically and were accurate as well.

Edit: Ah I see what you are getting at. I noticed in the King Tiger when you zoom to the second magnification level the point of focus changes and the sight didn't really seem to line up correctly. That could be a bug, I'll report it on the offical Iron Front forum.

Funnily enough i wss doing some testing of the gunnery last night. I noticed the some thing too, but noticed that the range on the sight corresponded with the true range more on the zoom than non-zoom.

A couple of the sights though don't seem to be calibrated and you have to use an in idicated range far less than the actual range.

Had great fun with the king Tiger though, engaging russion tanks at 1500 meters

Just found out that the non zoom is just for locating targets and the zoom is the only one to be used for range finding and targeting, so it would appear that the misalignment of the non-zoom view is not an error.

On the SimHQ tank battles map yesterday, another human player and I both spotted each other about 1200 metres away. At 1000 metres, we started exchanging blows. The zeroing system works really well - it only took two or three shots before I had the range dialed in. We slugged it out for what seemed like a minute or two. At this range, the rounds were not penetrating frontal armour and so no real damage was incurred, which, from my brief research, seems to be realistic. I'm not sure how long we could have gone on like this, but I was eventually flanked by a tank destroyer and killed by it at close range.

But yes, the whole system works very well, and it's a lot of fun.

I did some practicing with a Panther and noticed that the range "calibration" seemed off at longer ranges. I put an IS-2 1200 meters away (as indicated by the 'space bar' range finder) and when I dialed that in, my rounds were falling way short. I had to dial in 1400 meters before they landed on target.

Thanks for the responses guys.

Great thread here on range estimation using German sights. Really helpful if playing on a server that doesn't allow range aids, if such a server exists or you can take that feature away. Or just great if you want to try it out for a little more realism in your gaming.

I didn't agree with the assessment of the 'calibration mark' being used for the zero of sub-calibre rounds - that sounded 'unlike calibration' and impossible physically - at zero range all rounds (SpGr/PzGr39/PzGr40/HlGr39) should impact in the same place.

The 'correctly scaled' image 'for PE-X' also looked wrong, as the ticks were equally spaced. They should match the proportions of the super elevation required - i.e. small at short range and steadily increasing in gap with longer range.

I thought this thread title was Engagement Rings and other tank questions... which didnt make a lot of sense unless you were calling your fiancée a tank...

Makes more sense now that I read it though lol.

(Should have quoted... meh - the smart ones will figure it out )