History VideoGame / SteelPanthers

* EasyLogistics: The game ignores the effects of strategic bombing, supply interdiction, industrial capacity, etc. at the strategic level, meaning that, for instance, you can buy more Tiger tanks than Germany ever actually built as long as you have the points. Within battles your troops do have limited amounts of ammo, but they can be resupplied almost infinitely from ammo trucks and supply depots (and there's an "Unlimited Ammo" option in the game preferences if you find even this to be too pesky).

''Steel Panthers'' is a series of TurnBasedTactics games designed by Gary Grigsby and Keith Brors and developed by Strategic Simulations, Inc., the same people responsible for ''VideoGame/PanzerGeneral''. The first game focused exclusively on World War II (hence the name of the game), but the later games expanded its focus all the way to the Modern Era and [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture beyond]].

** The game also takes into account what year and country it is when calculating base morale, at least in WW2. For example, the German base morale starts off at 70, and stays there until 1944, when it drops to 65 due to the war starting to turn against them, and then drops to 55 in 1945 when it becomes clear that defeat is imminent. Most of the Allies start off at the opposite end, with low base morale in the early years of the war, only for it to climb as they gain more experience and the war starts going in their favour, though a few smaller countries never have their base morale change, and there are some exceptions:

** To allow the USMC to cover some weaknesses in their roster by using US Army units without having to deal with the penalties that come with taking allied units or captured units (something that would be unfair, since no other country with marines has their marines as a seperate faction), a number of US Army units are included in the USMC roster, primarily some heavy artillery and anti-air systems only operated by the Army, and, post-2021, main battle tanks, all which have descriptions stating they are US Army units attached to the USMC.

* TheEngineer: Combat engineers are better at clearing minefields and other obstructions than standard infantry. They also tend to have absolutely brutal short-range weapons like submachine guns, satchel charges, and flamethrowers, making them useful in assaults on entrenched positions.

* MisguidedMissile: Less due to clever manoeuvring on your foe's part, and more to your aircraft acquiring the wrong target in the first place.

* AcceptableBreaksFromReality: Some countries have access to vehicles and weapons that were only prototypes in real life (like the Maus and the Black Prince), which are included for "what-if" scenarios, or are allowed to use vehicles and weapons long after they stopped using them for the sake of balance and[=/=]variety[[note]]Especially notable is Canada being able to use their [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Defense_Anti-Tank_System ADATS vehicles]] after 2011, both for the sake of it being unique combination of a SAM system and an ATGM system, and because the only other air defence Canada has is stationary AA guns and pintle-mounted machine guns[[/note]].

* AcceptableBreaksFromReality: Some countries have access to vehicles and weapons that were only prototypes in real life (like the Maus and the Black Prince), which are included for "what-if" scenarios, or are allowed to use vehicles and weapons long after they stopped using them for the sake of balance and[=/=]variety[[note]]Especially notable is Canada being able to use their [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Defense_Anti-Tank_System ADATS vehicles]] after 2011, both for the sake of it being unique combination of a SAM system and an ATGM system, and because the only air defence Canada has is stationary AA guns[[/note]].

** If the AI has artillery or air support, and you capture a victory point, they may decide to bombard that area, as they know that at least one of your units was there recently, even if they couldn't see it, just like you can tell one of their units was in the area when they capture a victory point you can't see. They avert AllSeeingAI as they will still carry out the bombardment even if you moved the unit out of the area immediately after capturing the point.

* HouseRules:
** Some scenarios (particularly the fan-made ones) have "victory conditions" written into the description for objectives that the game engine itself isn't coded to handle, such as the survival of a particular unit.
** Players in head-to-head games will have agreed rules, such as purchasing points, number of air strikes, artillery purchase limits, etc.

* RareVehicles: Goes as far as to include some vehicles which never actually saw service, such as the Nazi German Maus and Sturmtiger. Even for those that weren't quite as rare, you can again have more of a particularly rare vehicle in your core force than would ever have been available throughout the course of all of World War II thanks to the points-based purchasing system.

** One fan-made scenario that saw the 1991 Gulf War continue into Iraq instead of stopping have a branching campaign where high success would give you a final mission where ''Saddam Hussein'' was named as the Iraqi forces HQ unit.

* FromNobodyToNightmare: Chew through some of the longer campaigns and see what kind of core you get by the end.
** Start a randomly generated campaign in 3 with three companies of ATGM vehicles or light tanks, light self-propelled artillery, and a few forward observers. End it with a fully-tooled up elite tank battalion backed by heavy guns or multiple rocket launchers.

* TheEngineer: Combat engineers are better at clearing minefields and other obstructions than standard infantry. They also tend to have absolutely brutal short-range weapons like submachine guns, sabot rounds, and flamethrowers, making them useful in assaults on entrenched positions.

* AmericaWonWorldWarII: Averted. While the majority of scenarios and campaigns do feature the "major players" of most conflicts, there are some for the other contributing combatants of World War II (China, Poland, Australia, etc.), and even the ones featuring the major combatants often focus on other countries. As well, a fair number of scenarios in MBT focus on small African and Asian "brush wars" (Chinese invasion of Vietnam, Rhodesian Civil War, etc.), various other wars not featuring the US (the Arab-Israeli Conflicts, the Iran-Iraq War) and American allies in wars they did participate in (the South Vietnamese and Australians in the Vietnam War, the South Korea and the other UN taskforce members in the Korean War, other NATO powers in the Gulf War and Afghanistan), and fictional conflicts focusing on other countries (often [=WW3=] featuring other NATO members fighting Warsaw Pact countries. West Germany versus East Germany is fairly popular).

** If a transport plane gets shot down before it has dropped all of its passengers, it will rapidly eject them before it crashes, so you won't lose entire platoons to a few lucky hits.

** If your on-map artillery fires repeated barrages from the same position, the enemy will eventually figure out where they are. This goes for enemy artillery units as well. There are numerous techniques for figuring out where artillery is firing from in real life, and the game simulates them. Move your artillery every so often or you will receive counter-battery fire.

* ArtisticLicenseMilitary: In addition to the examples under AcceptableBreaksFromReality, a number of countries have access to units that ''never'' existed. For example, Canada in MBT eventually gets access to Leopard 2's mounting

* AcceptableBreaksFromReality: Some countries have access to vehicles and weapons that were only prototypes in real life (like the Maus and the Black Prince), which are included for "what-if" scenarios, or are allowed to use vehicles and weapons long after they stopped using them for the sake of balance and[=/=]variety[[note]]Especially notable is Canada being able to use their [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Defense_Anti-Tank_System ADATS vehicles]] after 2011, both for the sake of it being unique combination of a SAM system and an ATGM system, and because the only other air defence Canada has is stationary AA guns[[/note]].

* AmericaWonWorldWarII: Averted. While the majority of scenarios and campaigns do feature the "major players" of most conflicts, there are some for the other contributing combatants of World War II (China, Poland, Australia, etc.) as well as some for small African and Asian "brush wars" (Chinese invasion of Vietnam, Rhodesian Civil War, etc.).

* ArtificialBrilliance: If the AI has artillery or air support, and you capture a victory point, they may decide to bombard that area, as they know that at least one of your units was there recently, even if they couldn't see it, just like you can tell one of their units was in the area when they capture a victory point you can't see. They avert AllSeeingAI as they will still carry out the bombardment even if you moved the unit out of the area immediately after capturing the point.

** If your on-map artillery fires repeated barrages from the same position, the enemy will eventually figure out where they are. This goes for enemy artillery units as well. There are numerous techniques for figuring out where artillery is firing from in real life, and the game simulates them. Move your artillery every so often or you will receive counter-battery fire.

* VideoGameLongRunners: As mentioned in the main article, the game has gone through six incarnations since 1995, two of which still receive annual updates.

* LaResistance: Some of the playable factions are this. It's not easy to win with them, since you'll probably be badly outgunned.

* BreakOutTheMuseumPiece: There's a lot of this going on, just like in the real world. A notable example are the obsolete French tanks deployed by the Germans in Normandy in 1944.
** In ''[=WinSPMBT=]'', some Latin American countries are still using the Sherman tank in the 21st century.

* HomeGuard: The TropeNamer shows up in the [=WW2=] installments, though plenty of other examples are present, from the US Army National Guard to the Nazi German Volkstrum, to various militias. Several nations also have the option to deploy police forces, which are a mixed bag: Some of them have good morale but are less experienced than regular soldiers, like the Nazi German Ordnungspolizei or the Polish Policja, some have poor morale and less experience, like the Afghan National Police in the modern games, some are completely average, like the UN police in the modern game, and some actually have better morale and more experience than the regular infantry, like the Spanish Guardia Civil or the Italian Carabinieri

* SeparateButIdentical: In the post-[=WW2=] settings, most factions essentially use either an American or a Soviet equipment roster, although some factions (NATO nations, China, and Israel among others) do have their own designs. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in that this is what happened in real history; both sides of the Cold War sold surplus weapons and vehicles to their allies and affiliated resistance groups.
** A few countries (e.g. Yugoslavia, Iraq) use a mix of American and Soviet equipment.

%%* TimedMission: Turn-based.

* RealityEnsues: Many tanks, and some other armoured vehicles, have pintle-mounted machineguns mounted on them, officially for use against aircraft but more often used against infantry. However, most of them require a crew member to be partially outside of the tank to operate them, meaning that if the tank takes enemy fire and buttons up (closing the hatches), they will no longer use the pintle-mounted machine gun. Which is also why rifles and machine guns that can't actually harm the tank can still suppress them (that, and infantry aiming for their vision slits, making it harder for the crew to see).

** Typically the setup in any scenario involving Tiger tanks. You can kill some of the T-34s, but not all...