I had an aha moment the other day when I regretfully realized why tanks sims like Sabow will never be completely satisfying, for me (also I continue to get my ass kicked by the campaigns
). I think it's a problem unique to tank sims that flight sims and infantry combat sims may not share. SABOW is a fantastic tank sim. The level of detail is the best I've ever seen in this type of game. However I'm not really gratified, as a player, when I'm playing the game.
When the engagement range gets beyond 1000m as it tends to do in any post WW2 tank sim, the ability of the human player to spot targets on a normal sized computer monitor is restricted so as to reduce the player to merely being a passenger along for the ride. Add in any vegetation or brush to the mix and you are much better off letting your ai fight the pc's ai because they can spot each other at distance and through vegetation much better than the human eye can. I find myself spending more time in the tactical map and in the TC position, trying to stay out of the way and letting the ai gunner spot and decide what to shoot at.
ARMA shares this annoying problem. The ai spots and hits before you even see him.
Maybe it's the size of the monitors we play the game on. Maybe a full sized tank simulator as used by the Army for armor training would be different. Maybe it's just the nature of playing against ai.
The spotting icons featured in SF Kharkov 42 go a ways to help with this problem but are decried as too arcade like by some. Sims like SB2 model a later stage in tank warfare and get around this problem somewhat because thermal imaging is available.
It's probably an impossible dream on many levels but I would love to see how a game like this would operate with all the seats in the tanks having to be filled by humans, or least the TC and gunner seats as a minimum. But differences in hardware and graphics settings would mean advantages and disadvantages there also.