No, there won’t be any artillery or aircraft. Steel Aces is focused on ground combat where vehicles engage one another via line-of-sight. We made the early design decision to exclude artillery and aircraft, allowing players to concentrate on tactical, ground-based battles.

We deliberately use the term Rank to describe progression levels in Steel Aces, rather than “tier”, as it more accurately reflects your progress through the game. Regarding Collector’s Vehicles, we avoid labelling them as “premium” since that implies an unfair advantage. Instead, Collector’s Vehicles are designed primarily for collection and novelty factor rather than giving the owner an edge in battle.

Our matchmaking system ensures fair and competitive battles by pairing you with opponents of the same Rank or, at most, one Rank higher. This approach allows every player to actively contribute to the outcome of the battle, rather than feeling outmatched or sidelined due to random matchmaking.

We have divided the game into two distinct historical periods to ensure balanced and immersive gameplay.

The first period (Ranks I–X) covers vehicles from 1916 to 1950.

The second period (starting at Rank XI) includes vehicles from 1950 to the present day.

Due to their unique characteristics, WWI era vehicles will primarily appear in standalone game modes.

To maintain fairness and consistency, our matchmaking system keeps vehicles from different eras separate, preventing balance issues—such as late WWII heavy tanks facing high-penetration Cold War munitions on mobile platforms.

At present, our vehicle roster includes only those tanks that have been in service, prototypes, tech demonstrators, partially built models with supporting blueprints, or fully realised mock-ups. Furthermore, the game will not be incorporating tanks based on unverified designs or made-up imaginary tanks.

Currently, the primary rule set available is Arcade. Here, vehicles have a lifepoint counter and deal predictable damage that is determined by shot placement and spalling, making for an easier entry point and allowing for mistakes. Aiming is simplified into a point and click flow, but guns are still accurate and can consistently hit weak points. A Realistic ruleset will be implemented later, where vehicle damage is based exclusively on component damage and players have to account for shell drop manually.

Vehicle physics are not finalised. The internal parts like engine and gearboxes work very well and are close to finished, but traction mechanics for tracked vehicles use a placeholder calculation. This can cause sliding or difficulty turning for certain vehicles and will be addressed before the game is released. In the finished product, arcade modes will feature significantly improved mobility over realistic modes.

Steel Aces is a Free-to-Play game accessible free of charge to anyone. Naturally we still need to pay staff and finance development, we want to place a strong focus on fair and sustainable monetisation to ensure that the game can last for a vey long time and the community can enjoy it. This means that we will never use Lootoxes or similar intransparent paid gambling mechanics, or exploit pay-to-win mechanics like overpowered vehicles and “special ammunition” for excessive prices. We will primarily focus on monetising with unique collector’s vehicles that offer unique gameplay or uncommon features without being flat out better than others; a subscription (Club House) to accelerate progression and aid in collecting all vehicles; and cosmetics like unique paintjobs, decals and the likes.

Vehicles will be separated over 19 ranks; the first ten will comprise the time from roughly 1930 to 1950, while 11 to 19 will cover around 1960 to 2025. Vehicles in the “historical” era will be sorted into progression lines, where players unlock one after the other. Modern era progression allows players to freely switch between different branches, like going from a Leopard 1 to a wheeled RadPz 90, then a Marder 1A3 and back to a Leopard 2A5. Each vehicle itself features upgrades that improve its performance and sometimes even change the subvariant, like going from a T-34 from 1940 to a T-34 from 1941. Upgrades mostly revolve around historical upgrades or field modifications, like improved ammunition. We will make sure that the default configuration of vehicles have a fair fighting chance and are not massively inferior to the fully upgraded loadout.