Scott B

Thanks, guys. The prefixes for scenarios that I remember were B&T for general Boots & Tracks scenarios; RD for Rugged Defense tournament scenarios (there are some good ones there); and SP for the Stalingrad pack of scenarios that we released just over ten years ago. I'll recognize the Der Kessel scenarios I'm looking for when I see them. Germanboy and Berli always made good stuff and there was another guy that I think was already getting out of the game in 2002 that had built (for CMBO) some of the most innovative scenarios I've ever seen for any wargame - can't remember his name but there were a few with elite commando-type forces, one on the bluffs on the coast of Northern France, another based on a dam takedown. Greatly appreciate your help!

Hey all, Long time! I have been getting back into tabletop gaming and wanted to mine some of the old Boots & Tracks scenarios for tabletop scenario material, and will probably play a few just for old time's sake. I lost all mine in a hard drive crash a few years back and I don't even have my own work anymore. Anyone able to help? (Double bonus if you also have some of the Der Kessel stuff!) Thanks much! Scott

I'm with MeatEtr - this is pretty much ideal in terms of my expectations. The naval battles look gorgeous, and assuming it can be properly modded, it could be the game we've all been waiting for.

Oh, and I'd still go with an Intel motherboard.

Hmm - in this article at Anandtech, they can get you sort of an apples-to-apples comparison. Basically, in multithreaded game performance (Far Cry 2) the Phenom II is a bit better on a clock for clock basis than Core 2 Duo, but still gets beat on in games like Crysis that don't use more than one or two cores. However, the Phenom II X4 920 is a 2.8 Ghz processor, and the E8500 is 3.16 Ghz; I would expect in pure gaming terms the E8500 is a better choice. Now, obviously gaming isn't everything - the quad core Phenom II is going to crush the Core 2 Duos in things like video encoding, but frankly the only reason I care about processor capabilityi beyond a minimal level is for gaming.

I've been running Vista Ultimate 64, and haven't had any troubles that I can pin to the operating system (did have some trouble with some Nvidia graphics card drivers recently, but I actually think they were beta drivers, so technically not something I can blame on Vista either). Recently I've had some issues with getting a Civ IV mod to run, but I couldn't get it to run on XP either so I don't know for sure that was Vista, either. I have a big pile of games, but depending on what you're looking for, some teething issues should be expected (they have compatibility modes and "run as administrator" commands for a reason). If you have specific games that you will really want to run in Vista, it'd be worth checking around on Google to see if they'll work. But overall, I have had a pretty good experience with Vista. I wouldn't upgrade to it if I had a working XP machine, but if building a new machine, I wouldn't hesitate to install it, assuming the machine has enough horsepower to deal with Vista's increased overhead. It has been stable as hell for me, secure, and some of the bells and whistles are pretty slick as well. Vista Ultimate with a dreamscene background and a few gadgets in the sidebar is a very attractive workspace.

I agree on 64-bit. Overall, your machine looks a lot better. How much does it add up to? When they list a motherboard as "Crossfire" or "SLI", that's just the capability - you don't have to get two graphics cards for it. In most circumstances, unless you have money to burn, it probably isn't worth doing that anyway. "Crossfire" just refers to Intel chipsets (for the most part) that have multiple PCI-express slots that can handle graphics cards, and SLI refers to Nvidia chipset boards with the same feature. That said, the MSI board you're looking at is decent. It's a little light on USB ports for me, but that's easily corrected. And it's cheap. The E8X00 series are fantastic for overclocking; mainly it's a matter of tweaking the bios and keeping an eye on temperature. With the stock cooler, my E8400 was running at about 43-44C at its stock clock speed; when I got a new heatsink (Xigmatek SDT-1283), I've found it holds a 3.6 Ghz overclock and the temps are actually down in the 37-38C range at idle. I'm not a diehard on the overclocking stuff; in general I want stuff to last as long as possible so I tend to be pretty cautious, but hey, it's basically free performance, and it matters in some cases.

You probably already knew about them, then, but just in case you haven't, I'll toss in yet another plug for the Silent PC Review site. Obviously this is a personal choice, but I'm quite pleased with having built my machine last year. In my case, it's a no brainer - we have other machines in the house and I have redundant backups of data, so if it doesn't work I'm not screwed until I can get it back up and running. The things that irk me when pricing out a machine at another site are typically some combination of the following: 1. inferior selection of parts; in some cases you really get hosed because you can't get them to tell you exactly what parts are going to get installed. Frequently this manifests as you can't *quite* get the exact set of components you want. If you're picky about brands (and I am), this is a problem. 2. pricing - sometimes they get close, but by the nature of the thing you can never quite get it as cheap as if you build yourself. Even if they could build me exactly the machine I wanted and sell it to me for the price it'd cost me to buy all the parts over a period of a few months (I'm a bargain hunter and usually won't pull the trigger until I'm sure it's a good deal), then I don't like to give up the pride of ownership of having built my own machine. My desktop's my baby. I can tell you off the top of my head every component in it and why I got it. Most of the stuff there does have good warranties because you do to some extent get what you pay for. I think the most likely weak point in a system is probably the hard drive, and maybe the power supply, and the better versions of these can still be had with 3-5 year warranties. If I didn't have redundancy at home, and if I had to live or die on the reliability of my system, I'm still not sure I'd trust my machine to someone else. My power to affect my computer's performance may indeed be somewhat illusory, but I think I prefer to cling to the illusion for the sake of my ego.

Though it's fair to note I wouldn't buy that thing for reasons of case alone, but it looks like a comparable deal is at ibuypower, and you can pick a different case.

Got it. Tried that out as an option, but never can get past the price premium of letting someone else do it. Also there's a personal pride thing, though that counts for less if you set aside an evening to build your new machine and then it turns out you got shipped a defective part. I haven't heard as much about the overclocking of the Q9550, but the Q6600 has been getting rave reviews in this regard. Doesn't look like it's on offer at ibuypower, which is a shame, since half of the advantage is it'd be $100 bucks less. You get what you pay for, though, and that Q9550 is going to be a monster. Never heard of it. Google'd it, first few links from people warning it's loud. One of the big things I spent time on when building my current machine was reducing noise. I didn't go fully silent - too much work - but I did get it to the point that my old PC, on the other side of the room, drowns out the noise from it. Best site for this I've found is Silent PC Review, and especially the reference pages and forums there. It primarily influenced my choice to go with an Antec P182 case, Samsung F1 HDD, and Corsair 620 HX power supply, and later when I upgraded from the stock cooler, I got a Xigmatek HDT-1283. (At some point in the future I want to go through and upgrade all my case fans, but that'll be after I spend some time quieting the other PC.) Back in April/May when I was looking at this the agony of the gaming system builder was that Nvidia cards were crushing ATI cards, but Intel chipsets were straight up better with the one exception that Nvidia had withheld permission from Intel to have SLI drivers (obviously if they'd done so they'd have shot their own motherboard sales in the head). Over the summer, things got ugly for the Nvidia guys - ATI's new 4850 and 4870s are pretty good, and offer great price/performance. Then, when the Core i7 came out, Nvidia decided to back out on the motherboard front and sold SLI to Intel for the new X58 chipset. So the X58 motherboards are monsters - they really can do it all. I've always went with Intel, not just because I don't think much of SLI, but because Intel's also making systems for industry, and they spend an enormous amount of resources testing their systems for reliability and performance. Frequently they will not be on the cutting edge of performance features, but they have consistently been the best choice in terms of reliability as long as I can remember. I'll take the contrary view in this case. I've weighed in on Vista in this forum before, actually (here), and I think for a new machine with some performance overhead I don't see a downside with going with Home Premium or Ultimate. Should make upgrading to Windows 7 easier, also, as you'll already have the drivers on hand. I would go 64-bit - as you said, you want to be able to use all your RAM. You can get more for a grand. For that much, I'd be looking for a Core i7. This one popped up at NewEgg. Shipping might be a bit of a bear, but still. There are comparable deals on the ibuypower site, apparently, but the site was choking on me and it's late enough that I need to stop messing around and get back to bed...

This is the way to go, in my opinion. When I want something, I usually try to take a couple months and scope out the best deals at places like Ben's Bargains and the like, get parts one at a time. I still lean toward the E8X00 dual cores, myself, but can't blame you for a Q9x series quad for "future proofing." Again Q6600 is the price/performance king, especially if you're looking to overclock, but I bet the Q9550 will be solid for you too. Assume you're just going with stock cooling? (No shame in that; the Intel stock coolers are damn good these days.) No experience with the brand. Not much to these - reliability, efficiency, noise, and cable options (modularity is neat, I've learned). 650w is good, but see below. Again, Asus is pretty much top of the line, but I'm not all that impressed by the chipset. The only reason to get this board over an Intel chipset board is SLI. And if you eventually want to do SLI, is 650w going to be enough? Other than that, only real downside is 4 USB ports (I like more than that). Why do you need Pro? You're looking at quad core; have you priced a Core i7 system? If you're going to burn $1000 on just the machine without graphics card, that's well within reason.

Oh hey, I love these threads. Heh. A more snide person than myself might point to your graphics card as evidence. But you came here for advice, and different people have different priorities. You have a decent setup otherwise. It's not a bad time to go quad, but I think at the moment the best bang for the buck is still a Core 2 Duo E8X00. Got an E8400 myself last summer when I built my new machine. Lots of cache, overclocks like a sumbitch. Running mine at 3.6 Ghz with a Xigmatek heatsink, zero problems. If you do want to go quad, the budget monster right now is just a bit more expensive than that Q8200 - go with the Q6600 and overclock. Redwolf is worth listening to in general, I'd feel pretty safe following anything he recommends. For my money, I'd say 1) look at NewEgg for the parts if you're going to be building it yourself. Especially look at the combo deals for motherboards/CPUs/video cards. 2) Intel chipset is the way to go. I went with a Gigabyte P35; Asus is my usual favorite but found a good deal on the mobo in combo with a graphics card. Only thing worth having that you give up with an Intel motherboard is SLI, and I'm a single card guy. 3) 600w is fine for that machine. Actually, with that graphics card and processor you might even get away with the 450w that comes with the case. The Core 2 processors are pretty efficient. 4) Windows 7 is neat and free for the time being. Highly recommended. Vista's fine in my opinion, but 7 is better so far (for the moment only running it on one laptop at home, but we like it). In general, as a rule I tend to prefer 64-bit, especially if you want to use all of that memory you bought. 5) DDR2 will probably never be this cheap again; buy as much as you think you'll ever need. I have 8GB for absolutely no good reason at all except for the fact that it cost less than some meals I've eaten. For graphics cards, I started last summer with an 8800 GTS 512 and currently have a Nvidia GTX 260 core 216. It's neat. I think the sweet spot right now is the ATI 4850 (though I have pretty much only ever bought Nvidia); you probably shouldn't go higher than that unless you have a big honking monitor and want to play Crysis on it.

Ah, see you responded on the TO&E issue. So no tanks in the recce squadron for a heavy BCT. Is the perception that this is not needed? I guess they could task some for the duty from one of their two maneuver battalions. Man, these really are kind of puny brigades.

Sure, we have ISR coming out of our ears; given how things are going, I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case. I was thinking of the more traditional cavalry role of screening/battlefield reconnaissance - i.e., that which was done with tanks, Brads, etc. What's the rough makeup of these reconnaissance squadrons and surveillance brigades? I do find a lot of things to like about the new structure; main criticisms I've heard were things like no more engineer battalion at brigade level messes with promotions, etc. Though really when you get down to it, I kind of liked great big brigades with great big battalions, and some of this modularity stuff smacks of trying to pretend we have a bigger army by inflating the number of brigades. But I'm out of date on this stuff - it's impossible to keep up with everything, and I've been out for too long. A couple little wars and suddenly all my old uniforms are fit for museums, the Army's taking counterinsurgency seriously, dogs and cats are living together... mass hysteria!

It also gets rough when you start designing forces around the idea of translating "information advantages" into combat power and trading off other capabilities. FCS, and if memory serves FRES (if it still exists?) are both examples. It is pretty easy to imagine that these "fast, nimble" forces may well end up sitting tight waiting for the intel picture to clear up before moving out, where modern heavy forces are already well prepared to just go out and find people. In the U.S. Army's transition to a modular division structure, one of the things we gave up was our division cavalry squadron. We may miss having a screening force designed to be able to get out there and fight for information. UAVs just don't do the same thing.