JulianJ

was intrigued but all these pix have disappeared

LOL. Was the entire military deployed for a pop video? It looked like it.

You are entitled to your opinion, but iconography is important. I expect you know enough about WW2 Germany to know that is the case. It's not just that the game doesn't favour one side of the other, difficult as that is to achieve, but also players see that is how everything in the game appears.

I second the premise that the main and loading screens should be side-neutral. In all the CM games I play, I generally play both (all) sides depending on how the fancy takes me. I was surprised at the comment about the US perspective. I didn't get that at all, which is why the lack of Soviet kit slightly irked me. On an irritation scale of 1-10 this is about a 2 so not very bothered but surely easy to change? Plus, from an iconography point of view, the 3 pix akd posted are evocative. The current ones are not as "sexy" from a gaming perspective.

@John Kettler Thanks for the information. As you can see I found the book, in its audio version, very convincing. I think I know enough about WW2 to spot obvious fakes. So if it was made up, presumably by mixing up fiction with bits taken from existing German accounts then that would account for its verisimilitude. Apart from the Goliaths, which fitted in with other accounts: great idea, but didn't work too well in actuality, there wasn't anything in the audio book about secret weapons? Maybe that was missed out? I will check out your links. @LukeFF Yes, that makes sense - the hurris would be too vulnerable in a high air threat environment but could still operate around the med.

@Bozowans interesting approach. After SF2 and particularly BS I am kinda conditioned that rushing forward is a recipe for disaster. Perhaps I need a bit of time in a Soviet Reeducation Camp to get the proper gung ho aggressive spirit. Interested that your air seems pretty ineffective too.

I'm on my third playthrough. 1st as US, put the M60s hull down on the flanks and slaughtered the Ruskies at long range. 2nd as the Red storm I held off at long range with the T72s and blasted the linear road target with mortars and rockets. Then sent in one aircraft. It seems only one MANPAD had survived and it missed. My tanks killed everything eventually, including the TOW 113s. Although I had wiped out the US force with negligible casualties (2 BMPs and a damaged tank, lost all the foot scouts though), I was just too slow in getting to the road so got a Russian Minor Defeat. Game 3 I am not doing so well as the Soviets. Although I felt I used the arty and air better, there was less effect and got one plane shot down. Minor variations in deployment of the armour (or bad luck in not spotting the M150s immediately) means I am down a few tanks with both M150s and 2-3 M60s still active. 16 minutes left on the clock. I don't think there is much wrong with the game design, but the TacAI of my own troops is frustrating me. BMPs don't seem to fire their 73mm. I can't seem to shell places where I think US troops are hiding; they have wasted a few ATGMs on buildings though. The long delay in bringing down artillery does hamper my attacks. The two ground attack aircraft use their cannons mostly and depart the scene with most of their bombs and missiles onboard - they seem to spend about 5 minutes between attacks coming round. So it is difficult to bring the full firepower of my Evil Commie B'staads to bear on the Lackey Capitalist running dogs of the US army.

Now I come to think about it, why not have Shakira, Pele, Kermit and Jenna Haze present their Bottom 5 tanks?

I had a quick skim through it. It seemed to be trolling for clicks. The guy may have a degree but so do I. I rate his knowledge about tanks as deep as a puddle. I revise my earlier comment - the guy's a cnut, who isn't advancing our knowledge any. Just the sort of media prat I expected.

It seems a bit academic: my local computer store plus eBuyer and Amazon are all out of cards.

I must admit to not necessarily rating his expertise. He's a comedian. The Chieftain was an actual combat tank commander, and David Fletcher is one of the world's most knowlegeable tank historians. I may give it a watch though.

Mission Accomplished! The lesson is that for some reason you need the latest extracting software.

Hi, I think it's working now - I got the latest 7-zip from 7zip.org - version 19 for win 64. I installed that separately from the previous 7zip.

I'm having the same problem. I'm sorry @Lethaface your instructions don't make any sense to me. Using 7zip I've tried right clicking, extract archive and open archive. Nothing works and also downloaded Express Zip file (which also does RARS).

I need to get a new graphics card for my win 10 dell desktop. I have found that buying refurbished Dell computers is a cheap and effective way to upgrade. It came with a NVIDIA GTX710 2 mb GPU. It feels a bit laggy on some games, even though I generally don't go for really major new releases - it will also be used for photoshop, design and some video editing. PCI-Express x16 slot. I planned to upgrade to a mid-range graphics card around Xmastime. I looked at the Palit GTX 1050. I didn't get round to buying anything. I thought there'd be bargains in January. Unfortunately the huge rise in cryptocurrency mining (you use 6-8 GPUs in a rig) has meant graphics cards are very expensive and hard to get hold of. I'm at a bit of a loss and wondered if anybody had any advice - I don't need a top of the range card, and quietness is good, as I find a noisy fan quite distracting sometimes.

I am sorry to report that @Bootie informed me that the book is a complete fraud and hoax. He pointed me to this twitter thread, by no less than Giles Milton (one of my favourite historians):

Anybody know any more? I'm like a skittish kid on Xmas eve!

A bit of googling brought up some images of Hurris with invasion stripes and the info that Hurricane fighter-bombers were used in Europe up till the end of 44. http://www.aviation-history.com/hawker/hurrcane.html

Possibly, but the German recognition is so good - "We felt safe behind our minefield, then this clanking thing came into view - it was a Sherman with a girder attachment that held a rotating drum with chains. It started to beat in front of it with huge detonations of mines which didn't affect it, although some chains flew off sometimes." The Hurricane is the only bit that I wondered about in the whole thing. Although the Germans haven't seen C47s before they realise they are paratroop transports, while they probably do know what a Hurricane looks like.

The Chieftain has some good videos on this topic, and also Steve Zaloga's book Armored Thunderbolt, about the M4, is also excellent. I'd bought into the myth of the Sherman as a death trap from my early wargaming days when they got creamed by Airfix Panthers and Tigers but I now think it was a pretty good tank for its era and the speed that it was designed and manufactured.

I bought several non-war games during lockdown, but have played them very little. Until recently I'd lost interest in gaming, strangely. I rejoined an online D&D game called Rome with Magic (yes, it's that on the nose), where we are secret investigators for the Emperor tasked with covert missions. Although there seems to be an awful lot of fighting. I got given a pre-genned Bard, which I don't think I've played before and am loving it - he's a pretentious muso so gets to wind the other players up. He keeps telling them that the Cithara (=guitar) is a newfangled fad that will never catch on.

This is a slightly-dramatised audiobook by a German WW2 'journalist' = writer for Signal, etc. A fascinating story: Eckhertz went to write a puff piece about the Normandy fortifications in 1944, but it was never published. After the war (1950s) he searched out people from the units he had visited, including finding one guy he'd actually talked to, and got their memories of D Day, and sometimes their other war service. He intended to publish a book but unfortunately died. His grandson found the papers recently and edited them and published them in book form. This is the 6 hours audiobook interviewing 5 German soldiers who fought on D-Day and it mentions some of the previous article as well. Worth the listen – didn't seem that long I found this absolutely fascinating and vivid. Unlike some memoirs written decades after the events, this seems very accurate to me. The Germans had been taught vehicle and aircraft recognition very well, so their observations are really good “I identified the attacking Jabos as Thunderbolts. I was surprised that they were silver, and not painted with camouflage. Every aircraft had black-and-white stripes on the wings.” The Funnies The Funnies get mentioned quite a bit, because these were a complete surprise and amazement to the Germans, and we get a good idea of how effective they were – one of the Germans thinks that the DDs was a kind of tank/submarine which rose out of the water onto the beach (obviously with its skirts up swimming he didn't notice it, lots of things were going on at the time :-)). AVREs, Flails, crocodiles – terrifyingly effective, and several mentions of Sherman DDs. Chapter 4 (the Engineer Officer in charge of Goliaths), and Chapter 5 (the gun command officer at the Merville Battery – I think he's in Casemate 4 which held out the best) were the most interesting, although the whole thing is worth listening to. Incidentally the Merville officer says they were expecting 21cm guns, and were a bit ashamed of the stop-gap ex-Czech 100mm they had. Most accounts say the allied intel was 150mm ish, so clearly if they had the artillery the battery was designed for, it could have made a nasty dent in Sword Beach. I've tried not to give any spoilers. Warning: some of this is very grim and grisly. I've always thought of the Merville attack as a tremendous piece of Para elan and tactics under adverse circumstances, but it seems quite different from the perspective of the poor Germans trapped in a bunker unable to respond to the attack. One question: one of the soldiers talks about being strafed by aircraft “of the Hurricane type”. That's the only thing I wondered about, as Hurris had been withdrawn as fighters, could these be IID or IVD ground attack aircraft with 40mm cannon?

@mjkerner Happy Easter MJ! And everyone else! How do you play Red-on-Red? There's not many scenarios, that I know of. I tried some QBs but they didn't work our very well. Do you create a scenario?

@IICptMillerII I was probably being over-optimistic, and made up 1st April instead of simply the "Month of April".

Are we still expecting a release date around April 1st? I haven't pre-ordered because I didn't want to get my hopes too high in case of a delay.