Gen Von Television

Hi Guys! I've just activated the 2.0 version (Super!) on my CMBN/CW and I noticed a couple of problems with some uniforms i.e. a couple of guys in US Airborne Mortar Team dressed as Germans! and a Wehrmacht Officer dressed as a US GI... I still have to dig these out and find in details where it was coming from: I will update my findings here. I started this topic hoping we will share here for problems/solutions regarding v.2 and the old Mods, so that eventually Modders can be made aware about any issue.

To me it smells like piracy at a price...

Another feedback: they look good, excellent, well done!... but I need much more white dust on the ground, stones and grass, much alike the same dust baking you made on the jeep!

Great work here! As for the terrain I would apply the same dusty treatment you're using for the vehicles: this is particularly true for Sicily in the Summer; so as e.g. for the rocks for sure varying their sizes and distribution would help, and even more if you cover them in yellow/whitish dust eventually spreading it irregularly, I believe... Well done Aris!

Well, in case of a battle/campaign that uses custom flavor objects, these should be included in them, with instructions on how to activate and install them: adter all is the same when you want to play a custom modded campaign as they happen to be published right now (Japanese, Ardennes, etc.). Doesn't seem to me it's so complicated, even in the unlikely case some of the objects may influence the game play, or rather especially if it's at all possible they will (I would love to design or reproduce historical fortifications, buildings, bridges...).

Ah yes: what about a possibility to MOD and add flavor objects? That also would be great: suppose I want to create a battle with some specific buildings, bridges etc. and I can convert those objects and somehow add them (or reference them) to some specific Campaign/Battle.... It would be just a matter of adding the compiled objects to the MOD directory to make it available to the indexer when the game loads.

About Fortifications: I would really appreciate if they would belong to a special category, and not specifically to any one side. They should be purchasable by any player, and once placed they can become possessed by the same player. One great thing would be for the fortifications to be modular, like trenches and barbed wire: have the armored cement walls link up with various types of MG, AT or AA bunkers and nests... That would be just fine! If these fortifications can combine with any other kind of fortifications/buildings/terrain, then we'll have no limit in creating puzzling scenarios...

If I may I'd like to chime in too: I still own the whole SL/ASL lot, stored away. Irrc there were also plans to produce (I'm not sure they ever did) a program to use with some 8086 machine to throw the dices, make the calculations, and so on. The rule book was massive and time consuming to study and keep track of: a real burden. Besides my main interest in the board game was to closely examine battles I knew from readings, watching documentaries, listening to the Vets stories, like so many of you. The oddest thing I was playing it solo! since all of my friends were not so much involved in studying all those game rules: I was able to get some of them playing on other less steep learning curve boardgames like Luftwaffe, Ambush or Okinawa, just to name a couple... When I played Close Combat and other Atomic's games I found a few other PBM players around the world, and we had some real experience together, as if re-living history. Indeed playing against another human gives much more to the players. Still I'm very much enjoying playing against the AI, and surely the CM series is giving me a lot to think about, even for the odd behavior (bug) that I also ascribe to the chaos on a battlefield. What is concerning me most is that the Editor should really get close to the under the hood Game philosophy: of course there should be very powerful and flexible tools easily accessible to the designers, I mean a Dremel toolkit is so much better than just have a complete set of hand driven files or cutters. The point is that many of us may find difficult to understand when use a file or a cutter to make the job come out right. Maybe it would just be a matter of making clearer to any user what kind of tool to use in a specific situation: it maybe helpful to have them named consistently to the Military world, for example organized when the AI is on the Attack or dug in Defense; or associate them to a specific menu, or even give them standardized icons. Think about the Movements orders in the AI Editor: sometime you have to give the pixel troops a move order that doesn't reflect what they actually depict in their action but will end as you thought it should. Whatever, I'm an happy customer!

5th Parachute Brigade / 6th AB Div to which the 7th Battalion belonged: the men forming this Btn were coming from the Somerset Light Infantry Rgt, so I presume there were quite a few veterans from many battles fought in France, North Africa, Italy, Burma. Sure the 7th Btn was fighting his first battle in Normandy as a unit. As I wrote, I did just presume there may be some difference regarding it: IMO the level of the troops in CMX1 was much more relevant and had been discussed since then; it's also true you can still easily notice the difference, yet I have the impression of a much more realistic behavior now. Maybe it's just my impression.

Yes, that is a good point: test playing this campaign I realized I had to make that choice to get the historical results. Besides I also believe in this specific case you really had those levels of training and experience: i.e. the Ox&Bucks D Co was indeed an Elite unit, while the 5th Paras were actual Veterans of an Elite Division. The Warwicks were considered Crack troops. On the other side except for the newly reformed 21st Pz Div that had a cadre of Veterans Officers and NCOs the remaining German Units were Green if not Conscripts. Even so in my testing I was able to score victory using the Germans, so I also believe there is some very important change and improvement in CMX2 in respect to the CMX1 troops' levels; I don't think you can compare them now. You can brake even Elite troops.

Yep, WeiterJWA, that was a choice I made to reflect the Historical outcome of the Benouville battle: by midnight after the Warwicks entered the fray, the 21st Pz was totally repulsed and expelled by Benouville, so you should need a Major Victory if not a Total one. For this German Campaign I lowered a bit the requirements. Thank you Guys for playing it: let me know how you do fare... Enjoy.

Just uploaded the Germans' vs AI version at GAJ Mod Warehouse and will soon be available here at the Repository...

If you can read French here they have some very interesting publications: Militaria Hors Series, Batailles...

Besides, in theory mipmaps system should preserve the quality and lessen the load on graphic resources, but in practice in my experience it fails in the first instance. The quality is not preserved at all.

I'm not that sure about it: certainly it was born ages ago so to eventually solve the RAM load on old systems with poor graphics and limited video cards. Personally I always disable the mipmaps in any 'game' or sim that has that option possible, since the visuals are very much degraded...

I deem the original design for these battles (not mine, and aptly credited in the Designers' notes) was accurate enough so you should try to apply the tactics used in real Life by the combatants, and refer back to what happened in history: you should be fine. i.e. the 1st battle was a coup de main, hence it should be accomplished by fast organized and coordinated assaults; the time constraints and level of victory to accomplish in each scenario reflect again those recorded on the real battlefield. A thorough study about the tactics used then will provide you with a good enough blue print of the events. That said, what I quite like of CM is that it still depict the unpredictable events, the unlikely option that even the best of plans can go wrong in a moment in the course of any battle.

I don't know about the wood plates: I'm not convinced. Maybe adding a little patina & shine...? The skin background would also fit well: kind of HQ map case, or something... May I suggest more Metal Plates? Or a variant with Military textile (not camouflages) background...?

Alligator skin, snake skin, rosewood... Quite... classic! What about a metal plate? Great job JuJu, as usual...

Good points I actually share to some extent. The Military system is build to erase any individuality and make you function as a part of a mechanism, that is why you're given to wear uniforms, you're then trained to act upon orders even if this will make your own existence at a risk, supposedly to make the whole moving and progressing in the right direction. I believe the apparent uniformity of the soldiers depicted in BoB was an effective way to show this contrasting aspect of the soldiers' life; even so after sometime the 'real' characters will emerge no matter what and if this is true for any Army I'm not so sure, but indeed for the WWII US Army of Citizen Soldiers was undoubtedly a fact. I remember I've read in one of those books as we are told that a soldier would clearly distinguish each of his comrade even in the dim light of dawn by the way the helmet was tilted on his head, or the way he carried his weapons...

Indeed that was the problem with The Pacific series: if BoB was based on a single book where many of the E/506 men told their shared war experiences, The Pacific is based on two excellent writings that only briefly cross each other during the war; I also believe Hugh Ambrose's 'The Pacific' was used to kind of give structure to the time line and battles, and adding more details particularly about Basilone and Phillips. In the book's cast you can also read about Lt. Shofner and Ens. Michael experiences. If I used the term 'characters' of course I didn't mean to refer to fictitious personae: Julius Caesar is a character in Shakespeare's tragedy too... Webster's Parachute Infantry is another excellent reading and if you like more of the 101st troopers' personal memories, all the four of Donald R. Burgett's writings may become mandatory text books in your class.

I've also read Ambrose's son The Pacific book, and it's not bad at all: it adds two more characters to the story line, besides the three you'll see in the series. Another book I highly recommend about the PTO is Manchester's Goodbye Darkness: he himself a Marine Veteran travels back to the old battlefields of the Pacific war, and intermingles his own memories with relevant historical aspects of each main battle. A must read IMO.

It is actually a good point of reflection: ETO or PTO were IMO both hell on Earth for humankind for the simple fact that in war you are ordered to do something you are always thought never to do in a moral and healthy life (killing fellow human beings, destroying properties, etc.). The Nazi and their obsession for the Race and ideology started a ruthless eradication of everyone they deemed as sub-human, hiding in between what they were actually seeking as an expansion of their power on other Nations, their true agenda. So they were the evil masters in upholding and bloody teaching this approach to war, even to their enemies. The Nippon Empire was nevertheless ruthless, but essentially started the war not on race but just as an imperial war, to expand their dominions allegedly proclaiming to free the Asians from the Colonizing powers (again such hypocrisy!): needless to say they failed to actually conquer the Asian people they invaded because of their ultimate sense of being a superior race. If in the ETO still there were some common war rules accepted on both sides, not so was happening on the Eastern front at least for ideological reasons when they failed to prove to the German soldiers that the Slavic were actually different from the Aryans (both belonging to Indo European cultures), and far less in the PTO where two different cultures met: i.e. the Japanese soldiers when heading out to war were granted a solemn funeral. No one was expected to come back unless Victorious, and so transformed into a kind of Mythological Hero. Surrender was not contemplated in their moral code or as a war rule. Instead was suicide. And so their adversaries on the battlefields had to learn and adapt to this pitiless war of no quarter given or accepted. This general philosophical approach to war of course had many exceptions on any front by any combatant nation, but still makes the more evident difference when you look back to history.

Erwin, really? What series did you see!? I clearly remember Snafu throwing pebbles in the open top of a head of a Japanese Soldier's corpse (a scene so well defined from the book), or when Sledge swish down in the mud and ends up in a morass of decomposing corpses under the monsoon rains, and this was happening after they had to dig their mortars' positions where they found other corpses deep down in the mud... BoB is special for the fact that you follow the men of E Co / 506 / 101 through all the war, and it is based on the memories of those Veterans, while The Pacific is based mainly on the two books (Helmet For My Pillow and With The Old Breed) written by two Marines who were not in the same unit: I watched again The Pacific after a while, and it is excellent, though definitely different from BoB. Both are top notch in my scale.

...and it goes back to back with 'Helmet for My Pillow' by Robert Lackie, as good as Sledge's.

The astonishing fact is that in reality the 5th Para had not that many PIATs available! I added them for playability, but in fact A Co destroyed about 17 tanks using DC or Gammon bombs, at close range... The Red Devils!