Mugendo

There is one of these parked up in a yard in the village next to mine here in France, no guns on it but the rest of it is there, rusty..... but looking in good overall condition.

Try launching your game as Administrator (right click the shortcut for the option). I had a similar problem with another game I play ...(scourge of war-gettysburg).

I am very impressed with both the game engine improvements overall, Just been playing the trainer campaigns and thoroughly enjoying the progressive hand holding to independence of them.

This explains and clarifies ...Those rose tinted glasses do make comparisons from memory alone impossible.

I used to play Combat Mission Hotseat with a friend back in 2000...wow....Eighteen years ago . I never read the instructions because the game was intuitive (for any semi intelligent gamer). But we had a blast battling away many evenings, oblivious to complexity of the game mechanics that far exceeded our understanding of battlefield tactics....after all it was the time of 'drag a box' tactics of the isometric 3D era. As time marched on....as it does.....I was distracted from 'real time physics games' into 'real need to step away from the screen life'. And I forgot the title of the game....but had fond memories of it when we sit around reminiscing old games we loved....erm....we all do that don't we ?? As stories go....' A few years later a chance encounter'...................I saw in a game store, ahem....while looking fora game for my son.....Combat Mission Shock Force, and like a bolt of lightning it all came back to me, the wonderful battles in the Bocage, the tense expectations of rolling my tank around waiting for it to explode. Yes... all those hotseat games were going through my mind as I stood in the queue waiting patiently to buy my copy of 'rose tinted glasses'. Getting home and loading it up certainly was a Shock Forced ..on me.... A few units standing on a piece of terrain modelled on sandpaper!!!!......that was a WTF!!! moment for me....my first realisation that Modern warfare is not for me. With my preconceptions blown away I grudgingly played a couple of turns until it crashed.....then froze...then....crashed again. I was running Vista at the time, and it was rare for any software to run without a blue screen....Vista even had trouble running itself. So my return to Combat mission was limited to a couple of incomplete battles in a theatre I did not enjoy.....So my impression of Combat mission became very negative and biased against it. As a casual gamer I still had no idea who wrote and sold the game title....and was oblivious to the fact it was a game engine being improved upon as it expanded into new theatres of combat. Now we are in the 'modern' world....to be honest we were 'modern' in the sixties too....we had a television set..two in fact, both black and white of course. One for the picture and one for the sound....My father was a 'make it work or do without kind of man'. . So I spent my childhood listening to Doctor Who while I waited for the 'picture' set to warm up and let me see the action!!! . But I digress.......I came across the newer Combat mission games about six months ago, and with mixed feelings from my love/hate issues with the original and shock force....I downloaded the Demo of CMBFN, and was impressed. All the fun of the original ...erm...with the same graphics ??!!!!....erm...the same graphics ??!!...really.... I was a beta tester and current Elite Dangerous Gamer, and comparing the new Elite Dangerous with the Original is Night and Day difference.....no lines flickering across the screen now, a full blown cockpit with module management in a fully immersive real scale Galaxy to play with.... . And Combat mission still wont allow me to get my hands dirty and change a tank track!!!! But, then I looked at the Price of the Games and saw the original could still be bought for a few Euros....problem solved, I just buy the original, same gameplay, same graphics, bargain basement price..................nice logic....until I actually looked at the original and compared it with the current game engine.....and I saw.....Combat Mission had also jumped ahead light years in development. Now I was ready to take a serious look without rose glasses or sandpaper scenario bias...and the only decision was, which one ?..as described in my first post. So, I am not really new to Combat mission, I am one of the 'founder' gamers who has returned to the fold.. and very pleased to find a welcoming, and sometimes critical community who strive to push the game series forward through 'polite requests' to the small team who make it all possible. And The Modding community is first rate, providing very impressive content changes with useful hints and advice....Often sprinkled with historical details.....Historical details, that reminds me of the stories my father told me when he was driving around in the Valentine self propelled gun (later a tank) .........but, another day for that.

Not taken away in a straight jacket, I mean i committed to actually purchasing A combat mission game. After months of playing the various demos (except the Red Thunder Demo that insisted I use an activation key), and watching youtube AAR uploads.....comparing versions, reading multitudes of reviews...and sifting the useful from the useless, and as we all know, there is a lot more of the latter to be found on the Interweb sites. I Really like the look of the Normandy theatre, lots of interesting and familiar battles I can relate to. But I had to put that on the back burner for now as the multiple addons and big pack offers were pushing the price up ...just one more...just one more.....just... Anyway I then looked at the latest offering Final Blitzkrieg, the Demo again gave an excellent feel of the game and theatre, but it was too cold and too many trees for my liking. So it was off to look at the Red Thunder (on youtube because of the activation key issue) that became my favourite, and I see it is a very popular theatre for support....and it had all the features anyone could want, troops riding tanks (contentious subject) and the flame throwers....plus all the campaigns and missions had already been designed with the AI keys implemented. And it had no DLC, so out of the box it was ready to go with all the content in it.....that was very tempting, But I kept coming back to the Fortress Italy theatre... Fortress Italy....The very much overlooked theatre of many wargames, and the Unique makeup of the Italian forces in the game really made manouvering as a cohesive force a special challenge. Spotters without radios, operating old French Tanks alongside the might of the German forces, A combination that gave me that extra dimension when ordering forces around....The Italians never had any reason to fight, Mussolini or Hitler in charge of the military forces .....talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. With the varied terrain, different weather conditions in the campaign, changing forces depending on the timeframe.....it had just one thing missing....British forces...which is easily resolved with the Gustav line DLC that adds Commonwealth forces. Looking at the Battlefront site there is the offer of the Bundle pack, And that is what sold it for me......Fortress Italy with Gustav line is the one I purchased today, and looking forward to getting some decent spare time for gaming. ... Oh....and Hello everyone