Map size choice

[JasonC]

The size of fields in Russia is not an esoteric subject, and anyone can go look for themselves on google earth.

I know so little about programming I've been doing it for 20 years. And I said it is easy *in the existing editor*, which it is. I did it all the time in my own campaigns.

If they don't want to crop they can just allow a variety of fixed map sizes, selected by the campaign designer, as I have repeatedly said.

Analysts analyze, spinners smear.

[Peterk]

Just wondering how you can easily crop a map in the existing editor. Reducing map size in the CMBB editor is going to chop from top down towards the bottom and from right towards the left as far as I can tell.

What happens if you want the northeast corner?

Not doubting you. Just wondering what the trick is.

[Sergei]

Peter, hold down shift as you click the + or - icons.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Sergei:

Peter, hold down shift as you click the + or - icons.

Another good trick is RTFM

No worries, Peter, it took me about 2 years to figure that out too. I think it was 3 years before I realized the slash key would reverse the camera, too.

[Bannon DC]

Cropping is easy in the existing CMBB editor. So what?

The "matter of scripting it properly" so that the CMC program can crop is not necessarily "easy." You are adding another feature to a program that is well along in development. That does not sound easy and as someone who has been programming for 20 years you would know that of course.

The issue has been played and is completely moot. 2k x 2k is not perfect. The occurence of a platoon on platoon battle is going to be extremely rare. On the other extreme, the occurence of multi-battalion sized forces facing each other on 2 x 2 maps won't make a difference either. At that level, the problem is computing power rather than the size of the battlefield. Bigger map for more units? Same problem of computing power when fighting it out at the CMBB level. It's the "To the Volga" factor.

Instead of cropping the existing 2 x 2 map, should the program have the option of choosing a "small," "medium" or "large" sized map based on the size of forces engaged? This again seems pointless and misses the basic understanding of how the game works. The 2 x 2 CMBB map corresponds to a part of the map or tile on the larger CMC campaign map. Now you suggest parsing out the CMBB maps in different portions. This disrupts the whole structure of the game. For a small battle you would give the player a small chunk. For a larger battle you give the player a larger chunk. Instead of an evenly sized grid, now you have a patchwork quilt of all different sizes. Your "easy" suggestion ignores the entire structure of the game and would involve a different campaign-level structure. The suggestion is reasonable if all the program did was spit out CMBB battles. But it ignores the larger level of the campaign game. But as a person who has been programming for 20 years, you already were aware of this point.

To further bury this issue, consider what has not been considered in this thread. Reinforcements. On the campaign-level of CMC, various battle groups have been given orders to move to a certain 2 x 2 tile. Some of these are further away, some closer. Some are motorized, some on foot. They will not all reach the 2 x 2 tile at the same time. A battle is started at the CMBB level. Let's say at first it is platoon vs platoon. This battle goes a few turns and then reinforcements arrive. Then more reinforcements, etc. You get it. Now the platoon vs platoon battle on a 2 x 2 map is suddenly filled with a couple of companies and armor support. (Or whatever mix you want to imagine). How would this be resolved if the map started as a 500m x 500m map that is appropriate for a platoon vs platoon battle?

Jason, you do not have a full grasp of the game. Nor do I think you have a full grasp of programming. Issues such as the size of the CMBB maps and their relationship to the campaign-level game are one of the foundations worked out before the programming starts. This is not something a little script re-write can change. To tell the lead designer who has spent 2+ years considering these and a thousand other issues that he doesn't know what he is doing is just a plain joke. It is like the drunk fan at a baseball game arguing that the umpire made a bad call.

Analyze that.

(edit typo)

[ October 09, 2006, 10:11 PM: Message edited by: Bannon DC ]

[Bigduke6]

Jason, I think you are forgetting that practical experience about what can or should be done in a CM meta campaign can be found outside a campaign run by you. Vide SGT Kelly's last post: He says he is doing what you are arguing is patently impossible.

As to this -

The size of fields in Russia is not an esoteric subject, and anyone can go look for themselves on google earth.

- Here's what I propose to do. This afternoon, as it happens, I am taking a train from Kiev to Chernovtsi. To spare you the effort of checking, Chernovtsi is on the Ukraine-Romania border in the approaches to the Carpathians.

I will look out the window. A day later I will take the train back. I'll look out the window again. When I get back to Kiev, I'll fire up Google Earth and see to what degree the terrain impressions I gathered out the train window, correspond with the terrain data offered by Google Earth of the same swath of land.

And then, for the sake of our hobby, I'll post my impressions in this thread. Or "spin", as you might put it.

EDITED for typos, those little suckers get in everywhere! :mad:

[ October 09, 2006, 11:03 PM: Message edited by: Bigduke6 ]

[George MC]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

Jason, I think you are forgetting that practical experience about what can or should be done in a CM meta campaign can be found outside a campaign run by you. Vide SGT Kelly's last post: He says he is doing what you are arguing is patently impossible.

As to this -

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />The size of fields in Russia is not an esoteric subject, and anyone can go look for themselves on google earth.

- Here's what I propose to do. This afternoon, as it happens, I am taking a train from Kiev to Chernovtsi. To spare you the effort of checking, Chernovtsi is on the Ukraine-Romania border in the approaches to the Carpathians.

I will look out the window. A day later I will take the train back. I'll look out the window again. When I get back to Kiev, I'll fire up Google Earth and see to what degree the terrain impressions I gathered out the train window, correspond with the terrain data offered by Google Earth of the same swath of land.

And then, for the sake of our hobby, I'll post my impressions in this thread. Or "spin", as you might put it.

EDITED for typos, those little suckers get in everywhere! :mad: </font>

[Hensworth]

Originally posted by JasonC:

SK - uh huh. How many completed games and how many regular players?

I played 17 battles myself over 4 turns and created something like 20 to 30 as a GM. Teams are about 10 players a side and the GM camp has 2 to 4 people in it. The campaign started more than 2 years ago and is now in its 18th turn. At an average of 10 games per turn, you do the math.

Just silly.

Suit yourself. You're probably right and CMC won't be for you. I'm not remotely interested in winning you over.

What interests me is the exchange of ideas, even if your tone is constantly dismissive and derogatory.

[mav1]

A qustion for you scientists. How far can you see theoreticaly if there is nothing blocking LOS. How far can you see theoreticaly due to the earths curviture. That is from a standing up position on the ground and also from a top of a two story building.

[JasonC]

Bannon DC - you have (probably willfully) misunderstood my second proposal, if they find changing the map size for each fight too hard to program. It is that the campaign designer be able to set any of a variety of map sizes for the whole campaign, rather than being shoehorned into 2km x 2 km.

If he is doing a campaign entirely set inside Stalingrad, for example, he might pick 500m by 500m. If the fight takes places entirely in heavily wooded terrain or is meant to be played out in company scale fights, he might pick 750x750. Another might use 1 km etc. All fights would then take place on maps of that size. It is a minimum of tailoring, and it requires no changing of grids etc.

As for varying arrival times, of course I am also proposing staged arrival for large forces so obviously I am including those. It takes a special kind of deliberately uncharitable reading to pretend there are difficulties there.

On measuring field sizes by looking out the window, glad to hear your eyes come equipped with laser rangefinders. Me, I need either an accurate map or surveying equipment to accurately distinguish the number of kilometers long a given line of sight is.

On a campaign that has run 2 years and has run through 18 op turns, yeah that sounds about right. 40 days per hour or two game time. The wonder is why anyone would consider it a success on the playability side. It will only take you about 5 years and 100 people with considerable "churn" of short timers who never see the outcome or have much cause to care, to finish one campaign.

Here's a thought - CMC might aim at making it possible for 2 to 10 people to actually complete an entire campaign within 6-12 months. It's a thought. I kinda thought more playable was the point. If more monster is the idea, and playable isn't a design goal, then I guess I just need to get back to making scenario packs.

[JasonC]

The theoretical formula is the radius of the sphere times the arc-cosine of the radius over the radius plus the height of the viewing location above the surface.

For the earth the (mean) radius is ~4000 miles or more precisely 6378 kilometers. From 1.7 meters above the ground that gives -

6378000 ArcCos(6378000/(1.7 + 6378000)) = 4657 or about 4 2/3rds km. At 2m that becomes 5 km, at 3m about 6.2 km. At only .1m it is already 1.13 km.

In practice, other than at sea I suppose, there are obstructions that intercept the line of sight long before the physical horizon of a perfect sphere.

As a correction, you can basically deal with obstructions by subtracting the height of any from your height above ground, pretty much. Thing is, when you go out to 4-6 km in most places, there will be obstructions of more than a few meters somewhere along the LOS. Not at sea or in open flat grassland, though.

[ October 10, 2006, 08:26 AM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[The Coil]

If it takes 5 years and 100 people to complete a campaign, I gotta wonder how many people are going to really play this. JasonC, I'll assume for a moment your estimates are wildly high, and cut them in half, 2.5 years, 50 people, plus various short termers. Many of them playing battalion on platoon actions or whatever, that result in a lot of flag dancing and skulking around in the bushes. I'm wondering how many people are really going to be up for this? Sure, there's a few large campaigns going on, but is there a market to sell more than a few copies of CMC? I would bet the VAST majority of people playing CMBB don't know more than 5 other people who play with the regularity needed to finish anything other than a tiny campaign. I'm very willing to be wrong here, and I definitely could not have any idea what I'm talking about, but I wonder if there's very many people who'd snap up CMC if it took 10 people playing for a year. Sure, there's a group of people who'd be very excited to have it, but enough to make any kind of profit?

On a side note - seems like there is a 'realism' vs. playability issue here. Might be 'realistic' (in some sense of the word) to have a battalion running around a 2x2 map securing flags while a platoon lurks in cover trying to gather intel for 50 turns. Doesn't sound like fun, at least not after the first time. With a lot of folks in this forum, it seems realism is the Holy Grail, without any concern for playability. Make any game too realistic, and there comes a point where it won't be fun or playable any more. I think there needs to be a recognition that realism = fun up to a certain level, then realism = tedious, boring, and/or pointless.

[Dirtweasle]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

...I will look out the window. A day later I will take the train back. I'll look out the window again. When I get back to Kiev, I'll fire up Google Earth and see to what degree the terrain impressions I gathered out the train window, correspond with the terrain data offered by Google Earth of the same swath of land.

I think you'll need to stop, or somehow get off the train, and use a transit.

[Peterk]

Don't worry about it. People will do fun, smaller, playable "campaigns" for things which would now be done as operations (or a bit larger) . You ALL seem to have only the "monster" campaigns on your mind.

Just wondering....since an operation can have a map that is greater than 2x2, I don't really recall anyone ever complaining that its too easy to overload a sector in a CMBB operation. Probably 'cause no one plays operations or because the front width is less than 2km (or somefink).

[Bannon DC]

Originally posted by The Coil:

If it takes 5 years and 100 people to complete a campaign, I gotta wonder how many people are going to really play this. JasonC, I'll assume for a moment your estimates are wildly high, and cut them in half, 2.5 years, 50 people, plus various short termers.

What makes you think Jason is even half correct? He is purely speculating on a game he has not seen. He doesn't know what he is talking about any more than you do. Read the web site and skim the forum and you will know as much as anyone else. You will become the expert.

But, what if... what if Jason is more than correct? What if he is 200% correct? What if it takes 10 years and 200 people to complete a campaign? What if they marketed the product only to prisoners serving a life sentence who possess a penchant for World War II minutiae. Of course there would be the odd guy who's shived in the shower or those misanthropic bastards who dump a rain of artillery on their own companies. But, you can work around that.

Ridiculous speculation. Find a credible source. :eek:

[The Coil]

Originally posted by Bannon DC:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by The Coil:

If it takes 5 years and 100 people to complete a campaign, I gotta wonder how many people are going to really play this. JasonC, I'll assume for a moment your estimates are wildly high, and cut them in half, 2.5 years, 50 people, plus various short termers.

What makes you think Jason is even half correct? He is purely speculating on a game he has not seen. He doesn't know what he is talking about any more than you do. Read the web site and skim the forum and you will know as much as anyone else. You will become the expert.

But, what if... what if Jason is more than correct? What if he is 200% correct? What if it takes 10 years and 200 people to complete a campaign? What if they marketed the product only to prisoners serving a life sentence who possess a penchant for World War II minutiae. Of course there would be the odd guy who's shived in the shower or those misanthropic bastards who dump a rain of artillery on their own companies. But, you can work around that.

Ridiculous speculation. Find a credible source. :eek: </font>

[hoolaman]

Here's a question: Can you force your opponent to play out a CMBB tactical battle?

[Hensworth]

I'm not going to explain the whole of Onion Wars here, but most of the people taking part are husbands and fathers and have jobs. The average age is probably higher than the average age on the CM forum.

The campaign models a whole war, not an operational campaign. As such, one turn covers a month and not an hour or a couple of hours.

Just goes to show there's more than one way to get to Rome. A little creativity can go a long way.

What I'm saying is, you can bend the laws of reality a little and still make a fun simulation. It isn't entirely true to life, no, but then how much sense is there, really, in talking about realism the way JasonC does when you're still after all sitting behind a computer screen with a bag of pretzels and a beer.

Somebody puts something together, leaves bits out and goes out of his way to get other bits exactly right. The result convinces you or it doesn't. That really doesn't depend on every little sub-aspect being convincing when you study it in isolation from the rest of the game.

[mav1]

Thank you JasonC for answearing my question.

Sgt-Kelly, whats Onion wars? I take it, it doesn't involve onions.

[Fangorn]

For those that want to try the Onion Wars campaign, check out our site:

http://www.onionwars.net/forum/YaBB.pl

In the first campaign, the teams' economy was based on onion fields, hence the name.

As for the current discussion, and from my experience as a GM, 4 km² maps seem plenty good to me.

[The Coil]

Originally posted by Sgt_Kelly:

I'm not going to explain the whole of Onion Wars here, but most of the people taking part are husbands and fathers and have jobs. The average age is probably higher than the average age on the CM forum.

I have no doubt that they are. After all, somebody is playing campaigns. I just question whether there are enough of these kind of people to make CMC profitable. I think relatively few people are interested/committed enough to play a game that takes a 2-5 year (or whatever) commitment to play. If CMC doesn't streamline the campaign experience, I doubt there's more than a relative handful of CMBB players who'll be interested. Doesn't sound like anyone is saying it will streamline the game, esp. with 2x2 maps. If true, seems like CMC is targeted to a relatively small demographic. Obviously, your sales base is 'people who play CMBB,' seems like 'people with the time/energy/willingness to play campaigns which include lots of insignificant small platoon on platoon recce actions which last 50 turns' is a small subset of this. Auto-resolve might be somewhat of a solution, but I still wonder.

Originally posted by Sgt_Kelly:

What I'm saying is, you can bend the laws of reality a little and still make a fun simulation. It isn't entirely true to life, no, but then how much sense is there, really, in talking about realism the way JasonC does when you're still after all sitting behind a computer screen with a bag of pretzels and a beer.

Somebody puts something together, leaves bits out and goes out of his way to get other bits exactly right. The result convinces you or it doesn't. That really doesn't depend on every little sub-aspect being convincing when you study it in isolation from the rest of the game.

I think we are in almost total agreement on this point. What makes me nervous is when people start talking like realism is the ultimate goal (see CMSF thread about immobilization ). It's not - a reasonable approximation of realism that is still fun and playable is the goal. What prompted my comment was the claim that battalions roaming the map securing flags and searching for a lone platoon was somehow more realistic than scaled maps. Here's one such claim from earlier in the thread:

How is that sensible? You're basically telling the battallion sized attacker that #1 he's up against a small force, and #2 that small force is located on this small map. You're basically giving the map to the attacker and giving the enemy position away. It's gamey, it's not sensible(not from a defender's standpoint), and it's not realistic.

Maybe it's gamey and unrealistic to have scaled maps, but it's silly and unplayable to have a platoon squat in the bushes watching a much larger force roam around the map. Maybe a certain percentage of players enjoy the fun of 50 (or 30, or 55, or whatever) turns of this and see it as a fun challenge. I don't think it's a very high percentage though. My point is, realism should not trump playability and fun.

[Hensworth]

Originally posted by The Coil:

I just question whether there are enough of these kind of people to make CMC profitable.

Not my problem.

Personally I have the developer down as a nut who happens to be into just the kind of CM experience that I like too and is making the game because that's the kind of game he wants to play. If he spends any amount of money on the development, it is highly likely that he will not earn it back.

... it's silly and unplayable to have a platoon squat in the bushes watching a much larger force roam around the map.

To some degree, yes. But one of the things I like in a campaign is that you get to experience different kinds of battles : totally imbalanced games that teach you the value of having one poor AT gun over having none at all, games where taking a platoon down with you can be considered a success, games where you get to stomp all over a hapless company marooned in the open steppe with a handful of tanks, games where nary a shot gets fired and yet you still come away with a sense of achievement at having fooled or misled your opponent.

Being forced to play out the sometimes not so glorious and action-packed phases of an engagement can be enlightening.

[ October 11, 2006, 11:07 AM: Message edited by: Sgt_Kelly ]

[Bannon DC]

Originally posted by The Coil:

Umm...not sure if your main point is 1) that we should all stop posting because none of us knows anything and we should all just stop thinking about anything and accept whatever Battlefront puts out because they are inerrant gods or 2) that you don't like JasonC.

Either way, it's sort of irrelevant to the question I was asking. Don't like JasonC's numbers, fine, work with Sgt. Kelly's - 20-25 people, 2+ years. At best, it seems like this is a product that appeals to an extremely small percentage of regular CMBB players. I don't forsee the casual player who plays a few PBEM games, has a job, a wife, and a kid or three getting real excited about spending 50 turns securing flags on a 2x2 map with a battalion while his opponents platoon hides in the bushes. Thus my question: is there really a market (beyond a few hundred people) for that sort of game? Doesn't sound like anyone on either side of the issue is arguing with the fact that there will be a lot of these sorts of engagements with 2x2 maps...just seems like that would appeal to a pretty small demographic.

I would think the appeal of CMC would be that it would make campaigns accessible to players with less time. Seems to me like the arguments for 2x2 maps ran more along the lines of 'it's more realistic' than 'it streamlines the game'. Again, maybe I've got it all wrong, and I'm open to being straightened out. Convince me with some solid facts or some sort of reasoned opinion, not by a sorta strange tirade about prisoners and how stupid JasonC's opinions are.

What I don't like are hecklers and those with a pretend air of authority. A few Chicken Littles have people all flustered and dismayed that games will take years to complete and require Staff Officers to manage the process. Doesn't that seem a little silly to you? People have become fixated on something that seems like it would be a rare occurance and are demanding a "fix" before the games is released.

How can a person satisfy you with "factual" answers when this entire thread is complete speculation based on some perceived "flaw" in a game no one has played and one that does not appear will be release anytime in the near future.

I don't agree with your premise that the game is overly concerned with realism over playability. From what I have seen I don't see that.

So, you question is "is there really a market" for such a game? I wouldn't buy the game that the tangental speculation has concocted. But I would buy CMC.

[Bigduke6]

Well I'm back, and a slow and rickety train ride it was too.

I am not budging from my basic statement, which is: East-front-wide armored combat LOS averaged around 800 to 1,200 meters. I stand by my position that a 2 x 2 map is suitable space to simulate most East front armored engagements.

Based on the slice of terrain that I saw, on average even a traitorous Soviet commander would have to have worked extremely hard to allow a German opponent a 1.5 or more km. shot at his T-34s. That is to say if you look very hard for it there are scattered long views to be found, but the frequency of "long shots" one comes across is nothing compared to the instances where there might be a long shot, but something gets in the way.

Overall, the terrain is not wide open, it is heavily cultivated rolling hills with a large rural population.

Here are two qualifiers:

1. I am not arguing 2 x 2 is sufficient distance to simulate true tableland steppe. As I noted earlier, I'll freely admit the north Crimean plain (for instance) looked as flat as a friggen' pool table when I saw it.

2. My definition of East Front for the context of this discussion is: "Every place that saw a reasonable amount of armored combat during the Soviet-German war from June '41 - May '45." Thus, I include places like Bohemia and White Russia in that definition.

Ok, now for some fun details on what I saw.

Basically, the route goes Kiev - Zhitomir - Khmelnitsky - Chernovtsi. This was, effectively, the MSR for 1st and later 4th Ukrainian Front from (roughly) Jan - June '44.

Relief - The most open part of what I saw were, predictably, the Dniestr and Prut river plains, where outside of built-up areas certainly LOS was well above a kilometer. In Chernovsti itself (a rather hilly place, now I know why the Ukrainian princes set up castles there) there are points where you can stand and look across the Prut, and LOS is a good 5 km. or more.

But most of the land isn't like that. The farmland is covered with mixed crops, predominantly wheat but also things like corn, and what looked like barley and I don't know what else. Overall the terrain is rolling hills, with anything between (I'm guessing here) 1 to 5 kilometers between each ridge.

What is decidedly not visible on the satellite pix are all the folds in the ground. For instance, even in one of the flatter bits, the Prut plain going eastward from Chernovtsi (or more correctly Chernivtsi) is table-top flat from the river to a big forest about 3 - 5 km. away.

Well, I saw it, and it isn't. There are lateral folds in the ground, plus minor folds inbetween the laterals and the majors. This is not to say this is the Wyoming badlands, a fold sufficient to hide a WW2 tank in full defilade was at this particular point I would estimate every 300 - 500 meters, and maybe in the flattest bits 500 - 1000 meters.

But again this brings us back to the basic problem of where battles took place: sure the Germans were looking for the most open ground possible, but the Soviets weren't. My opinion, a CM 2 x 2 map could replicate that particular bit of ground perfectly "fairly"; there are plently of places to hide and move tanks. This is after all the suburbs of a small city we're talking about.

Besides the obvious limitations in Google's ability to depict minor relief, here here is a list of some of the stuff simply not invisible on the sattelite photographs, that really bust up LOS on the ground:

1. The larger roads are raised like a RR right of way, and for practical purposes can serve in most places as a tank berm.

2. Manmade vegetation - Trees are planted along pretty much all roads, major and minor. It's almost absolute law, the Ukrainians will cultivate just about any spot of open ground. Often trees lining a road are thick enough to prevent easy passage of armor. One must qualify here: there certainly were less roads in the SU than in modern Ukraine. But that brings me to point 4.

3. Natural vegetation - Yes there are forests, especially roughly speaking inbetween Khmenitsky and Zhitomir. Again, this ain't steppe, it ain't even close to steppe. But it is in the hearland of some of the most intense armor fighting of the entire East Front.

3. Agriculture - Private garden agriculture is alive and well all along this route. Within walking distance of pretty much any inhabited location there are networks of small fields tilled by the locals for their own use. (This based on my experience in the region, rather than checking every town along the way.)

This was the case pretty much for all of the SU except than the worst days of collectivization. More imporantly, the Ukrainian population in the wartime years was roughly 2/3 rural-dwelling. All those millions of people growing corn and planting orchards and building stuff for the local kholhoz had an impact on LOS. It still does today, and today only 1/3 of the population is rural.

I will note that nowhere did I see any 8 km fields. 1.5 to 3 km., very roughly was the norm.

4. Drainage - The region I rode through, as is most of right bank Ukraine and generally East Europe, has been intensively tilled for millenia. That means ditches, vegetation by the ditches, garden plots taking advantage of the water, buildings for equipment for the gardens, yada yada yada.

5. Visibility - This isn't a LOS issue per se but still I think bears on my contention. In the mornings from about 0500 - 0800 (yes I was up that early) there was thick icky fog, and when I got back to Kiev it was drizzling. This reminded me that, by US standards, the weather sucks in East Europe, usually by means of fog or rain or snow, and almost always when the weather sucks LOS is reduced.

All you reading this can take these impressions or leave them.

As to pictures, yes I have several. There is one small problem (actually two), I'm not enthusiastic about loading up the pix on image shack because of the time and bother. Also, they are huge format (11 x 17" print equivalent) and so if I link the pictures up on this thread then they will blow pretty much every one's screen settings out the window.

One possibility, if some one wants to donate band width I'll be glad to send them the pictures, and he can do the legwor. Warning: Each picture is 2-3 Megs large. If that some one wants to link to his band width, or even reduce the size of the photos so they can be viewed easily in this thread, that suits me fine. I've got no problem with sticking the pictures in this thread, just I don't want to bother with sticking them there.

As an incentive I'll note that besides the terrain pix I have some shots of a neato T-34/76 on a pedestal on Gagarin Street in Chernovtsi, which is according to the inscription the vehicle driven by one Lt. Nikitin when the city was liberated.

I even chatted with and took a picture of (in front of the tank) one Efim Dmitrievich Rak, who said he is 88 years old and that he was present for the city's occupation, successively, by Germans, Romanians, and then Russians. He said he fought in the war but did not make clear on what side - I gather from the way he talked about the Reds and his pride in speaking "good German" (not really) it was not the Soviet army.

So if some one is willing to contribute the band width and does the image sizing, I'm glad to place Mr. Rak's image (with the tank) in this thread.

Another possibility, if not many people are interested in my travel pix, is you just send me an e-mail and I'll ship you the pictures. My e-mail's in my name thingie.

Bannon DC, that offer is meant specifically for you, I'm glad to throw what I have your way. Jason, you too.

Bannon, remind me in a couple of days about your map request, I think the Berkley map link is down but there are other ways to get the area you are looking for, but I'll have to hunt, once again the CM vs. RL thing rears its ugly head.

EDITED to reduce quantity of text, if you can believe it.

[ October 12, 2006, 02:30 AM: Message edited by: Bigduke6 ]

[mav1]

Great work BigDuke6, very interesting. Thanks from me for taking the trouble to find out all this stuff. its great info for us mapmappers to make realistic maps.

Anyone know of any websites with photos of the ukranian steppes.