Elmar Bijlsma

Mr Atkinson's second book, while a riveting read, is a poor shadow of his first and not that great on history. Too often an attack is just described in the vaguest of generalities. As for bias, to my mind there can be very little doubt there is plenty in the book. While several US generals do not come out of the story unscathed, pretty much all non American generals are described as rigid, out of their depth and a bit thick. Only Juin comes off looking good. Somewhat less clear cut is whether Clark gets off too easy. I think so. His glory seeking character comes under fire throughout the book but his generalship pretty much only gets attacked after he lunges for Rome. And even then every damning statement is followed by justification. Pretty much the only thing Atkinson comes out strongly against is Clark's disobedience and subterfuge. Personally, I think that his lackluster performances throughout Italy might have drawn more mention. His direction was often either absent or erroneous. Off the top of my head I cannot think off any action where his directions to his divisional commanders changed things for the better. It is a REALLY good book if you want to get a feel for the US side of things but borders on misinformation about the other allies.

The new content for CMBN is doing its XXX Corps impression.

AFAIK there is something quite like CM's Quick Battles, but no co-op or something similair. Still on the fence on this one. Every reviewer whose opinion I value is loving it to some extent but all of them also mention the little niggles that I think would drive me up the wall. As a long time fan of the original I do not think I could get over the streamlining/simplification/dumbing down.

What he did was cool and all but that people here and in the media mention the guy in the same breath as Armstrong, Yeager, Colombus and indeed Kittinger is just plain lamentable. Are you all really that impressionable? PR compamies must just love you guys. Have another Red Bull! Yeah he went Mach 1. Usain Bolt does not even come near that, but impresses me a hell of a lot more. His jump and his spin recovery skillful? If you say so, I would not know. Personally I was more impressed by Jeb Corliss recovering and flying on after smacking into Table Mountain. Guts? Sure. The man has undoubted balls of steel. But when I see this much fawning over a guy and not nearly as much as for instance a MoH or VC recipient, yeah, I will happily point out that it is a hype.

Neil Armstrong went where no man went before. A genuine milestone for humanity. And he went there strapped on top of a rocket at a time when the lauchpad frequently traveled further then the rocket. Baumgartner fell from a higher place and faster then the guy before him, kudos and his name in the Guiness book for that. But to say he broke new ground for humanity or did something fiendishly difficult? No. The difficult part was getting the balloon up there and he had very little to do with that.

I'm not really getting the hype around this. So, this man is apparently really good at being pulled down by gravity? Big whoop. What Baumgartner did could have been achieved by a sack of potatoes. At least when Kittinger did it we did not really understand what he was in for. Show me the guys that did the engineering that got this fellow so very high. That is the really impressive thing.

Wow, that's so lucky! Most campuses just get the usual guy wit a high powered rifle in the belltower.

Uhm... eteled notroN? Really, it is a terrible AV. Just about anything else is better, free or paid service. Having software conflicts is what Norton does best. That you only have trouble with CMSF makes you the most satisfied Norton user in the history of mankind.

My practice is to pick clean any vehicle I know isn't part of the core force, preferably with units I know that are. For core force vehicles, I usually leave them with some ammo just in case. Never feel comfortable totally cleaning them out. In that case I don't pick up more ammo then I am likely to use in that mission. But always err on the side of your combat troops having as much ammo as possible. Maybe your ammo will carry over next battle, maybe it won't, but dead troops definitely won't show up next battle. So grab that ammo and shoot up any location you think might conceal an enemy.

C-130 isn't as fat as it looks while sitting on the ground. http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2376/2189815098_9efefafccd.jpg I'm betting you are seeing the exhaust of a 4 engined plane. Prop wash may disperse the exhaust to both sides of the engines. The outboard engine to outside and centre of wing, inboard engine to inside and centre. This would give you three exhaust trails per wing. My money is once again on a C-130 if you also think you saw 6 nacelles. If not there are so many alternatives that it isn't really worth guessing at.

Yeah, I think Steve was out in the sun a bit too long if he is expecting us to use good taste and common sense.

Would perhaps be helpful if you actually had some valid argument to make rather then just a lame sneer. Have you actually, as I suggested, looked up how Medal of Honor looked like? This was the high end of good looking in 1999 and it looked worse, way worse, then CMBN does now. That renders you previous statement utterly untrue. Rambler, the guy you "corrected" wasn't too far off in his comparisons. And indeed, those are FPS engine usually only display a tiny area from a limited viewpoint and have not much else going on under the hood. Does CMx2 look like the latest and greatest AAA titles? No. Would I like it to? Yes. Oh god, yes! But considering the concessions made to gameplay for those mainstream titles, ... I can live without the graphical nirvana of AAA titles. You need a reality check at what is technically possible, and more relevantly, what is possible for such a small outfit as BFC.

1) Hit Decals 2) Flares 3) In-game gamma settings or a toggle to visually brighten the night missions.

Not quite. The Fireflies would still be in direct support of the tanks going forward. They'd be providing the AT overwatch for the 75s going forward. This preserved the troop's heavy hitter for when he was needed and seemed to have allowed the Firefly commander a better overview of the battle then being in the thick of it would allow. As far as I can tell it worked well enough.

Someone needs to look up old screenshots of Hidden & Dangerous and the original Medal of Honor. If CMBN looks like that, you need to re-configure you graphical settings.

You can drag a laptop through the dense jungles of Papua New Guinea, show off CMBN to the amazed and hitherto isolated villagers you encounter and the first thing you see as they write a review on a stone slab is MD running along with a chisel in his hand to give his views beneath the article.

Not really. It is more to do with success and failure being so hard to distinguish during the battle itself. For every battle where a commander decides to give it another go in the face of failure there is at least one where on the verge of success the commander digs in or pulls out. A HQ on the losing side a battle will likely get flooded with messages along the lines of: "Taking heavy casualties, please send help" Whereas the messages arriving at HQ in a battle being won tend towards the "Taking heavy casualties, please send help". Aborting a battle when things look bad means you never get anything done. A battle is per definition A Bad Situation.

I'm off the opinion that Market Garden was worth doing. What else were the Allies going to do at this point? The first attempt on getting past Antwerp had already sputtered out, so that does not look promising if you want to have a last try at keeping the Germans on the back foot. Certainly not if you need to go island hopping across Zeeland afterwards too. So, leaves us with Patton. Who in their right mind would give Patton their last supplies? Not exactly known for his careful husbanding of supplies and grasp of logistics. His genius did not exactly lie in that direction, to say a kind thing. And for what prize? Backing Patton would see you master off an awkward bit of non essential Germany, with a populace the Allies were at the time rather fearful off. And all that at the far end of a tricky supply line. The gains made would no doubt look impressive on a map, but would not get Allies much closer to knocking the Germans out of the war. MG on the other hand, could see you bag tens of thousands of Germans in Holland and Zeeland. Plus you'd get the ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam and possibly Amsterdam/IJmuiden. And then past the Reichswald and into the Ruhr, the heartland of industrial Germany. And your supply lines go through an area where the chief danger to the troops would be contracting VDs. If you have only one shot at VE day in '44, this plan looked like the best bet. Besides, it is wrong to think of MG as a no hoper. How close they came to success despite all the flaws and mishaps! Had the Allies had things go their way on one or two occasionss, i could well see this have a success. Alas, it was not to be. It's popular to blame Monty for it's failure, or maybe XXX corps. But if you absolutely must identify the fingerprints of defeat I'd suggest you ink up General Gavin's hands. 82nd seriously screwed the pooch with their inaction in the opening stages. The 504th's stellar achievement later would not make up for the failures. But even so, how close they game. It was a risky gamble but with a huge payout upon success. You win some, you lose some. Such is war. This was a loss, but a loss that saw important gains be made. In WWI Haig would have loved to be defeated like this! The most remarkable thing about MG's place in history is the vitriol with which blame was assigned. And I think that was more to do with poisonous atmosphere in parts of the US Press Corps, which kicked off decades of arguing, then any failings in men and their plans. The Allies had failures before without leading to so much articles written with ill will.

It' is going to be X-COMbat Mission. *faints*

Does not take anything away from them being notable omissions. Omissions of BFCs choosing. As is the decision not to add features down the line as a sweetener. The once purported advantages of the modular system have all evaporated. Take care your customers base doesn't do the same.

I was expecting more but some of it sounds rather good. Hope the nerf to mortar accuracy is colossal, not a mere tweak. Pity no other weapons are mentioned. Still too much robotic accuracy, especially from troops who themselves are fired upon. But no, far from impressed given that this is what we get when BFC are too busy to implement Cover Armour Arcs, fire or the many, many things still sorely missing.

This educational post by Bullethead is mandatory reading in regards to Sherman sub-types.

The unit purchase thing to be redone to select units instead of deselecting units. Current system is an unwieldy PITA.

So, not a cunning plan to increase the overall Christmas cheer levels by turning us grumpy buggers out of our place of residence?

.RAR is a compression format like .ZIP, it has nothing to do with BFC file format. Run an unpacker like 7zip on RAR files to unpack the original file(s).