hoolaman

And of course the ground fire application of every light AA gun in the whole theatre.

I think you might be confusing the rather cool flexibility of the orders available and the ease of the interface used to implement them. Objectively CMSF's menus result in so many hundreds of unneccesary mouseclicks and keypresses that I can't believe anyone could claim to be a fan. Sure you can get used to anything but really they are absolute rubbish and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any improvement in sight. For example to get a single unit to move to a position and face the way I want, I make the following mouse commands: Click to select the unit Click to select the M tab Click to select the Move order Click click on the desired move location Right click to unselect the move order Click to select the C tab Click to select the Face order Click on the waypoint Click the desire facing direction Right click to unselect the waypoint Right Click again to unselect the unit. In a more mainstream game designed by someone who does not wish RSI on their customers you could do the exact same thing with the mouse like this: Click to select the unit Right click to place a move order Waypoint stays highlighted and you scroll mousewheel to modify the move order to the one you want if not the default Drag mouse from the waypoint to give facing direction Click on the ground to deselect the unit.

Aerosol chemical poison dispensers come as standard off the production line of course.

I don't know what is meant by "password". My game key has five digits listed after the game name, but I don't recall putting in a password? I can't really test out the events yet.

How did you know? They are the third "faction" in the CM:Space Lobsters of Doom.

Well don't let me twist your arm . I do think getting PBEM stable is a worthy goal for the game that will attract a few more players.

Yeah there was recently a story in the news from WA (not washington) where they changed the guidelines for taser use from risk of "harm" to risk of "serious harm" after they tased that aboriginal bloke 48 times for being a bit disorderly. The police union was up in arms (pun not intended) because they reckon they will have to start shooting people and bashing them with batons again. I think it really should be a matter of choosing between the gun and the taser and in similar situations.

My current PBEM game was not updating events in EoSM for some reason, so I deleted the game from the messenger, but now I can't for the life of me work out how to get it back on there. Also, EoS Messenger does not give the types of events like you see in the in-game event logs eg. "message" or "turn updated". It only shows a exclamation mark icon like an error <!>. I believe it is actually supposed to show event types isn't it? This would be extremely useful.

I've never had a problem with BFCs DRM and I can only see sales going in one direction from this and not the good direction. What other limitations are there to just passing the installer to your mate? Will he get jsut as good a game experience as me?

Yeah, I think this sort of thing has been discussed here before. Running into anything solid in a vehicle travelling at 40 km/h is a pretty bad idea. WWII tanks had a lot of protruding metal bits and definitely no airbags. OTOH if you were about to get blown up it might be the better option.

Even if there some plausible rumour doing the rounds, the headline "mystery surrounds" is a classic. "We have no idea what happened if anything but we'll write 1000 words about it anyway".

Soudns like a wonderful work of fiction by Fox there.

I don't know, the V2 was historically an expensive waste of effort, maybe it is useful as a step to other tech, but in that case why not just make the tech cost higher and skip it completely? When you say "City damage" what do you mean? There is population, refugees, production and improvements all in there. Maybe you could set the V2 "terror weapon" to cause a large hit of refugees for a turn or two, but very little actual physical damage?

I've got a freeze/crash immediately on loading an in-progress PBEM game. Te whole software freezes then fails. Single player works ok.

You would have to make a custom ruleset and a custom scenario so the forces, ranges, firepower and production capabilities are right. You'd also have to make nation specific unitsets so the strength of the Japanese and US units are relatively correct. It could be done, but it would probably not have the tactical possibilites you'd expect. One drawback is the lack of directional fortifications and multi-directional combat.

Yeah I thought a simplified flash version or something like the ipad might be a good way to get enough visibility and sell a few copies of the real thing.

I don't think EoS has bad graphics at all. They are pretty, nice and cartoony, all having a cohesive style. Nice work if you did them all yourself. Have you thought about going 3D? I notice the sprites were constructed from 3D anyway, and the terrain is not that complex. I guess that's a lot of work to redesign the pixel based game system. Then you could relaunch as EOS 3D! One game I really LOVE is battleship chess, and it is a good example of how simple 3D graphics can look really charming. http://apezone.com/battleshipchess.php

My thoughts are that it is the die-hard old-school "empire" fans that is a market waiting to be tapped into. There is a company online just simply selling a rehashed DOS empire deluxe, so there is clearly a market out there for a vastly superior remake. That's a little bit of why I made my empire deluxe ruleset. How about setting up a wikipedia entry for the game and link it into the empire game entry? I know it isn't meant to be for marketing, but you might justify it as info on a remake. Google any combination of empire game or empire remake or empire deluxe remake or empire clone or whatever, and maybe post a message on sites near the top. edit: oh I see someone has added empires of steel to the wiki site for classic empire! nice.

Yeah I get that it isn't meant to be a WW2 sim, and honestly I don't think it is worth your time to try and make it one. What I meant was it would be nice to save it as a scenario where all the towns in egypt belong to monty and half of the rest belong to rommel and let the two sides duke it out on more equal terms instead of doing the usual expansion rush at the start. Tunring off production in all but a few more established cities could easily be done with a custom ruleset, just make prerequisite buildings with massive production costs.

It's nice, looks good. The only problem at present is that when you play it with standard rules, there's a bit of a disconnect between the real world map and the fact you have to fight all the towns in Egypt before you can get started against Rommel. A scenario even with the 1940 ruleset would be best for getting right to the action. It does show what can be done with the system though.

Well considering it has been stated that it IS a bug, trying to justify it into some kind of simulation of leaving equipment behind is a bit odd. I can understand your frustration zmoney. Hopefully the patch is out very soon.

I've just been making mines! (Sea Mines) You give destroyers a transport capacity of 1, make it so they can only carry something with the "mines" tag. Give the minefields a movement ability of 0 and some large combat ability. The destroyers can drop them off anywhere, and they kill all ships that come close. I kept them visible as they should be deterrents more than anything. A sonarbouy would be the same kind of deal, just give it a zero combat ability and a big view range for subs, but any enemy that finds it can kill it. So in short you can do all this right now, the only thing that isn't possible is for something to die after 3 turns. I even made an icon. It's not very good, I can't work out the alpha channels with my software. Sea Mines.bmp

Maybe it hit the orphanage in the next village?

I'm kind of glad Stryker didn't get into the title as the game has long since diverged from the US Army side of things. Shock Force is ok, sounds kind of hammy but as others have pointed out, this sort of crap was all the rage in the Rumsfeld Pentagon. Remember Team America:World Police; "America - "Fvck Yeah!"" that is a parody of the real world nonsense going on at the time. Actually that might have been good: CM:FY!

Some cool stuff there Brit, thanks. A couple of suggestions I've been thinking about: Could you tweak the amount of swamp and mountains that go into random maps? I still think there are too many large masses of mountains, and there is waay too much swamp IMO. I think some swamp around a thin strip of some coastline, and some more isolated patches inland would be plenty. Also it would be nice to get the same terrain and resources sliders like in the map editor when generating the random maps for an actual game. Another suggestion I have made before and would be nice if it could be done, is to list the types of events in the EoS messenger. That way you would know if a turn has been submitted or a message has been posted.