hellfish

It's expensive to paint vehicles. US paints are special chemical resistant coatings. Plus, you never know where your vehicles might be sent next. Sand colored tanks tend to stick out in places like Germany and Korea.

I tried to play it, as company level light infantry fights are my thing, but that first mission is too big for my poor laptop to handle adequately...

It'd be awesome if they had a scenario covering the spetznaz assault on the presidential compound to kick off the Soviet invasion. Also cool is the chance that we'll have Mi-24s for air support.

Damn this game is addictive.

^ Both those tank sims have been released in Russia already, but yeah, we're still waiting on them here. Of the two demos, I enjoyed Steel Fury more than Battle Tanks.

Check out the developer's briefing from E3. It has ingame stuff, and a better explanation of what to expect. Before I saw it, I was pretty dubious about the whole thing myself, but this dev thing did get my attention. Besides, Armed Assault 2 will be a copy of Armed Assault 1, except all the mods won't work, it will have tons of bugs and will play exactly like OFP1 - a nine year old game by then. BIS lost my business when Arma1 was a massive disappointment.

He focuses on the junior enlisted men. All the NCOs in the book and show are pretty professional, but the junior enlistedmen act like they're right out of high school. Because they are. Having been a junior enlistedman in the infantry, I can tell you they're all goofs. They'll fight like lions, but they're goofs. As for your complaining about the troops whining about sending the Iraqis back to the death squads - God forbid American troops should have a shred of humanity. Idiot.

Yeah, Rhyse and Fall. Thanks. Good mod.

Yeah, that's not a 30lb skull. I still have no idea what it is. Those spikes are pretty big, so they'd probably protrude from the skin, and they look like they're pretty even in length down the whole body. That skull, though, doesn't strike me as a fish skull. It does look kind of reptilian, but that doesn't jive with the rest of the skeleton for known species. It'll probably end up being something really obvious, but damned if I know.

Get Civ4 with the Beyond the Sword expansion. A good couple of mods are "Rise of Mankind 2" (it adds a lot of civ-specific units and buildings, resources, techs) and one that I think comes with the BTS expansion. I forget the name of it, but it's more historical - civs show up at specific times on a giant real-world map and you can jump to lead a new civ when it arises. It's hard, but fun. Africa is a nightmare to raise a civilization in, so beware the Egyptians, Malinese, and Ethiopians. Skip the "Fall From Heaven" mod that seems to be so popular. It's really pretty lame, and all the "evil" civs end up becoming neutral or good in the end, meaning it's rare to see any fighting.

I've been an amateur marine biologist and a volunteer aquarist for years and I've never seen a skeleton like that. It looks vaguely like a flathead or snakehead. It looks like the jaw is missing too. Of course, with that said, there's still incredibly little we know about the ocean. I wish I could see better pics of it, with a sense of scale as well (the kids don't help).

It wasn't designed to be a history book, and it had no obligation to be. The Marines knew who Wright was when they let him tag along. I read a lot of books by embedded reporters/writers in OIF and I'd argue that Wright's is the only one to pay full attention to the enlisted. So many of the books written were about O-3s or above, with scant attention paid to the enlisted men. I think a lot of the embeds came across as snotty pricks too - keeping with the well educated officers instead of entering the [sarcasm]terrifying realm of the unwashed enlisted masses who listened to rap music and heavy metal. [/sarcasm] By and large I got the impression that most embeds were intimidated by the enlisted men, which is why so much time in their books was spent on officers, to whom they could find a kinship in education and middle/upper-class affluence, and also why so much of their book involved the embeds themselves. Wright's book was easily one of the best to come out of OIF so far, along with Colby Buzzel's book and Nathaniel Fick's. Bing West deliberately focused on higher echelons, so I can't fault him for that. He was also more interested in the history of the fight, rather than the people who fought it.

^ Agreed re: JA2. I was looking for a realistic military squad-level game and found a pretty ridiculous tactical game. It had it's moments, but I really hated the whole idea where you start with pistols and progress from there. I'd much rather start running and work from there against an enemy who seemed more organized than a random bunch of soldiers with ridiculous mixes of weaponry. There's a JA3 coming out in 2010, theoretically. I'd like any future version to include vehicles, logistics (money, guns, ammo, etc) and a halfway realistic enemy. X-Com1 was fantastic - fantastic! - and I would love for someone to replicate it with modern graphics. All the clones I've played either attempted to add or take away the things that made the original great, and in the process failed entirely. I'm looking forward to the Les Grognards demo (I'm not a Napoleanics fan, but there are a lot of interesting concepts involved in the game that might bring me in). Likewise for Empires at War - I think it has a lot of potential, based on what we know of it so far. Otherwise the only games out there that I've heard of that I'm interested in are Armed Assault 2 (though I fully expect to be disappointed in this, as I really doubt it'll be what it could be... like Arma1 was a disappoinment). Operation Flashpoint 2 might be interesting. Far Cry 2 might be good if it's the modern Oblivion based in West Africa like I think it is. In the end, however, I'm still waiting for someone to build me an integrated battlefield sim like Microprose once promised. Or a strategy game that doesn't look like it belongs in a long, thin box with carboard counters. Remember Road to Moscow? That would have been brilliant.

To be honest, it's not an historical book. It's a book written by an entertainment reporter embedded with the Marines. It's mostly about the junior Marines he met - the Generation Xers and Generation Yers. From my Marine friends, it seems the guys who did their 4 years and got out liked the book, but anybody who became a Corps lifer tended to hate it. Same as Jarhead.

Sweet. Carrion.

To get you all moist and warm for CMSF: Marines, HBO's new mini-series Generation Kill, about recon Marines in OIF1 will be premiering on Sunday the 13th at 9pm EST. http://www.hbo.com/generationkill/

I'm intrigued. Definitely looks like it'll be up my alley. Will there be the option to change the names of equipment (i.e. 'Fighter III' becomes 'P-40 Warhawk'?). Totally cosmetic, I know, but it'd make me just a little bit happier.

combatreform.com is to sanity like what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Ghandi.

Initially, no. Read into that what you will Steve </font>

I haven't played any west front games since CMBO, so I'm looking forward to revisiting it.

A TOW flying over the target is not a failure - it would best be explained as the gunner just missed the target. A TOW impacting halfway to the target could be a failure, or could be that the gunner sneezed or got distracted. No missile is 100% accurate. You're going to miss some of the time. Just be glad you're not forced to use the Dragon ATGM. And the "hump" of the TOW right before it hits the target is the top-attack feature at work.

Were the crews panicky/suppressed? Were the TOWs fired by the same vehicle, or two TOWs from two different vehicles failed? Did they "fail" as in drop way short of the target or did they just miss their target by a couple of meters?

Or just screenshots with notes. I haven't noticed this behavior.

Holy crap. African fighting is the topic I'm most interested in for gaming. If you can somehow mod a Stryker to be a Ratel, I'll be in heaven.

IIRC the Land Warrior system has largely been ****canned. Only one battalion got 'em, and that was just for experience for the Land Warrior replacement program.