eba

Waiting here.

Bought the game but waiting for patch to open it. Hope I didn't make a mistake....

Ageod's American Civil War or Birth of America. Great games.

bump?

Dallas, Texas.

Since Allies can't share MPPs, I'm wondering whether it doesn't make better sense in some cases simply to declare war and conquer Minors rather than wait for them to join as allies. The disadvantages of conquest, as I understand them, are: (1) you lose the military units that the Minor would have contributed, (2) the Minor produces MPPs at a lower rate (80%) and (3) you suffer adverse political consequences with neutrals. On the other hand, with conquest, you control all the MPPs that the Minor produces - MPPs that you can add to your own research or to build your own units, which typically are of better quality than what the Minor would produce. What's the preference among the SC veterans?

In my experience, AI trucks don't move unless attacked. And AI infantry mounted in halftracks will dismount at the first opportunity. No way around it that I know of.

The problem with the Radeon (or any other current ATI card) is that they don't support fog in CM. And that's a big minus in my book. Does anyone know if ATI's next generation cards will support fog in CM?

I also switched back from a GeForce 3 to my Voodoo 5500 because CMBO just looks better on the Voodoo card. The GeForce image seems to shimmer or sparkle here and there, while the Voodoo image is very smooth all around. There really is a clear difference, I think.

Tread Head- Your new Compaq is plenty fast and will run CM (and most any other game) just fine. But you definitely can improve its performance by shutting down all the hidden programs that load at startup. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and you'll see everything you have running. Odds are you don't need (or even recognize) 99% of it. You can use that screen to close down whatever you don't need. You actually can close everything but Systray and Explorer, which I usually do before playing a graphics-intensive game. You can also go to System Information (it's probably under System Tools in Programs/Acessories). Go to Tools/System Configuration Utility/Startup. This menu allows you to select what programs load at startup. You can change your selections whenever you want and then just reboot. Play around with it a bit. You'll find that you really don't need 99% of the stuff that Compaq loads at startup.

I recently saw friendly fire in a night QB. One squad of crack US paras was in a captured foxhole in woods when a second US squad moved up on its right flank, just at the edge of visibility. The first squad turned toward the second and fired a couple of times before turning back to its front.

I just tried Maastricht as Allies. Lost. Not sure how bad since I didn't look at the summary at the end. I plan to give it another try later. Nice scenario. Short. Interesting map. Challenging (at least as Allies).

I remember reading early on that the reason QBs don't feature bocage, rivers and the like is because the random map generator doesn't handle these terrain features very well. I just hope CM2 allows the use of custom maps in QBs. I'd be happy to make the map and then let the AI pick the units.

ATI cards (Rage, Radeon) don't support the type of fog emulation that CM uses.

I ran into the friendly fire issue in a recent QB. Night battle. One US squad turned and fired on another US squad approaching from the right flank. I'd never seen that before and was surprised to say the least. Using the LOS tool, I determined that the "target" squad had moved just along the edge of the "firing" squad's maximum LOS in the darkness. Translated into real-world terms, that means that the first squad never got a good look at the second, but just knew that someone was moving in on its flank. Seems realistic to me that a few loose shots might be fired in the confusion of battle. Nice touch, I think.