Peterk

Rule 28 for large battles didn't make the cut. I based mostly on 1.5 and that wasn't there at that point in time. It'll come...in the meantime, you can make that roll manually if you want. I don't see any consequences later on if you override the support numbers that biltaid gives you.

> A small bug: The custom campaign screen doesn't > accept negative favor. Just checked. Nice catch. > So if you try to input an existing campaign > with negative favor, you suddenly find that > your CO was replaced, and the new one hasn't > been briefed abut your previous history Nah, that's not it. Your superior is just so happy you're using Biltaid he's feeling generous. Enjoy the free-favor loophole while it's there guys..this is the next one to be patched!

> But I need to use smaller battle sizes, and I > might also like to tweak a couple of other > things. Your tool doesn't seem to be > customizable yet. Have you considered reading > the die rool results from text files? That > ought to be doable, unless it requires a > redesign Yeah, I did think of it and designed for it actually but didn't implement because it makes those classes much more bloated and difficult to debug. Reading all those table values from a resource file turns into a surprising amount of very tedious programming...and I don't see _myself_ ever using it, so it fell down pretty low on the list. In the meantime, maybe find a way of mapping what Biltaid gives you to your own values to use in the real battle...don't know if that's feasible for you though. Source code's available to anyone who wants to have a go at customizing it.

It was on my to-do list. Tip - if you start off as Regular and you really are Green, "someone" will come by to visit you after only a few battles anyways to set things right!

It shipped with the game. It's on the CD.

<Sigh> First patch already. I just sent out Biltaid v1.0.1 a few minutes ago. If you're using the earlier one, be on the lookout for 2 bugs which I fixed: 1) The earlier version doesn't run properly out of the box on computers whose locale is not set to something that has english as the primary language...so basically anyone outside of US, Canada, England, Australia...The work-around is pretty trvial and is posted in an earlier message. 2) If you're loading a saved file for your first battle, enter your results and advance to the next battle - if an immediate counterattack/followup is not generated, then there is a very good chance (depends on your favor from the first battle) that you won't be able to succesfully generate any more battles. Hopefully the patch (version 1.0.1) will be posted soon. If you can't get it off the sites and absolutely want to play it, you can send me a quick message to get an e-mail delivery.

A quick message for anyone who downloaded Biltaid today. I just fooled around with it tonight (as a user..playing my own campaign...yay!!!) and I noticed a pretty massive bug. Basically you can't get a 2nd battle generated. Sooo.....use it to generate one battle, enter your results and then SAVE your campaign. DON'T hit advance! I know what it is and I'll have a patch out for this and one other problem before I go to bed tonight. Apologies...I should have caught this one.

Yeah, it's a tough one. You have to compromise a bit. If you have enough points to do it you can try this. Buy your company at the average level, then buy your veteran platoon. At the start of the game you move one platoon from the original company off the map - your veteran platoon takes their place in the company. But usually, you won't have enough leeway point-wise to get away with it, so I think most people just buy a company at the average level for all 3 companies.

Stereo Mike just helped me find a problem that people outside of US/Canada/UK will probably have. I don't want to do a patch just for this so I'm posting the fix here.... 1. Go to the directory where you unzipped the file and then descend to the resources/utl directory. 2. There's on file in there that has a "_en.properties" at the end of its name. Take the "_en" away so it looks more like the other files.

> Peter, are you going to make an announcement on > a seperate thread? I think a lot of people are > going to be pretty excited about this... I think we'll just keep it in here for now and see if the first few people like it and are able to get it going.

Hi Stereo Mike, I think you unzipped the files without telling zip to use directory information. It's in the readme, but unfortuantely the readme is IN the zip so it might have been too late at that point to be of any help. The quick way to tell if you did it right? Check in the directory that you copied the zip file to. Do you have a handful of directories and a handful of files there? Good, you did it right. Do you have a few hundred .class files in there? You unzipped it wrong. Delete everything except the zip and start over but this time extract keeping directory info. Hope this helps. Keep me posted.

You can also try the Biltong rules with the map packs. You'll get mostly attacks - a wide variety of unit mixes and situations ranging from walkovers to truly desperate battles where you have to pull out all the tricks you know. The maps are excellent and representative of what you will see when playing a prepared scenario. It's a great training exercise.

I e-mailed Scooby already. I only announced when he told me it was up but I can't find it either (even deep in the bowels of his server ). Hey, congrats everyone! We now have more replies here than those damned Pengers have in their thread!!!

Also, in case anyone wants to try it out...I just got word that Biltaid will soon be available for download at Scooby's CMBB Page

Question to anyone in the know... As everyone knows many of the key small battles in the East involved river crossings, bridge defenses. Those also happen to be some of my favorite things to play out. Is there any chance of getting such battles with the current map pack???

> Peter-where will Biltaid be posted when done? On the 2 main sites where the rules are hosted. It's gone out to the webmasters already. More details posted later today or tomorrow hopefully. p.

> ....I'd happily have it integrated into a paid > CM3 option Did I mention Biltaid will be shareware??? It costs 50$ to get off June 22, 1941. That's why I'm so late..I'm setting up the credit-card thingie! Just joking.

Hi Seahawk, The reason I'm suggesting you start over is that you haven't been given enough battles with the old version of Biltaid. The first few days of Barbarossa typically make you fight several times a day and weraing your guys down very quickly. I don't want you to miss out on all that fun! The only way to do it properly is to go back to the beginning. The counter-attack function was in the demo version and got called but it was a dummy and didn't actually do anything. Jeez, sharp eyes - can't hide anything from you guys. It's slow going tonight - I don't know if I'll be able to get something out early.

> City fights of the future will be choreographed > affairs <drool> Can't wait!

> It is in fact a simpler solution for the paper > rules, It is an excellent idea for the paper rules; the only downfall is that there are modifiers on the date roll that ties it to the month of the year. I'm not sure if the length of a city fight should be tied to the month. WHy not just make a roll as to whether the city fight continues before rolling for date: 1-2 - The city fight ends 3-10 - The city fight continues This gives you a 26% chance of the city-fight lasting 6 days. [ March 01, 2003, 06:58 PM: Message edited by: Peterk ]

Since you were such a helpful tester, I'll see if I can do better than tomorrow just for you.

Not a solution for the paper rules...but if you end up using my Biltaid program (coming out tomorrow hopefully) you will have NO idea how long you will be in the city. The computer knows and tracks it, but it is not shown to the player.

> you mailed me I will be able to Load prevoius > battles so to have a smooth continuation. Not quite but yes, you can continue. You'll have to go through a little wizard to enter the data from your old campaign manually (should take 2 minutes or so) . I decided not to support the old beta save files...too dangerous. But this also means that anyone with a paper campaign in progress can continue on with Biltaid no matter where they are. ...personal opinion. I think you should start over anyways. You've been getting off much too easy without the immediate counterattack/followups that were missing in the demo. Biltong's supposed to be HARD!

Hi Seahawk, Glad you like it. Thanks for testing! The update? Estimated time of arrival for 1st official release is...TOMORROW! Wait 'til you see all the cool stuff I added in the last 2 weeks. p.

I use anything > 20% as being off limits for stuff I purchase on my own but I don't think that's in the rules. I think when you do the QB generation the rules tell you to use the Historical Rarty setting, which limits what gets generated in the QB to generate Aux units and then you choose almost everything you get from those - I haven't seen anything else involving rarity in the rules.