Cuchulainn

Wow guys! this thread still going 137 posts later... I didn't know what I started. Don't know whether to be pleased or apologetic. :0

There have been a lot of postings on this. Try a search of the forum.

Absolutely!

Quite incredible. Will it never stop... All I now want,... is for it to start

Fantastic work Matt! Now all we need is the game ...

So that's how it works.

Brilliant Seanachai!

Merely to say that when I posted the initial article that started the thread, I felt that within it were the seeds of a good discussion. How little did I realise how right I was! My hat is off gentlemen to your inestimable eloquence and perspicacity. (That's my ten dollar words used up for the month - but it's truly meant)

And what was this Battle of the Cow Pens, anyway? All sounds very messy ...

OK. Now for my two cents worth. I should perhaps first of all say that as someone who is half-Brazilian, half-Irish, raised in England and living in the USA, I bring a certain perspective to this. (Just don't ask me what it is!!) There is no doubt that to those who have the benefit of a good education (whether imposed or self-taught) and an enquiring mind, it is easy to concur with Steve that it is all too obvious that entertainment is ... well, entertainment. However, as the visual media have taken precedence over written media over the years, and as the majority of the population have neither the time nor the inclination to "check out the real story" I do feel that there is a drift to the 'legend,' the 'story,' becoming 'history' even more than has been the case before. The merits of the particular arguments laid out in the Sunday Times article I am not well versed in history enough to fully support or destroy (especially those concerning the 'Revolutionary War' about which I readily confess my knowledge is scant). However,history, they say, is written by the winners. It does now appear that to write history, increasingly you not only have to win the battles, but also the ratings.

An interesting article: From the (London "Sunday Times" June 4 2000 John Harlow and Nicholas Hellen on how the movies are rewriting British history 'Lies, damned lies and Hollywood' The British soldier, resplendent in his redcoat and musket, kicks down the door and stares at the huddled group of terrified children: with a sneer, he orders the razing of the South Carolina farmstead. The oldest boy is carried away to be hanged. The distraught father arms his children to wreak bloody revenge on the redcoats. This, according to Hollywood, is how peaceful farmer Benjamin Martin was dragged into the American war of independence. More worryingly, thanks to the charismatic portrayal of Martin by Mel Gibson in The Patriot, a $100m blockbuster due for release soon in America, this is how the world will once again think of the British Empire. Martin was a real-life fighter in the war of independence (1775-1783) but the film is far from an accurate account of his participation. Instead, in the hands of an Australian actor working with a German director and funded by Hollywood money, his story has been transformed into a 160-minute polemic against the British. Dramatists have long sacrificed fact in pursuit of art, and much of the time it can be shrugged off, like geography teachers patiently explaining that the volcano Krakatoa is, unlike the erroneous title of the 1969 adventure movie, west rather than east of Java. But there is a growing concern that in a "post-literate" society, where children get more information from films and television than books, the routine distortion of history in Hollywood films is becoming pernicious. Films are no longer mere entertainments: they are a prime and often sole source of information for many young minds. Lord Puttnam, whose 1981 film Chariots of Fire was praised for accurately recapturing the social tensions behind the 1924 Paris Olympics, last week became the first cinematic heavyweight to rail against distortion in Hollywood films and warn of its long-term damage. Speaking as chairman of the General Teaching Council, his particular target was Disney's computer-animated hit, Dinosaur. "It is cute, but the film does not explain why the dinosaurs are no longer around. It is compelling in terms of imagery, but in terms of education it misleads children," he said. "It is up to us in education to come up with something better." Yet this is innocuous stuff compared to The Patriot and others of its ilk. Gibson has been here before: he made his name in the film Gallipoli, in which the Australian troops were depicted as the main victims of a first world war campaign in which, in fact, many more British than Australian troops died. He played the lead, too, in the anti-English epic Braveheart. For The Patriot, to be released on Independence Day weekend, the film-makers have gone to unusual lengths to assure the public it is historically accurate, even hiring experts from the Smithsonian, the American equivalent of the British Museum, to cast an eye over the 38 script drafts written by Robert Rodat, best known for writing another film that marginalised the British, Saving Private Ryan. Yet there are good reasons to suspect the British are going to lose in this film as surely as they lost the war. The sadistic dragoon, whose violence stirs Gibson to hatchet-wielding mayhem, is, according to the film-makers, partially based upon the British soldier Banastre Tarleton. In real life Tarleton, the son of a former lord mayor of Liverpool, was a dashing officer loved by his soldiers. He was no bloodthirsty villain. Hollywood preferred to rewrite history to make the story more dramatic; nor does it end there. Two battles in South Carolina in which the Gibson character and Tarleton are known to have taken part, at Cowpens in January 1781 and Guilford Courthouse two months later, have been merged and "rearranged" by the film-makers to the advantage of the Americans. "We had to simplify a few things, both to save budget and to explain the bigger picture," said a source close to Roland Emmerich, the director, who also made the science fiction fantasy Stargate. Simplify is one thing: distort another. The English are shown running away from Gibson, just as they were depicted at a battle in Braveheart; in reality, the British won both battles. WHEN Chris Smith was appointed culture secretary after the last general election, one of his first tasks was to order a rethink of Britain's image abroad. This was the height of "cool Britannia" and he was concerned that Britain was still perceived as a land of warm beer and poor plumbing. A confidential report, compiled by the British Council, made disturbing reading. It postulated that the image was worse, pointing out that the film Ghandi might have rekindled anti-British feelings, potentially costing British companies business contracts. In the film Richard Attenborough had restaged the 1919 massacre at Amritsar in which British soldiers killed 379 demonstrating Sikhs. At least that massacre was historically accurate. The report also warned that some outside Britain believed that the British army deployed a tank to shoot dozens of spectators at a 1916 football match in Dublin - a horror that was controversially altered for the 1996 film Michael Collins by its director Neil Jordan. "Filmgoers have no way of distinguishing between the two events, so we should ensure that British interests are represented in the earliest stages of film production: otherwise we shall find it difficult to shake off the image of our past as a cruel and unfair epoch, which will continue to resound upon our interests today," said an official behind the report. Smith has since beefed up British representation in Hollywood. It will be an uphill struggle against a global tide of historical ignorance, however,especially among teenagers, who are the prime cinema-going audience. A Gallup poll taken just before the release of the film Schindler's List found that four out of five American children had not heard of Auschwitz. Similar polls have found that the majority of American high school students believe that the second world war leader in Russia was Lenin rather than Stalin, and some believed his first name was John. Even so, the British cannot be smug: a Scottish survey last summer revealed that children at a mix of public and private schools believed that John F Kennedy led the allies during the second world war and D-day was the German invasion of Britain, possibly through Dunkirk. Hollywood is not to blame for this, but its effect is noticeable. Judith MacKinlay, who teachers history at City College, Manchester, said that the Hollywood-funded Michael Collins film had directly caused confusion. "One student reproduced whole chunks of dialogue almost verbatim from the film in support of an argument in her essay. Even undergraduate students would rather watch movies than wade through a textbook, without realising that directors are twisting the facts. Hollywood leaves behind powerful images." William Rubinstein, professor of modern history at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, believes there is sometimes a deliberate agenda. "It is more than just dramatic or commercial considerations: the great liberal establishment of Hollywood does all it can to blacken the western, imperial colonial past, probably because the Americans largely missed out on the spoils." James Bowman, an American historian, said that Steven Spielberg was responsible for some of the most powerful Hollywood fakery, not only in Saving Private Ryan (which relegates the British role in the D-Day invasions), but also Amistad, his anti-slavery epic. It failed to mention how the black hero, after being freed, became a slaver himself. "The deeper sin is to make every historical character, from Merchant-Ivory's Jefferson in Paris to Elizabeth I as played by Cate Blanchett, sound like a modern liberal. They distort in subtle as well as obvious ways, such as making us feel superior to Nazis and slave-traders rather than questioning if, in another life, we might have been Nazis and slavers. It gets in the way of understanding the foreign country that is the past," he said. Despite Smith's best efforts, there is little sign of a halt to the cinematic rewriting of British history. Last week saw the release in Britain of a war movie called U-571, starring Harvey Keitel and pop star Jon Bon Jovi. It tells the story of how the US navy recovered an Enigma Nazi code machine and changed the course of the war. In reality, although the US navy captured a cipher machine off West Africa in 1944, the original was seized in an equally daring and costly mission by HMS Bulldog three years earlier when America was not even in the war. The code books were snatched by HMS Petard the following year. It took a parliamentary protest by Dr Julian Lewis, Conservative MP for New Forest East, before the film-makers tacked a dedication to Bulldog on the end of the film. Even more bare-faced distortions are planned for the Hollywood version of The Colditz Story, first filmed with John Mills in 1954. Miramax has purchased the rights to the original accounts by Pat Reid, who broke out of the "escape-proof" prisoner of war camp near Leipzig in 1942. Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax boss, is talking about casting Tom Cruise, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as American escapees when, in reality, no American came close to getting out of the castle. Kenneth Lockwood, secretary of the Colditz Association, said that no American was even at the camp when Britons were launching their imaginative escape attempts, including building a glider in the rooftops. "The film will be laughed out of court if it shows Tom Cruise leading a 'mission impossible' escape. The problem is people so very easily confuse films with history," said Lockwood, who was incarcerated in the castle for more than four years. Nor is this the last in the current glut of military madness to come out of Hollywood. Okracoke, the next Kevin Costner film, will tell the story of the disgraced British naval captain Robert Maynard, who redeemed himself by chasing down and beheading the pirate Blackbeard at the bloody battle of Okracoke off the North Carolina coast in 1718. In early versions of the script Marc Norman, who more playfully mixed up history in Shakespeare in Love, has stereotyped the British admiralty as full of snobs and fools who do not recognise the true talent of the American accented Costner. Where will it all end? Sherl Bearlstrom, the Los Angeles-based author of Hollywood and History, said there was a simple morality at work in Hollywood. "We are the top nation and we need history to explain how we got here. If that means stealing your history and heroes to do it, then Hollywood will think it's a small price to pay for success at the box office. "Your Lord Puttnam was right: its up to you guys to make your history more interesting than our version of your history. Otherwise you are going to lose - forever."

Manhattan - Upper West Side Good idea.

Done my two bob's worth. We'll get the word out eventually!!

I've had a similar occurrence. I've found out that if another program kicks in (ie something working on a timer such as a weekly viral scan) while I'm playing CM it kicks me to the desktop. If I then click on the CM tab at the bottom of the screen it takes me back successfully, although i usually have to press "play" as the action is paused, and occassionally have graphics glitches (often a bluey flickering over some of the terrain squares). Apart from that however, the game continues fine.

Working for a biotech company

"To sit where I can see your game And hear the rounds zip to and fro Is greater bliss than the gods could ever know. The bright dream carries me away, Watching your men, your hills, your tanks. You deserve so much. You have my thanks." [with apologies to Catullus] Congrats on an excellent game!

Wel, just to say thanks guys for such an educational exchange. I know know why I read so much on this BB and write so little. The standard of the company is just too high for my humble self. Here's to the Gold Demo and what comes after!

When I was a lad, a long long time ago, and being trained by the british Army how to be an officer and a gentleman we use to have TEWTs, Tactical Exercises Without Troops. CM seems to have brought tactical computer simulations to a stage where they might be of real use in training people as to how to approach tactical scenarios. With the military's interest in using game technology (several games now being used/looked at by the US Army, Marines and Air Force come to mind), has anyone run CM past the "official" military yet for their take?