patboivin

Thank. I try.

For fun I put a few tanks on ASL mapboard one, and took a look at it. Wow! When playing ASL I knew those buildings were large, but in 3D they are HUGE! What a nightmare, I wouldn't want to be the attacker on this board.

What is this tallying of dead bodies. Gruesome! I for one would be happy if some crewmen managed to sneak away to safety, never to be seen again.

Fionn, I am a little annoyed that you would say I was spawning a conspiracy theory. It's the first time someone has ever accused me of that! Maybe you were just flaming me. I don't think there was anything offensive in my post, I don't understand why you reacted this way.

So BTS is only two people? That's hard to believe.

Well, of course if one side gets to use modern weapons then the other would have to use them too.

Problem is, not everyone wants to play a historical game, esp. in quick battles. Of course then everyone ends up with paratroopers and heavy armour. Maybe this could be a choice when we start a QB, historical vs. slugfest or something. Before we get to purchase our units. The choice would be offered once, locking both players into either mode.

So far I haven't read any. Well, I read one that was posted before the gold demo came out, I'm not sure whether that counts. I've been too busy playing PBEM games.

I wonder if the creators of CM thought that getting version 1.03 out the door was going to be some sort of "end goal" for them. (Notice MadMatt went to Germany for a vacation, that tells me they had this set as the end of a stage and some people are taking a breather before the next stage begins). That after shipping 1.03, they would be concerned about CM2, i.e. modeling new tanks and infantry, but that the game engine is there so things would be a little easier from then on. With all the suggestions that have been pouring through the forum, I'm sure they had to revise that way of thinking. heh heh They must have a list of things to do so long that it rolls onto the floor like an old scroll... I agree with you Loki that they built a masterpiece. I had thought of building a game myself at some point, but judging from what the other games could do, I figured it was just too complicated a project to juggle, or that computers couldn't handle dozens of units at the same time, in 3D. What I mean by a project being too hard to juggle, is I heard that NASA could NOT land on the moon again, they forgot how they did it the first time. The engineers who worked on it retired, or are dead. And there is so much bureaucracy there now that they just would not be able to manage such a project again. I suspect too that they have been infested with bureaucrats and academics on tenure. Witness the last two probes they sent to Mars, they couldn't do it. I think there is a real limitation to what humans can do, esp. when they have to work in concert. Also the compensation systems we have now prevent the completion of large projects. Witness the landmarks that we now see as ruins, like the pyramids, or those fortresses in the Andes made of blocks so heavy that we couldn't lift them with a crane, yet they carried the blocks up mountains and fitted them perfectly together. Our civilization just doesn't allow for big projects. Our skyscrapers for example are made up of the cheapest materials structural requirements will allow, sheathed in glass. Nothing is built to last. I know that writing a computer game isn't on the same scale as those examples, but you get my point. Recruiting many programmers and keeping them focused, motivated to complete just one project is very difficult. Many people keep glancing at their resumes, thinking "Hmm. I did this now, maybe I can jump ship and get a higher paying job elsewhere. Or start my own company." People may complain about the graphics not being like Quake III, but that game (and others like it) only manage to model a handful of creatures at a time, and it's always seen from one point in the model. BTS managed to let us see what happens from any angle. Since I started playing CM all the other computer games have been gathering dust. I had planned to buy Star Trek Armada and Starfleet Command because I liked Star Fleet Battles a lot, but this keeps getting pushed forward into the future.

Aluminum armour. What will they use next? Butter? Maybe papier mâché, or just plain paper like those WW-I biplanes... Do they paint them bright red too, so everyone can see them?

I just want to add that for me, evil people are those who believe life owes them something.

I like Lego. What's wrong with lego? Re. toy guns, quite right, my wife and I don't let our 4-year old son play with toy guns, water pistols, you name it. Meanwhile a 4-year old down our street is playing Doom, and his mother said that one day she was driving to the grocery store and her son said: "When I grow up I want to kill people." SCARY STUFF She didn't do anything about it though, she looked embarrassed when she told us but she didn't delete the game from her son's PC. She is a single mother and doesn't want her ex-husband to become more popular with her son than she... what a mess. I for one hope they do regulate. Here in Canada they are forcing people to register all their guns, with the support of the police chiefs' association. Result: A lot of people who have guns are now angry people with guns. I don't like the idea of angry people owning guns... There is enough violence as it is, why add to the turmoil which is life.

There was a thread a few days back about pipers, so I thought I might post this news item: http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/entertainment/afp/article.html?s=asia/headlines/000805/entertainment/afp/10_000_bagpipe_players_parade_in_Edinburgh_for_charity.html Oh, what heavenly music!

Recce armour is designed for speed, and designed to be destroyed. Doesn't the m2 Bradley have armour made out of some aluminum alloy?! Sheesh. Please correct ome on this one, say it isn't so...

Same here. I had two paratrooper squads that rushed the roadblock, certain death, against my orders. My opponent says that his German squads rushed into the field and were eliminated because they rushed toward me. My artillery spotted seems to be calling in artillery only when it pleases HIM, and not when I tell him to. I think he's on drugs. I watched the video for the last turn, and the "sound contact?" shadow of a tank kept poppping here and there in AT LEAST a dozen different places, until finally we were close enough to see the tank. For a while it was really confusing, the shadow was all over the map.

Ok thanks.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Iron Duke: Hi Pat, These streches are death traps which in itself makes a good map but if you overuse it or make it too long, you are really putting the attacker at a disadvantage, maybe even to the point where the map becomes unbalanced.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Thanks, I'll remember that. <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Iron Duke: By the way, don't you think a mixture of the 2.5 and 5 meter elevation interval setting would be a nice option? Or maybe have "half" elevation points such as: instead of 10 to 11 elevation (which as you know, if you are using the 5 meter interval this often makes an impassible cliff), have a 10 to 10.5 to 11 interval so that you can make a nice slope without having the damn hill over a kilometer across!...if you know what I mean? What do you think? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I know. I'm modeling the map of Arnhem, and it's really tough with the map designer. Buildings disappear if they are not on flat ground. The Arnhem road bridge was a huge suspension bridge, there is no way to model that. There is a long series of railroad tracks snaking through the town, and in places the tracks are inside an enclosure. The walls on either side should be vertical, at least one level I would think. Again I can't model that so I did my best using very steep rough ground. <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Iron Duke: Are there any railroad bridges? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> There aren't any railroad bridges. In fact there aren't any stone bridges with railroad tracks going underneath. Used the stone bridge with a road underneath instead. I don't think it's a problem with the game, it's just that I'm too picky. I could easily double the number of terrain tiles to the map editor. Also in Arnhem the houses are very narrow, and are all connected to each other like condos. On my map every house "represents" two to five houses, but there is no way to model this in the game. The houses in the game don't look like houses in Arnhem, either. They look more like houses in Alsace, France, or parts of Germany. But then you can't expect BTS to model every type of house in Europe, it's just not possible. I posted something about suspension bridges on one of the forums, but since then I realized that suspension bridges would have to be a tile that stretches, because there is no repeating pattern. Regular stone bridges are a pattern. So this probably can't be done at all. A cathedral would be nice, I imagine someone out there would have a blast modeling a gothic or roman cathedral. Maybe if someone explained to me how we can build our own mods, I could replace the church with a cathedral or a chapel -- but probably the church is of a certain size and can't be expanded to cover more ground. So far I have the map of Arnhem itself, I have to build one or two more maps to cover the landing zones and the approaches to the city itself. It's taking me so long! And it's really hard to build a good, realistic map. This is still the best game on the market right now, in my opinion. I had planned to buy Starfleet Command because I used to play Star Fleet Battles as well as ASL, but Starfleet Command keeps getting pushed further into the future. Eventually I will probably buy it for $5 in some bargain bin...

Hi, Welcome to the forum. When you start the game, it should have a version number written in white near the bottom right corner of the screen. If it says 1.03 then you probably have the gold demo. As for ordering through the mail, You will receive it through the mail... I don't know if you can order by mail. BTS will answer I'm sure. They may have posted info re. this on their website. www.battlefront.com

I've found that people tend to gravitate toward the heavier, latest, strongest units. In five games I had to fight hand-to-hand against German paratroop squads in 3 games out of five, so people are looking at the point values and the strengths of the different units and they pick those with the biggest punch. In a way this mimics what happened during the war -- tanks got heavier, infantry became better equipped, because the opponent was doing the same. Problem is that people pick the strongest units first, every time, so after a while they lose some of the benefits of the game I think. I did notice that in one game, the SS took no prisoners -- they eliminated every single unit that they overpowered. This is probably historically accurate. I've had two US Paratrooper squads go beserk just like in ASL -- they rushed a roadblock and were totally wiped out by an HMG position right on the other side of the barricade. This is a great game!

Not totally unrelated, I am playing a scenario now in a snowstorm, and my 3 inch mortar is totally useless. On the one hand I can't fire at anything closer than about 115m; on the other hand I can't see more than 50m away... and I can't target things that aren't in my LOS for some reason. I tried to use a leader to augment the LOS range, but 50m + 50m is still less than 115m, so no success.

I noticed, in the last five games I've played, three players had fallschirmjaggers. Hmmm if I follow this correctly, at least half of German troops in WW2 were paratroopers...

I did some work analyzing survey results and people almost always insisted that we asked people what their sex was, but in 90% of the cases there were no differences between men and women. These were mostly opinion surveys about associations (like Medical associations), one of the surveys was about learning styles and again there was no significant difference between respondents whether they were males or females. I think society fluctuates over time, sometimes it's socially popular for women to be involved in wars (e.g. the Celts vs. the Romans, in Gaul) and other times it's not (like Victorian times). We are only about 100 years away from Victorian times, so some of that lingers. We are making progress though. Also women are put against impossible standards, more so than men I think. (I'm male by the way). e.g. women have to be slim but at the same time they can't be flat so they are almost forced to go to the plastic surgeon. It's either one or the other, women can't be both. This is just an example. Careers and doing the house work too -- women usually do 70% of the household chores, even when they work as many hours as their husbands. The husbands commonly overestimate how much housework they do, many say 50-60% but in fact it's more like 30-40%. Suffice it to say that there are more difference within each gender than there are across the sexes. Enough stats.

I totally agree with you. The CM game designers, programmers, modelers did a fantastic job, I don't understand how they pulled this off. They must have alien blood or something. Building a game like this is a mammoth job! I'll post praise as often as you like.

I noticed too that some of the people who used to complain about not getting their copies have disappeared from the board! Captain Manieri comes to mind... Quake 3, why would anyone want to play that?! Someone please explain it to me.

When I read the subject I thought maybe you were using a Tiger Ausf B or some other mammoth tank but I'm surprised to hear this. I'm still dreaming about that tracked bunker, the Maus... Or the heavy Russian tanks that will be in CM2.