patboivin

OK, I'll keep you in mind. I got my hands on maps of Arnhem, (heh heh), that could be interesting but I hope it won't take months to model the map. Send me an e-mail too, in a couple of weeks, in case I start playing my own scenario and forget the outside world!!!

I just have the gold demo, but in the game, will it be possible to modify existing maps? e.g. if Valley of Trouble is in the game, is it possible to modify that map a little?

They probably forgot to put them in, that's why they don't discuss them. Maybe you will get a response, now.

I like the Tiger Ausf B because of its 88LL gun, even in ASL the Tiger Ausf E didn't perform all that well IMHO. I agree that the Ausf B is defensive, it bogs down too much and it was just too slow. On the other hand just knowing that a King Tiger is coming was enough sometimes to get my opponent to clear out, with few shots fired. Mind you much of the time the Germans in 1944-45 needed just that, AFVs that could slow down an enemy's advance. Good for the Allies that they had plenty of air support. Once I played a scenario where I put a JagdTiger behind a stone wall that was shaped like a V, at a road intersection. That was entertaining, I never knew my friends could swear that much. I would agree that the JagdPanther was better defensively, though. 75LL wasn't a bad gun either, plus the JPzV didn't bog down so much and could move relatively fast. Is there a SturmTiger VI in CM? I always need one of those, I use it as a flare gun...

Tom, It ends up being about $71 with the exchange. Usually if there is a customs charge you end up paying when they are at your door. I don't know about HST, I suspect we may have to dish out pocket money for that too. The mail was delivered this morning, I got CDs from Oracle Corp. but not the CM ones I wanted. I am still waiting for that 170-page manual... Great thing to read while I'm in the washroom!! ha ha

ThomasJ, Can you find me a copy of a 1944 Nijmegen - Arnhem map, at 1/32000 or better? I want to build MAPS but don't have a historically accurate basis for them. (I could use the Close Combat ones, but I doubt those are accurate). I *almost* had someone in the Netherlands ship me a couple, but he asked why I wanted them and then when I mentioned CM he stopped communicating. I don't know why -- maybe he is busy photocopying them for me, but I doubt it. Thanks. e-mail is lori.pat@ns.sympatico.ca

I played this scenario a number of times, as the Germans. The US player always does the same thing: Send the tanks at full throttle down the road, and line them up between the church and the hill side. The StuGs can come in from behind the hill, but they almost always get picked off by the five Shermans. The US player can lose two or three shermans during the shootout, but inevitably he has one or two left. Any way around this? The StuGs don't seem able to kill five tanks in one turn.

Yeah, you wouldn't want them to charge you for patches, or force you to upgrade every time they patch the game!

My VISA was billed on June 15, yippeee! I have never been so happy to add something to my VISA balance. Now all I have to do is wait after USPS to send it to the border, then for Canada Post to send it to me. How long will that take, do you think??

Allan, My wife read your post and she agrees with you, it very well might have been your LAST anniversary! )

Will do.

60,000 posts for just one person! WOW I AM IMPRESSED uh, -- what?! Sorry, I get it now, 6.

So the voices in your head are your superiors, not under your watchful eye? I pre-ordered about a month ago, I live in Halifax (N of Maine) but I doubt I'll be first my VISA hasn't even been billed yet. I am on vacation all next week, who wants to bet I'll receive the game the last day of my vacation. I suspect all the mail gets sent to Toronto's Pearson airport, then it gets trucked to some Canada Post depot to be sorted by province, then it gets either trucked or sent by air again to each province's main sorting station... You get the picture I have a feeling the Toronto people will get the game first.

[...]we could purchase battalion size +support units. But something tells me that that would go over 1000 points. [...] It all depends what nation you're playing, and when. Some of those German units in 1945 might just fit in at about 1000 points... and so would the British airborne near the end of Operation Market Garden. I know I'm going outside the bounds of your question, but when they say for example that the 2nd SS Division was somewhere, maybe it's just the size of a battalion by the time it gets to where you want to play. The survival rate on all sides was pretty low, as far as I know. I am one of those who want to put two battalions against each other or more, how are we ever going to add a strategic outlook to things. The Web campaign is good but I want to do this with only ONE opponent, no referee needed. ASL couldn't do it so my friend and I had to make up our own rules. The strategic scale is outside the bounds of CM so we will have to make up something to accommodate the bigger picture. I am sure someone will come up with something, it's inevitable I think. The reason I harp on this is because I want to reproduce Operation Market Garden as much as possible. Many of the things that could have been done better (or worse) during that campaign were just due to flukes, bold creative moves or mistakes/lack of initiative at the strategic level. Once you are in a bind because of bizarre strategic decisions, or just because of coincidence, there are fewer possible outcomes. It's fun to play CE or VT to death (OK, that was a bad choice of words, esp. when I am the one getting trounced), but I want to know what would have happened if the Panther had been there from the very beginning, if the VT reinforcements appeared on a map side instead of behind the US troops, or if the StuGs in CE had circled around and appeared BEHIND the US column, or on the side of the map. (sorry, I'm rambling I better go sleep again. Why do we have to sleep more than once a week?) <yawn>

I played some of those multi-turreted tanks in ASL, it was a nightmare, with all those separate covered arcs. I wanted all the turrets to point to the same target at once to knock it out, so I could move on to the next... In CM it wouldn't be as much of a problem, we could let the tank pick its own targets. Looks like a good site, I was surprised to see some many Canadian entries. Thanks.

The hill on the left kind of looks like a massive Tiger II turret. Scary! Time to turn the boat around! The graphics look great, can't wait to play the release version of the game. You're just whetting our appetites, you know.

Not me! For real -- I am way too busy. I log in at night, when I am supposed to get some sleep.

I'm 34, I guess for once I am older than the average. But I feel as if I were 50 at least. You bet I have been playing wargames for some time, I got my first lesson the hard way when I was about eight years old and I rushed a ten year old up a staircase and he hit me over the head with a yard stick. (we were playing Knights of the Round Table with yardsticks and pillows). I ended up in the hospital with stitches. I was bleeding quite a bit, I had to hold a towel to my head. Never happened to me again! Although high school dating was a disaster. The ten year old boy got punished something fierce after his parents learned that he hit a younger boy on the head with a yardstick.

Did any of you purchase Avalon Hill's Squad Leader game for DOS? I have it right here, the box is really dusty. It was supposed to mirror Squad Leader on 256K of RAM. I haven't touched it in years, but I never could make it work properly. It installed all right, but the graphics made absolutely no sense to me. The copyright is 1987,1988 -- twelve years later, look at where we are now with CM! Unbelievable. I am happy!

The response seems to be almost unanimous, you did a really great job with this game. I can't imagine how many hours of designing, planning, coding you did to get it to this point. Thanks for the effort and time you put into it, you did a better job than any other computer strategy game I have seen so far. Congratulations for a job well done.

My 2 cents' worth -- I think the forum is stagnating because we all played the demo scenarios how many times? So far for me, CE 4 times by myself, 3 times PBEM against a friend. Valley: 2 times by myself, 2 times PBEM against a friend. Riesberg didn't make it to the gold demo, that would have distracted me some more before the game is shipped. The more I am distracted by other things the less likely I am to post messages like this one on the forum!

I am Canadian, what about the RAM II? Was that just a lookalike of the early Shermans? I find it strange that the RAM II always shows up in games as the Kangaroo, what happened to all the TURRETS??? Maybe they were sunk by u-boats along the way. Maybe Canadians had such high morale and were so tough that we didn't need turrets on our tanks, they were just decorations.

In ASL I liked the latest Russian tanks, those were hard to beat. I also like hidden 88LL guns, those make for happy surprises, especially when the enemy is a convoy of slow, oversized, lumbering British AFVs. (here I have to admit that I got the short end of the stick for that ASL scenario and I had to play the Brits, my opponent had three 88LL guns hidden on top of a level four hill. I can't remember ANY of the British tanks making it through, the road was cluttered with wrecks and the useless things had a movement of 8.). I am not picky though, in a scenario my favorite tank is the one on my side that picks off all enemy targets quickly, effectively and doesn't bog down. My favorite tank (when played by an opponent) has to be the t38, the one that was bolted together so that when you fired at it the bolts would come lose and fly all over the place inside the tank. Those are fun. I don't like flamethrower tanks, they tend to have a very short lifespan, for some peculiar reason they become top priority for the opponent once their true identity is revealed. (I could never figure that one out...)

I bet the modelers have developed headaches while reading this list. Aim high, as they say!

I pre-ordered about a month ago, about a week after I started playing the original demo.