poorfish

Tried all that and just does not work for me. Too many license keys, parts, pieces, exceptions, wasted time, repeated failure. Thanks again.

I'm giving up once again - all the advice works, then fails on the next run. and that is just up to the first activation which proclaims the game does not exist; RT just ends up in a black screen. There is just too many varied steps depending on various approaches to various parts. Seamless, it is not. Phil at the help desk years ago, went through all the possibilities he could think of but none worked then as now. If I were to go forward, it would be with new purchases - as the old simply are too involved, complex. and usually prone to failure, leading to frustration and a colossal waste of time to no fruitful end. Thanks for your help guys, Chris

wait there is one other problem Originally I got the CD but no longer have CD player. Surely that version would not fire off under 10.14. What do I do? Would downloading the base version again be usable on 10.14 to upgrade?

Thanks I'll try that,

Thanks Dave, I assume that "you count NOT install them" means to install them. I believe I have all the original info. Looking back the 3.0 installs did not go well, and I had to open a ticket, but the help did not work either. I remember trying to do all the upgrades in order several times; it was a lot of time consuming work only to fail at the end with the 3.11 upgrade and the activation failure - I think I lost interest about there: 2014. Perhaps there is a list somewhere of the patches and upgrades and the order in which to apply them to both RT and CMBN. This is WAY more complicated than it needs to be.

What is the best way to upgrade from 10.68 (Snow Leopard) to 10.15 Catalina? The original install is on a 2009 Mac Mini; the new install will be on an iMac 2019 5K 3.1 GHz 6 core. I bought both CBMN plus Commonwealth Forces and Market Garden, and then Red Thunder in their 1.0 versions; the subsequent engine upgrades to 3.0 worked, but after that no joy. So I never went beyond that. I sent some of the files via Bluetooth to the iMac but hesitate going further lest I screw something up. Would it be more efficient and less touble to just repurchase the games and the modules? Thanks

FWIW: On my Mac Mini early 2009, the scenario takes a long time to load using scenario test mode, then after hitting start button, then surrendering, the HD grinds and grids before finally returning to main interface. On quitting the app, the HD grinds away again for a few more seconds.; this never happens with other smaller scenarios - I thought it was just my old mac and near nonexistent graphics capability.

"How to make the German AI move west as a single mass. And the Russian AI to move to block them???" If all the German forces are A1 for example, the just make a swath across the map in the AI, they will usually move as one, but sometimes some units will chose the same path to the same point resulting in unit slowdowns. Keep making sucessive swaths until the goal is reached. For the Russians who are trying to stop them, there are any number of tactics that could be used - which is the most likely approch the Germans will use to reach the exit, what forces will be used when and how to achieve that, and so on. The German part of the AI is realitively easy compared to the decisions the Russian AI will have to accomplish to stop them. As the AI author, you have to decide who's going to win in the end or can either side win with each having the correct balance of forces. Else is there a historical battle you can model the forces/outcome and so model the AI? I'm sure others will have a different approach, so the above is not the last word by any streach ...

Right now I can't find the post/page were I saw the above ref to (APS) and (ERA). The first may refer to Active Protetion Systems and the latter to Extended Range Ammunition. One variation was for one service and the other for another, however. All were M1A2 SEP versions. My comment was in ref to the original posted question about M1A3's existance/non-existance. All I know.

M1A3 was the original thought for naming the next iteration of the M1 series but for reaons unfathomabe to mortals it was decided to call it the M1A2 SEPv2 (APS) Abrams for the Army and M1A2 SEPv2 (ERA) Abrams for the Marines - or vice versa. See here for one: http://defense-update.com/products/m/M1A2SEP.htm

Today, we added parameters for both sides. After much heated discussions, it was settled that we would use the same parameters for both sides. We used the value of 25 for all of the first column on the left. These remain arbitrary, in any case. Last night's battle took about an hour to conclude. One poor Russian group misread their map and came out right on top of a German machine gun nest. Had to avert our eyes, so senseless was the slaughter. We still had a problem with troops keeping up and arriving at the front on time to make a difference. One expert suggested we divert the group in question from the northeasterly Crossroads assignment to a direct southern route to the front to solve this perplexing problem. It remains to be seen if the main force tasked with hitting the Crossroads first can take it successfully with minimal losses before proceeding to the front. 2 Company acquitted itself well in their assigned tack of harassing the enemy's rear. We'll run the changes today and see what happens. Note 1: the Russian forces ran against stationary and undirected German forces, since this is basically testing the Russian AI. Note 2: We corrected the German, as suggested. Chris

Well, the first thing we did here was bring in a bunch of people - loggers, road builders, landscapers, as well as hire a few local farmers to scout for routes through the dense woods. Then we set to work on the balance of forces.; too lopsided for the Russians and too many for low powered graphics boxes. We had achieved a good balance at 455 troops per side, but the foot soldiers couldn't keep up with mechanized units, do we had to hire some truck drivers; this put the Russians at a slight numerical advantage, but the drivers are non-combatants anyway. Running the stock AI resulted in a complete rout of the poor Russians, so we had to work on that as well. Our military advisors said the overall plan was sound, but lacked the dedicated resources and refinements needed. Head on attacks are very bloody and do not always work. 2 company was given some mechanized units to complete a rear encirclement, while a part of the main was split to begin an attack in the north. Going over the terrain objectives for both sides, some were added, while others were downsized. The German units and weapons were more properly deployed to suitable positions. The German and Russian artillery and air support were thought superfluous to the engagement and eliminated; those resources are need on other fronts - suck it up. The PAKs and the panzerfausts were degraded as stated in the mission statement. After many iterations, the battle remains bloody with heavy loses on both sides, but the Russians seem to be gaining a slight advantage. At some point, later in testing, we will perhaps be able to snag a few Tigers or Panthers when they become available to replace the inferior Panzers and other mechanized units. We'll see. Would love to send a copy, have no idea how. Chris This resulted in an overall reduction in file size by some 75K.

Yes, but then there is the money issue. What effects me likely effects many others. The work I used to do drove my upgrades, not games. Again not every one has the money, time, or inclination to upgrade. Which makes my point. Smaller, cleaner scenarios will keep and encourage more people to continue to buy and play, than large complex one ever will.

I second poesel71's criticism of the Repository - it sucks. I commented yesterday about the character limit, but thought perhaps I was wrong. There are 3 comments of the scenario I posted a few years back; one is mine which was truncated and so made no sense. Another was a recent comment to which I replied. And clicking the Leave Comment button made the whole thing vanish. Are comments over 1500 character automatically deleted or do they have to wait to be checked by a monitor? Doesn't matter really as there are no comment guidelines on the page - maybe somewhere else, but again that is irrelevant. BF Admin and others need to re-look at the whole Repository concept. There must be more user friendly ones available or just tweak the existing code. We users want to comment, and scenario designers want to be commented to, but the present system seems to actively discourage it. And active discouragement leads to fewer new maps and gives the appearance to some that the game is dying. -- On a Second Front Maps are growing increasingly larger and more complex, perhaps faster than users can upgrade their machines to render the evermore complex scenarios. I have this problem with my macmini 3,1 and must edit scenarios to make render times acceptable, and now with MG the render time is horrendous. To that end, I have edited several of the Master Maps so they now load faster. To scenario authors: I would encourage you to make smaller, tighter, less graphically complex scenarios. For instance: try not to place trees etc in every fence/hedge row square, make sure your roads are complete and properly formed ... not to mention the placing hundreds of Flavor Objects ... I have to contanly keep the numbr of troops and vehicles on screen way below 1000, else machine gun fire is relagated to the occassional pop ... pop ... pop.

One of the possible reasons for so little feed back is that the comment space on the senario page is limited to only 1500 characters. And last time I tried to type a message it got all screwed up, as I recall, and the BB would not let me add another comment. Perhaps this is fixed now?

Have mac, not pc --- frapp is pc. cannot find mac free game recorder. Know of any?

Too bad. That would have been a niffty feature. And maybe sold a few more games ...?

Chops, John, Macs come with AAPL's Preview which is far better and quicker for that sort of thing than anything Adobe.

Actually, while the other stuff might be nice, I like the "Options (page 9): Added new toggle. Alt-M will toggle War Movie Mode." Wondering if this 'movie' is exportable ...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2998207/posts Several interesting comments and further reading from the link above: Poster 1: A great book on the subject is “Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II,” by Belton Cooper. The author was in charge of recovering, cleaning out and repairing or dismantling damaged and destroyed tanks for Patton’s 3rd Armored Division. One of the revelations in the book is that the US was ready to replace the Sherman before DDay. The US Army could have gone to war in France with the M26 Pershing, which was ready to start being produced as the US main battle tank in late 43. The major opponent of the change was none other than Gen. George Patton, who falsely believed that a heavier tank with wider tracks would have to be slower on roads. He took the view that tanks would fill the roll of cavalry, running free behind enemy lines, and did not consider tank to tank fighting to be a major role. The Germans had other ideas, and the Americans were forced into unequal battles that cost over 100% casualties in his tank crews over a period of 8 months. Poster 2: Part of the situation was Army Ground Forces doctrine. Tanks were vehicles of exploitation. They were to play the role of horse cavalry. Tank to tank warfare was to be the domain for the tank destroyer force. The Pershing was a not ready for early 1944 manufacture. Consideration was given to replacing the Sherman with the T 20 series. These tanks had the lower silhouette of the Pershing but carried the same armament as the 75mm and 76mm Shermans. The Shermans proved ideal for the open warfare of July, Aug and early Sept 44, and combined with the Jabos of the 9th AF their results would not have been improved upon had they been replaced with half as many Pershings.It was true that in tank to tank battles US tankers were at a disadvantage, but in infantry combat US troops were also at disadvantage given the quality and numbers of the MG42 which all but negated any advantage of the Garand over the Mauser. What really gave US forces a solid advantage was the superiority of its artillery. In terms of its quality, numbers and time on target doctrine it was the King of the battlefield from the earliest days at Kasserine to the very end. Poster 3: True. That doctrine was part of the debate between wars between the traditional three branches of the Army, Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery, each of which claimed the tank should be dedicated to them. The Infantry wanted it to be a support vehicle. They wanted a heavy, wide tracked tank with a long, high velocity gun for destroying bunkers and enemy tanks. They didn't care about speed, as they claimed it didn't need to go faster than the infantry. The Artillery considered anything with a cannon to be theirs, and viewed tanks as mobile artillery. They objected to any long, high velocity gun, as they burned out barrels faster. They insisted that a barrel should last at least 1,000 rounds. According Belton, it's doubtful any tanks lasted long enough in combat to ever fire a thousand rounds. Finally there was the Cavalry. With horses obsolete, the clear answer for cavalry officers like Patton was the tank. They wanted light fast tanks to fill the cavalry role. Although they won the argument in terms of doctrine, the M4 was a compromise; light and fast, but with a low velocity gun the artillery favored. Poster 4: Very thorough and informative article. Thank you. In regard to some of the earlier posts, and some additional comments: The Germans did indeed employ Panthers at Kursk. In part, Operation Zitadelle had been delayed until a quantity of Panthers was available. However, those Panthers had been rushed into production before they had been properly tested and were prone to breakdown, particularly their transmissions. The gun and armor scheme was still the same that the Allies would face in Normandy a year later. The Soviets captured a number of Panthers, and several of them were undamaged and had simply broken down. The Soviets knew exactly what they were faced with and as a result, they up-gunned the T-34 from the 76mm to the T-34/85. The problem was that our Soviet friends didn’t allow an American military mission to go to the front or make a meaningful personal inspection of the captured German equipment. They didn’t tell us that they knew their T-34/76, which was comparable to the Sherman, was not a match for the Panther. And they didn’t tell us that the Germans were producing the Panther in substantial numbers. Poster 5: Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II Arthur Herman It was realized that you could pack ten times the tonnage in a Liberty Ship as parts as you could as assembled vehicles. So the agreement was made with Iran to set up an assembly line in Iran, and just make all the parts in America. Parts would arrive by Liberty ship and be efficiently laid out to feed the assembly line. Each Soviet driver who arrived at the port would be handed the keys to a truck which had just been assembled there and been loaded with other military supplies. They would drive in convoys back to the USSR. Poster 6: If the switch was made to the Pershing tank before D-Day, there would have been no American tanks at the landing. They would have been too big for the landing craft, and there would have been no way for them to wade ashore. Add to that the fact that most American rail cars has a load limit of 40 tons. The Pershing weighed 43-46 tons. According to the book “Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things,” put out by Chrysler in 1946, the minimum load limit of the cars required to ship one Pershing was 118,000 pounds. That means a lot fewer tanks in theater. There was also a shortage of flat cars of of any capacity. On Christmas day of 1944 the Chrysler plant had 75 tanks ready to ship and only 18 flat cars on hand. Even Shermans had to be shipped one to a car unless a 50 ft flat car turned up. If the US Army was building tanks as heavy as the King Tiger, it would have reduced the number of rail lines able to move the loads, further clogging the pipeline. These logistical issues never seem to show up in armchair discussions of the M4 in WWII. Poster 7: “On Shermans. We called them “Emchetyrye”, from M4 [in Russian, em chetyrye]...Overall, this was a good vehicle but, as with any tank, it had its pluses and minuses. When someone says to me that this was a bad tank, I respond, “Excuse me” One cannot say that this was a bad tank. Bad as compared to what?... In the first place, this track had a service life approximately twice that of steel track. I might be mistaken, but I believe that the service life of the T-34 track was 2500 kilometers. The service life of the Sherman track was in excess of 5000 kilometers. Secondly, The Sherman drove like a car on hard surfaces, and our T-34 made so much noise that only the devil knows how many kilometers away it could be heard... In general the American representative worked efficiently. Any deficiency that he observed and reported was quickly and effectively corrected... For a long time after the war I sought an answer to one question. If a T-34 started burning, we tried to get as far away from it as possible, even though this was forbidden.” When a Sherman burned, the main gun ammunition did not explode. Why was this? “Such a case occurred once in Ukraine. Our tank was hit. We jumped out of it but the Germans were dropping mortar rounds around us. We lay under the tank as it burned...We thought we were finished! We would hear a big bang and it would all be over! A brother’s grave! We heard many loud thumps coming from the turret. This was the armor-piercing rounds being blown out of their cases. Next the fire would reach the high explosive rounds and all hell would break loose! But nothing happened. Why not? Because our high explosive rounds detonated and the American rounds did not? In the end it was because the American ammunition had more refined explosives... The Sherman could never defeat a Tiger with a frontal shot. We had to force the Tiger to expose its flank. If we were defending and the Germans were attacking, we had a special tactic. Two Shermans were designated for each Tiger. The first Sherman fired at the track and broke it. For a brief space of time the heavy vehicle still moved forward on one track, which caused it to turn. At this moment the second Sherman shot it in the side, trying to hit the fuel cell. This is how we did it. -Dmitriy Fedorovich Interview with Russian WW2 tank commander http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/thefgmforum/threads/interview-with-russian-ww2-tank-commander.6905/

You must not have read the article - the points you make are fully covered in it. See opening paragraph below: "The US Army forces in the ETO went through a flurry of testing for one primary reason: The Panther tank. "The Panther tank came as a shock to US forces in the days after the Normandy invasion. Not that the Panther was unheard-of before D-Day. But somehow, the substantial information on the characteristics of the new German tank that were available to the US Army had not been correctly interpreted, and so its combat capabilities and its impact on operations had not been anticipated." The article is more than worth reading in its entirety, even to a non-historian like myself, exposing the overconfidence of the US command about the effectiveness of the .75 and the .76, despite repeated tests to the contrary, showing that the only weapon the Allies had to penetrate German armor was the British 17pdr - proving itself both in the tests and in real battles. The offer to the US from the Brits of the 17pdr was turned down, resulting in heavy losses of M4s alone. "During the period of 6 June through 30 November, 1944, the US First Army suffered a total of 506 tanks knocked-out in combat (counting both those written-off and reparable). Of these 506 cases, in 104 cases there were no casualties associated with the loss of the tank. In 50 cases the casualties were not recorded. Out of the remaining 352 cases there were 129 KIA (0.37 per tank) and 280 WIA (0.80 per tank), for a total average rate of 1.16 casualty per tank lost in combat." The focus of the article is the reproduction of the actual testing results of various rounds on different types of armor and what, if anything, was done - which prior to Normandy was to correct a slight deficiency - per Eisenhower. The original article uses small white text on a black background, making it difficult to read, the link below is easier to read. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2998207/posts

I don't know if the CM modeling takes into account the differences in US armor vs the German when hit with similar caliber and round type. M4 tanks on WWII had less hard, thinner, and flexible armor than Panthers, so the effects seen above might not hold true with US shelling German Panthers or Tigers. M4s weren't called "Ronsons" out of whimsy. See link: my post, "US Guns, German Armour".

This may be of interest to those who are into WWII tanks and armor - the suprise and struggle the US had with German Armor. The US was confident that M4s and the .75 and .76 rounds would penetrate anything the Germans had. Until they met the Panther tank at Normandy ... Complete with actual testing reports and images of various tanks and penetration of armor ... including the late introduced M18S and M26s. http://worldoftanks.com/news/919-chieftains-hatch-us-guns-vs-german-armour-part-1/

Designated as Elite because 1) forces fight better, 2) makes a more interesting senario (to me, at least) when equal forces use best available equipment. I've made some changes since the uploaded version, but have only tested it once. Am not sure how to replace the previous version, in any case. Right now am having problems with both the 1.10 and 1.11 patches - these are awaiting the return of Phil & co - ticket# ZCJ-806853- CMBN CWE 1.11 mystery crash.