Kong

One more reason for me to dislike CompUSA!!!

So I guess the people at CompUSA had no idea what Combat Mission was but agreed to put in on their shelves?!?! I don't think so. Either it got bundled with other CDV titles, which would make me wonder why CDV would be going through a 3rd party to sell their products to CompUSA or CDV "accidently" (pun intended) included it in the bundle?!?! Or it was sold from some "3rd" party and someone at CompUSA had to have some "idea" of what it was or it would not have gotten on their shelves. Any way you cut it someone "in the loop" knew this software was not suppose to be sold in the USA. Get 'em BFC boys!

If you ran into a copy of CM:BB CDV version in some little mom and pop computer shop then I would be like, ehh, litte Grey market stuff nothing you can do about it, well it would not be worth the effort. But to find a CDV version in any major American retailer (CompUSA, SoftwareEtc/Babbages, Wal-Mart, BestBuy) is a serious problem. I sure hope this is a VERY isolated incident. I guess this means WE All need to be on the lookout for CM:BB CDV to give BFC a heads up.

Yes the CMBB community is vastly outnumbered by the Warcraft one, so don't hold your breath. I anticipate getting several Honorable Mentions for Strategy Game of the Year at websites when they do their Game of the Year articles. Just the reality of the market. As much as I want the BFC boys to reap the financial benefits of having a Warcraft size community I like the relatively small size that we are now.

Cable... once you go broadband you will never be able to do 56k again. I remember many moons ago debating whether to DL a 2 meg file knowing it would take 4 hours!! One of those files was Descent, one of the best Demo's I have ever played!

Thanks JaegerMeister for finding and especially Barry Geipel for sharing/creating! Those are some fantastic pictures! Would love to read more about Otto's experiences during the War.

I have been an on again off again viewer of FiringSquad for years. Overall they give fair reviews. An 85% is excellent coming from them. I consider FS to be site primarily for action type junkies, FPS, RTS, etc. They basically rave about how good it is. The same reviewer gave Medieval: Total War an 86%. If it makes you feel any better FS gave Unreal Tournament 2003 a 72%.

Sorry guys, "Rough" and "Rocky" are not the same thing. Different tiles, different .bmps. Le Tondu & Michael emrys you can do that but the whole idea is so I DON'T have to do that. I like to plot multiple vehicle/troop paths from a high vantage point, that would be a birds eye view not Puff the Magic Dragon view! lol Next!!!

I agree but unfortunately there are a lot of these morons. They're the reason so many "bad" games come out that look "good". These guys are used to playing "dumb" AI, hell they need dumb AI! LOL IF they run into a game with real AI, or industry leading AI like in CMBB, they are in a world of hurt. So the knee jerk reaction is to diss something so they go for the graphics. The great irony is that almost all video games that are considered classics rarely have fantastic graphics when they are released. The only exception I can think of would be the Doom/Quake series. Now with that being said I must admit that one of hopes for CM3 is that the graphics are greatly improved. I know the AI, interface, sound and gameplay will be top-notch I just want to see more detail really. Tracks/wheels moving, realistic looking and moving smoke, exhaust, dirt flying everywhere, guys with more detailed movements, reactions, Guns with full crews loading, firing, reloading, etc. Oh, I was fantasizing the other night about actual planes strafing the battlefield and how cool it would look to be at ground level and look up and watch a plane come in on a strafing run! If CM3 is visually stunning what will be people have to complain about?!?!

Well I am confused. If rocky is a tile how does it not have it's own .bmp?!? A Tall Pine tile has a .bmp assigned to it. Could they not assign a .bmp to the Rocky tile?!?! Tracer, any luck making them larger, how about making them yellow or orange?!?! I am kidding sorta... I just want to be able to see the darn things when I am in God mode!!

I am officially requesting one of you talented modders to please create a rocky terrain tile so that you can see the bloody thing(s) when you are using an overhead camera angle. Driving me nuts when I plot a movement order over what looks to be open terrain and then watch as my unit slows to a crawl, zoom down and... arghh d*mn rocky terrain again! I guess the only caveat to making it visible at high camera angles is that it may be not quite as pleasing to the eye at lower camera angles. I for one am willing to make the sacrifice! Any help is much appreciated!

Here is the link: GameSpy CMBB Review

I think I understand now part of the BBG issue. They want the modeling to be 100% consistent! It is the randomness that drives them nuts! They want to know that any identical unit will behave a particular way EVERYTIME under the same conditions. The beauty of CM IS the randomness! The other issue is still tactics. As Steve has said a good deal (the majority) of this "undesired" unit behavior is solved with sound tactics. JaegerMeister, you gave a good example of doing most things right... but. I wonder if your squad who broke were within HQ range and how close they were to their fellow squads? If they were not in range and not close and began taking fire from 2-3 enemy squads then I would expect a Green squad to freak and run home to Momma. Even if they were under HQ command and had friends close if one squad is getting alot of enemy fire I would expect them to break, especially a Green one. Green squads need lot's of reassurance from HQ and friends to sit tight while under fire. Maybe what we need to do is have some of are Armed Forces friends put together a COMBAT SIMULATION event for CM'ers to demonstrate what it is like to be under fire!! Then to top it off we could have a LIVE FIRE exercise as well! Hey that sounds fun, sign me up!!

Way to far into this thread to add anything other than I think the Inf modeling in CMBB is great and expect the few quirks to be addressed, as Steve mentioned. As for Corsendonk, that is the best ale I have ever had, period. In fact it is so good it got me to stop drinking beer! What?!!? Cause it is expensive and it ain't no "lite" beer, and I was drinking too much! So I decided to stop and stick to good quality gins and vodkas!!!

Ok everything looks great up close but when I zoom out to an overhead shot many of my unit base markers and target/movement lines look very fuzzy, enough to hurt my eyes. Any ideas what this is or how to correct it?

Onward to "Strategy Game of the Year!"

Same as Japinard here, where I turned on AA my screen went black when I started CMBB. Got a GF4 4400, AMD 1900+, 512 DDR Ram. Any ideas? Update: Ahh the wonders of using "Search". I found a thread that mentioned that I needed to use 4x as it seems 2x did not work. That did it. [ November 08, 2002, 03:27 PM: Message edited by: kking199 ]

Don't compare to WW2Online, the two games have nothing in common. Especially when it comes to quality of the game and customer satisfaction. I would recommend today looking at GeForce4 Ti4200 cards. Great performance at excellent prices. Many companies make this card. Gainward, Asus, Albatron, MSI are all good brands. Prices should be around $150 for it with 128 megs of ram. Careful as some cards have 64 megs of ram. Oh, and stay away from the GeForce4 MX cards, there is a good reason they are cheaper.

I think many are trying to use CMBO tactics in CMBB and are getting frustrated, as Steve said you have to "unlearn", and quite a bit. I feel like I am completely incompetent right now attacking with the T-34, but I am determined to learn how to use them correctly! I LOVE the new INF AI modeling. It bothered me the way INF in CMBO would just happily fight to the last man, just was not realistic. I am much more cautious with my INF now, and am finding that many times their panicking and running is the best thing that could happen... live to fight another day. This is especially true in Operations. I would have been shocked if CMBB did not outsell CMBO in the first month, and will be shocked if it does not significantly outsell it overall, say at least 30% more. You have a much larger base of persons who are aware of BFC now than 2 years ago. You have had 2 years of great word of mouth and reviews to get people excited about CMBB because of how good CMBO was. Your website looks great now, which btw I am still convinced you lost sales with CMBO because of your original website's look. I would guess alot of the "on the fence" people who did not purchase CMBO will see that CMBB is out, getting great reviews (like CMBO) and say alright I'm gonna get this one. Market baby market! I can tell you personally I stumbled onto CMBO through a now defunct site called 3DFiles, that had the CMBO demo. So obviously I would recommend getting your demo anywhere and everywhere you can! I was happy to see the CMBB demo at 3DGamers.com [ November 01, 2002, 09:58 PM: Message edited by: kking199 ]

LOL Nippy... classic! Played for a few months... great idea, but overall very poor execution and coding. I give 'em maybe 6 more months tops. Shame really. There is a good game in there somewhere.

Who needs "Dirty" movies when we get this excited over "Dirty" T-34s!!! ...and they're free to boot! (they will be free right?!?! right?!?!)

***** SPOILER ***** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Is it even possible to win this as the Russians against a human opponent??! I played as the Germans against another person and got the most lopsided win ever.. 94 to 6. I just don't see how the Russians could even get a draw against a competent human player. Anyone?!?!

This may have been mentioned but will throw in my .02 worth. 95% of my games are PBEM. I sure would love to have the "Load E-mail" button be on the main screen.

I recently read an excellent book on Armor warfare on the Western Front. Death Traps, by Belton Cooper. Cooper was a Lieutenant in the 3rd Armored Division. His job was to examine battle damaged Shermans and determine if they could be repaired or should be scrapped. Therefore he examined A LOT of Shermans. He said that one of the key reasons the Shermans caught fire early on was due to the wiring. When the shell penetrates the armor it creates a shower of metal fragments. These would sever the wires and cause a short which would then catch fire. I believe he said at some point they changed the wiring or the way it was protected to reduce this from happening. GunnerGoz I must respectfully disagree with you. Read this book and you will understand why. The Sherman M4A1 was NOT designed to fight tanks. The greatest shame of it all is that we could have seen the Pershing in numbers must sooner in the war. But Patton did not want them. He feared they might slow him down. Patton was succesful because he used the speed and mobility of his forces. But this could have been done just as effectively and quickly and with A LOT less casualties using the Pershing. On a side note Cooper also talked about how effective the Priest was at taking out German armor using indirect fire and hitting their weak top armor.

Thanks gentlemen, I had a sneakin suspicion there was some logical (or illogical as the case may be) explanation!