SlowMotion

What about both sides having same equipment? Russians vs Russians or Tigers vs Tigers.

One of the things to check for people who haven't been able to make CMBO work, is your monitor. I'm not sure whether it has an effect, but in my case the Display Properties monitor used to be Plug&Play Monitor. Once I changed this to the real monitor I have, I think some things have worked differently. May not work for everybody, but that's how it is in my current configuration.

In this new design, could you please design the main page so that people don't have to scroll down as much as they have to now?

Is there any new CMBB info on this? Will it be possible to extract parts of the whole movie and make them sharable files like mods and scenarios are now? I tend to agree with Binkie that viewing the battle with full fog of war off should be possible only if your PBEM opponent allows it. IMO this should be a selectable option once the game is over. The opponent wouldn't need to tell his password, but the program would save a special movie file without any passwords.

I haven't tried XP, but isn't this possible already using Windows2000 Diplay Properties? At least I can do this from Advanced/Monitor.

Does anybody know whether some kind of simple planning tool will ne in CMBB? Drawing arrows and typing simple text notes to a separate layer would make set up of big battles easier.

Here's my update: My Windows refresh frequency is 75 Hz and this is how things are working. When I start CMBO the main screen, battle selection screens, briefings are 100% ok. Once in a battle, there's some flickering in lower part of the screen in texts 'Turns', 'Of' and 'Go'. Other than that things seem to be ok. When I quit the game or if I press CTRL-B to view briefings, text is not displayed so I have to ESC. Also, after ending one battle and returning to battle selection screen, graphics are messy. So now it seems I can run one battle just fine, but not two in a row without restarting CMBO in between. I'm quite satisfied even though I have no idea why things are working like this. But at least I can read briefings again.

I searched rarity and read some of those discussions. Still I can't understand how the option #2, Fixed Rarity, would make sense. Like Wreck and many others wrote, it seems to make buying rare units dumb. #3 would make purchasing units more exciting because of those possible bargains. Still, something like Rarity By Availability would be a nice thing to have, maybe the fourth alternative? To me it seems to lead towards units appearing in same kind of percentages as they were found during some month. In one of those old discussions, these June 1944 numbers were listed: PzIV - 719 Panther - 333 Tiger - 88 StuG/JagdPz - 393 So, I think some optional rarity system should allow Panthers be about as common as Stugs, but more than twice as rare as PzIVs.

But how would this pool work in different sized QBs? Let's say 800 and 1000 point games. Would they both allow 2 KTs?

Redwolf: I'm not sure if I understood you correctly. What I mostly had in mind was that this partly purchased troops idea would allow scenarios where the basic setting would be predefined, let's say Valley of Trouble Redone: For the defender, fortifications would be prepurchased. The rest of the points could be purchased, but within certain restrictions: for example armor could be up to 250 points, fortifications, arty and vehicles totally banned. Then the player could buy one Panther like it is now, or buy two cheaper tanks. And the rest for infantry. The attacker might have the initial group prepurchased, but the reinforcements could be purchased within some limits. Players could investigate the map and predefined troops as much as they want and then decide what to buy. I think replayability would be just incredible. This can't be done by a trusted person. Using a predefined map for a QB would be like a special case of this: a map with no prepurchased troops.

I think this 'Some troops are fixed, some can be purchased' would make scenarios much more suitable for PBEM. Now the risk that the other player goes ahead and checks opponents initial setup and reinforcements is so high, that QBs tend to make more sense. If some troops were purchasable, the surprise element would be there plus we could use all the great maps that scenario designers can produce. I think this would be an incredibly cool thing to have.

Another useful feature would be the ability to use SavedGames maps in scenario editor. Sometimes the map you generate for a QB would be reusable as is or after some tweaking has been done to it. And what about a mixture of QBs and scenarios: a map with some prepurchased troops. Then at QB generation time you could define that players can also buy some amount of troops in addition to the prepurchased ones?

It was too good to be true. When I booted my machine today, CMBO was working the old buggy way again. I did some quick changes and that frequency modification seems to have something to do with it, but does it only last until your next shut down??? Maybe this needs further investigations...

Because I haven't seen your screen shot, I can't tell whether my experience is exactly the same, but I saw something like that in one of my own scenarios. The AI had planned to move lots of vehicles to a bridge along a river bank. The river bank was normal terrain, next to it was scattered trees, both can be used by infantry and vehicles just fine. In my setup I had decided to close the river bank normal terrain using barbed wire. The scattered trees area was still usable. But the AI just didn't seem to understand it at all. All the vehicles just gathered to make a huge group next to that barbed wire obstacle. It looked really strange, I can send the screen shot if you're interested.

Hi! I just accidentally noticed how I can make my Nvidia-driver related CMBO graphics problems disappear. Win2k, detonator22.85, DirectX 8.1. The problems I used to have included messed graphics when browsing battles, briefing texts not showing etc. The trick that fixed EVERYTHING was to change the refresh frequency of my Windows desktop from Display properties. As long as it was the highest possible, I had problems. Once I changed it to use a different value, <drumroll....> surprise....! I don't really understand what's causing this, but the gfx adapter now uses different frequency for CMBO and Windows desktop (because I can hear a snap from my monitor every time I switch between them with ESC) and EVERYTHING works!!! I'm still slightly stunned by this, after trying so many things unsuccesfully, but it really is true. I have no idea whether it changes things on other peoples machines, but what can you lose?

> How about some scenarios utilizing it? You could try my RockyRoad scenario. It uses this diagonal approach by accident, not because it was my intention to prevent edge hugging. http://www.geocities.com/slm201slm/

Ok, here's my ad as well. I've released three fictional scenarios as well. Two small ones and one medium. Go check'em out from http://www.geocities.com/slm201slm/ The feedback I got from my playtesters was also positive, so there All feedback is appreciated.

There are also great sound mods out there. You can find quite a few from http://www.warfarehq.com/

Something like that Or putting a couple of snipers in the middle of woods. When a huge enemy human wave begins to approach, they see "You're surrounded!" And from the other sniper "drop your weapons - now!" I think at the moment many PBEM games include such comments between players - just think how cool it would be see the units "talk" those messages. HQ-units could shout all new versions of "Los, Los!" to troops under their command, the enemy could be deceived with fake plans, pre-attack propaganda and so on. There are so many uses for this. I think it would be especially good in town fights etc. where the enemy is close enough that we could think the opponents could actually hear what the other one is saying.

hi there! I just came up with a simple idea that is totally non-historical, maybe silly I don't know, but that IMO could make PBEM games more fun: When planning a PBEM turn, one could select a unit and write some text that this unit would "say" during the turn. Like in cartoons. The words would be displayed near the unit the same way "gun hit" or other such things. Then when watching the movie you could see things like a Stuart commander aiming at a KT shouting "I have higher ROF!" or other serious or not so serious things. I think this simple thing could make movies very atmospheric. And to make it perfect, it would be nice to specify a delay, like when using the Pause command, that would tell when during the turn the words would be shown. Like after 10 seconds or 30 seconds. What do you think?

I think this would be one of the most praised improvements of CMBB. Getting rid of that every third turn when nothing happens would be soooo good.

I think this could be an interesting addition, especially in QuickBattles. IF this was implemented, I think it should work so that the player wouldn't know how many reinforcements there will be, if any (so that the scenario wouldn't get spoiled). Here's one way to do it: The scenario designer could define reinforcement zones and place some non-locked reinforcement markers inside the zones. When playing a scenario the player would decide a place for all possible reinforcements that might appear to that zone. For example, there could be 3 reinforcement zones. The designer decides to place two non-locked markers to zone1. The player would see the three zones and choose a location for each, but only after the game has ended he would know how many reinforcements there were and where they appeared.

In one of my own scenarios I tried to do the same. Put infantry riding on trucks. But those trucks just stayed as far from the battle as possible. AFAIK there's not much you can do about this, AI just works that way. I replaced trucks with half tracks and then things worked like I had in mind.

in CMBB?

Well, maybe they'll write a CMBO to CMBB map conversion utility (or publish the file format so that someone else can do it) after CMBB has been released? I think it would be extremely useful.