Barleyman

I have a problem with Bocages.. To wit, trying to get troops to run up to them often results troops trying to run OVER them and getting slaughtered in the progress. What's the proper use of Bocages in game terms when defending against attack from the other side of the bocage? Keep them covered so anyone trying to cross will be slaughtered so the enemy has to use the holes in bocages'?

Another vote for Finns! Finnish ski troops or bust! How would you model that anyways.. Have them "limber" (put ski's on) for couple of minutes, then 100% bonus to movement in snow? Hmm.. Better call that 200%

Well, please do. They could probably crack this nut pretty easily if they had the problem setup running. That is, W2k, Nvidia and maybe athlon/duron. I don't know what kind of HW budget BTS operates with, but they've been selling out lately.. They coulda always GPL CM

For me the big white "TURN" and "OF" labels flicker, so no, it's not "1 pixel wide text only" FWIW, ESCing back to desktop fixes display corruption temporarily. This way you can read briefings and AARs.

Hmm.. At least rugged defense is in EU, that's good, timezone-wise.. Ok, let's see how many miserable defeats I've got in store

A question about the ladders - Which one's are "active" i.e. have people who participate? At least CMHQ seems to have truckload of people who don't have played even one game.. No, I don't really care so much about ranks, it'd be just nice to be able to pick someone who doesn't study russian military tactics with their Sunday brunch

Maybe BTS should hire some (new) people to handle the logistics side of things .. Grognards might not be so great with real-life supply problems, no? OTOH, I bet BTS isn't completely blown away by selling out repeatedly..

Um. I already fixed the main problem (w2k crashes) There's a registry workaround in ASUS site that works for other (kt133) motherboards too .. Yeah, W2k isn't a PnP OS, it uses ACPI by default. That means it doesn't give a "hoot" what you put into bios as long as ACPI is enabled.

I had bad lock-ups with CM in W2k, no blue screen, just hang. W2k + Nvidia 6.62 drivers + VIA 4.28 drivers i.e. very latest still had this problem. It's (apparently) a problem with Nvidia AGP drivers on Athlon motherboards. At least 6.62 drivers still suffer of the problem. There's a registry-workaround in ASUS homepage that fixed the lock-ups for me, your mileage may wary. Yeah, I have ABIT KT7 motherboard, but the fix is pretty generic. Check it out if the above sounded familiar: http://cgi.asus.com.tw/cgi-bin/dl.asp?filename=misc/utils/amdagp.zip Oh, it's not on all the sites, but at least in the main taiwanese-site. Cheers

CPU doesn't get bored doing that, I do. I usually check the spearheads and/or MLR, but rear guard .. nah. Even easier solution (programming wise) would be to add some kind of "contact" marker/list for units/platoons that haven't had new orders for a while and spotted someone. Actually this would be fairly realistic "report in" behavior, no?

How about a false-color map which would show the intensity of fire(fights)in the overhead view for the previous turn? That would give you an easy way to check if anything was happening with the rear guard you left in some hilltop 12 turns ago and who are late checking in..

I don't actually get blue-screen-of-death, W2k just locks up requiring hard reset. I also never had a lock-up after saving the game, but when CM finally killed W2k, all of the several saves I TRIED to do were hosed. I reckon that could be a bug in the IDE driver code somewhere. In any case, I made the lockups go away with all the different things I did .. Now I just have to backtrack and see when it starts to crash again. Bughunting by combat mission? I disabled ACPI (from device manager), which reduced lock up frequency but didn't make it go away.. I made sure all PCI devices had different IRQ's, even if it's not supposed to matter. Then I got very-latest-leaked ALI driver pack with new IDE drivers that replaced M$ generic drivers. I also applied an obscure registry patch which was supposed to be a workaround for an AGP problem in Nvidia drivers with Athlon Mobo that was due to be fixed with next public driver release.. I still have flickering buttons, but I can live with that. How about BTS gets an W2k machine with Athlon + Nvidia and figures out what goes wrong with that?

If CM makes W2k lock up, any games saved during the scenario/op in progress will be corrupted, no matter how much time passed between "saving" it and W2k locking up. I managed to play an op for two hours before lock up last night and the test savegames I made right in the beginning were hosed. But if I save and exit CM before W2k does die, the savegame will be OK. I just deleted all the corrupted savegames, as they appear as scenarios in the scenario/op list and clutter things up.. but I'm sure CM will make some more for me unless I manage to find a workaround for the lock-ups :-b

For what it's worth, I was losing Pz IVh's to lone STUARTS head-on in the Desobry op with pretty much one hit, one kill ratios. Admittedly some of those were "hit a turret weak point", in ~300m range and the PZ IVh turret armor is pretty bad, but _that_ bad? I still kicked AI's ass, just had very heavy casualties despite concentrating firepower + going out of my way to have narrow fields of fire.

Win9x stuff not into W2k applies.. I did some fact-finding and the only way to manipulate IRQs in W2k is to disable ACPI. It's a bad idea to do that in BIOS (even if it's possible). If you "update" the ACPI PC driver from "Computer" to standard pc, W2k won't have complete control of resources anymore. I haven't been able to actually CHANGE the resource allocation manually, except by moving cards around, even with both ACPI and PCI IRQ steering (that's in "standard pc") disabled. Anyway. I managed to play without crashes for about 2 hours in the Desobry01 operation, but after reboot w2k locked up almost immediately. Maybe it was just a fluke.. Savegame was corrupted as usual, too. I found out that if I save the game and immediately exit, the game is NOT corrupted. It looks like CM leaves all savegames OPEN until you exit (!!)

Okay, it'll lock up just by sitting there after I start a scenario after a few minutes. Most text appears sort-of yellowish for me and it doesn't flicker, maybe I have my gamma/color correction to thank of that.. I've also been unable to save games, they appear as scenarios and lock up CM if I try to load them. Fiddling with HDD write caching didn't help.. Now if I can just find NTFS->FAT32 converter I could downgrade..

I tried the 5.22 Nvidia driver, but it didn't make any difference, still flickering text and hard lock-up of W2k after few moments. That's the oldest available for W2k, too. Actually for me, not all of the text flickers, just a few borders like in the GO button. Still looks very annoying. DMX Xfire's a new soundcard from Terratec but they don't actually tell you what's it got (!) .. From what I've gathered, it uses the same chipset as Diamond MX400, something from Cirrus. Your basic 3D soundcard, I replaced SBLIVE with it as I got terminally sick of the loud crackling etc problems with EAX. Anyway. I played around some more with my W2k HW manager and found out it assigns ALL of the PCI IRQ's to IRQ7, so soundcard, network card, USB and TNT2 all use it. I did my damnedest to make it stop with no effect whatsoever. That was up to and including physically moving the cards to other slots, telling ESCD that IRQ7 was Verboten .. W2k doesn't let me change any of the resource settings for any of the PnP devices and apparently it resets the IRQ/DMA/etc values after it takes over. And it really seems to like IRQ7. Nice going, I think that's either a bug in the way it reports things or the VIA mobo drivers are fairly funky.. I quess I'll try if CM makes W2k freeze just by sitting there if I don't do anything..

I decided to try out W2k and promtly ran into the same flicker, lockup and savegame corruption problems other people have had here. My setup: Tbird 1G 128MB PC133 Abit KT7 3DBlaster TnT2 Ultra AGP 32MB DMX Xfire 1024 sound USB mouse IBM ATA100 45GB HDD (in ATA66 controller) This setup ran CM _PROBLEM FREE_ with W98. Ok, sometimes it'd bomb back to desktop but maybe only once a day, no big deal. I tried bios upgrade, different Nvidia/Creative drivers, disabling soundcard, updating VIA mobo drivers, disabling performance stuff in BIOS, forcing soundcard/3D card to use different IRQ's .. All for naught. Biggest problem by far is the abrupt lockup of W2k which requires a hard reset. Other stuff I could live with even if sometimes muzzle exhausts turns purple which might just be combat fatique.. Latest driver I tried was Nvidia WHQL 6.62 driver which came with Bill Seal of Quality but it was even faster to lock up than 6.31/6.34 drivers and didn't fix flicker. If anyone has actually found a solution to the lock ups, maybe I wouldn't have to upgrade back to W98 .. But if I cannot play CM, it doesn't matter what else W2k might do for me.