jmbunnelle

Great, I'm in NW Georgia so hopefully it will be in my box when I get home!

God, where's the f*&%#$%*&*@#@#g mailman!!!!!!!!!!

I love it, although it will take unlearning the old way. I hated having to constantly hit the keyboard or press the buttons at the bottom of the screen. Big improvement. Can't say it will make going back and playing CMBO very pleasant. I seriously doubt I'll play it for a long time anyway.

I think that's a very good idea, especially for operational maps.

JM: Sorry it took so long to respond. Negative. Haven't heard anything from him (nor seen any posts) in quite a while. I really dug on his Title Screen. Additionally.... very cool that you posted the mod-recap. Really helpful for all the players who missed out on some of the goodies the first time. So... what about you... any plans for future unit mods? - Holzem</font>

HolzemFrumFloppen, Have you heard anything from SamiV? Do you have a copy of his interface screens? jbunnelle

...Strategic Command AND CM:BB... there goes my hygiene

Stormseeker, If you thought SSI's PG1 and PG2 were addictive, I promise you'll love SC. Take it from a hardcore PG junkie. It's the unit expereince and being able to upgrade and form your own army that I love. Lately, extreme realism and OOB anal-retention has been the trend, and it's great to see a company not be so uptight about rigid historical data, i.e. you can't have PZ-V's in 1940. The hell I can't! P.S. OOB anal-retention has its place. I've had Talonsoft's Campaign series on my harddrive for a frightening amount of years. But it's not the only way to design a wargame.

Hubert, Yes, please change the AI turn messages if possible. I can just not look but, well, it's too tempting!

Great, I think it's something you should shoot for if you can do it. I love to see it all gray!

Hi all, Since I've seen a few random posts on here asking about SC mods, I thought a single master post that recapped everything would be helpful to the newcomer. Then just this one post could be added to and bumped from time to time. First off, Otto's Strategic Command HQ is a must, it being one of the first sites to collect mods from various artists. However, it hasn't been updated in quite a while because Otto is away until sometime in October. It contains the following unit mods, all of which are mutually exclusive: -The Camicie Nere Mod -Jbulldog's Unit Mod -Jorgen's Symbol Mod -Sgt Eagle's Historical Symbols Mod -Wolfe's Tank Mod -Moder's Aid 'Flat' Tile Sprite Next, there's HolzemFrumFloppen's Elite Interface (see original forum post here for screenshots). This essential mod changes everything, both the interface and graphics. I particularly love the work he did with the blended flags. Fantastic stuff. Sami V was working on an excellent interface using original propaganda posters, but I haven't seen a thread announcing its release. The initial screenshots, which are now dead links, were superb. Sami V, PLEASE let me know when it's done because I want it! Lastly, there are my own two mods, JBunnelle's Force-Specific Icons (see screenshot here) and Terrain Enhancements (see screenshots here). All of these are zip files that can be unzipped directly into your "bitmaps" folder in your Strategic Command folder (default is C:/Program Files/Strategic Command/bitmaps) BE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR ORIGINAL "BITMAPS" FOLDER!!! The majority of these cannot be used with one another. The Elite mod will replace pretty much all of the bitmaps in the game, so if you want to use another mod in conjunction with it, be sure you unzip the Elite into your "bitmaps" folder first, then unzip the others. [ September 06, 2002, 04:35 PM: Message edited by: jmbunnelle ]

bump

I enjoy it as is. It's cheap and it's damn fun.

Well, HoI is going to be quite unlike SC. I love EU2 but definitely wouldn't call it a wargame. Although it will have more combat, HoI wll also have a highly developed diplomatic side that deals with foreign policy relations and the economic/social aspects of waging war, such as instability at home, etc. If they can pull this off, and that's a pretty big "if", it should be good.

I agree, it works at its current length and changing to weekly turns would open up a big can for all of the reasons stated above. I don't think this type of game, as abstracted as it is, lends itself well to that kind of length. There are some excellent grand-campaign scenarios for Operational Art of War COW edition, which should be about 2.99 by now. There's at least four different ones on my computer at home: Third Reich, Europe In Flames, War In Europe, Europe 1939, etc., all of them somewhat whacked out if playing against the computer. Still fun, though, in my opinion. Many multiplayer stalwarts would disagree with me. Most are like 250 turns long or something insane like that, with thousands of counters and great detail.

LOL--Gunslinger, where the hell did you get that poster??

I am thankful for the comments everyone. Although I'm obviously on a different page than several of you concerning my views on US foreign policy over the last fifty years, I respect your input and will break my longstanding rule of never talking politics on a wargaming forum. So let's continue to keep it civil. I'm sure I don't have to mention that things like this can very easily become an ugly flame war between yin and yang. As for the next war, I disagree that it will be a showdown between despots and so-called "free thinking" democracies. Like a few mentioned, I see very little free-thought in the West these days, particularly with regard to those who shape and construct policy. To call the events following the WTC a World War is misleading to say the least. "You're with us or you're against us" is not exactly the spirit of cooperation. And don't even get me started on the Iraq thing. The unfolding of the next fifty years will be interesting and possibly quite ugly. Being an American and knowing the enormous amount of people here who fall completely out of the political spectrum (i.e. think all politicians are self-serving and full of s**t, don't vote and don't trust the government, etc.), I think it's only a matter of time before some seriously charismatic, whacked-out, ex-vacuum-cleaner salesman motivates the apathetic majority and convinces them that he is in their best interest, which he may very well be, who knows. And I'm not talking about militia groups or any of that popular paranoia, I'm talking about the average worker who just wants to take care of his/her family and provide for them with a house, a car, etc. If someone who is power-hungry and clever finds a way to tap into this segment of the population (not easy) and motivate them, it could get very nasty indeed. Granted, the electoral system is now arranged in such a way as to exclude outsiders, but this may not always be the case. If real wages continue to drop as they have in the past and the working poor in the US reaches unprecedented levels (one study at JHU showed that the gap between the rich and the poor in Manhattan alone was so extreme as to only be replicated on a former leper colony in the South Pacific), anything could happen. It is, after all, the story of history. I see no real reason for it to be different next time. Old wine, new bottles, as they say. One more thing: that being said, I think the fact that there are several countries represented here by posters on this forum, each with his own worldview, is one of the major contributions in the modern age. It's seemingly small things like that which remind me of the positives of the the e-marketing super--I mean, the information superhighway. [ August 26, 2002, 04:56 PM: Message edited by: jmbunnelle ]

I know the AI in any game will have horrible shortcomings but you learn to deal with it and have fun anyway. I'm very busy and just cannot coordinate multiplayer, at least not without leaving someone impatient and in the lurch. I play whenever I can squeeze in ten minutes here, thirty minutes there. I don't like the pressure of knowing someone is relying on me to continue playing. I've tried it and I simply don't enjoy it. If playing against people, I need the face-to-face contact and social interaction, and anything else just can't sustain my level of interest. As far as computer strategy gamers go, I might be in the minority but inclusion of the AI gives me the opportunity to continue wargaming as a working adult who no longer has the two or three friends down the street who can pop over for an afternoon of Third Reich, Civilization (Avalon Hill's, not Sid's), or Axis & Allies. These lazy bastards are now scattered all over the place, all of them as busy as I am, and coordinating anything with them is a logistical nightmare. So if it weren't for the great contributions by the teams behind East Front 2, West Front, Operational Art of War, Panzer General, Combat Mission, and Strategic Command, I'd have given up wargaming long ago. Of course, I still have War In Europe in my closet just in case said lazy bastards show up unexpectedly one afternoon for one final crap-kicking.

That's how I see it as well. To include individual artillery units, Hubert would have to take the game to a smaller scale and resize the map.

With Paradox's HEARTS OF IRON coming out next Spring, Hubert would have some god-awful competition for a global-scale game. Of course, I'd buy it.

Someone may have already mentioned this but if so, I missed it. I think the mini-map should be color-coded to reflect occupation and not be static. Can you change this, Hubert?

Yeah, the WiF demo is a mess. When is the game scheduled for final release? And have they done the AI yet? The non-AI version is way overdue if memory serves. The longer they put it off, the less enthusiasm they'll be, unless they're redesigning the interface. I second what the other poster said about the restricted view. It's very hard to get the feeling for the big picture. I really love the boardgame, although not as much as Advanced Third Reich or Totaler Krieg. Some may find them functional, but I think WiF's maps are horribly busy and difficult to stare at for any length of time.

I agree, it's as off-topic as you can get. I decline to comment on its intellectual level. I guess someone thinks it's funny.

Interesting topic. I wouldn't quite go so far as to call Germany the economic powerhouse of Europe. As for who won the war, the only real winners were obviously the US and USSR. Everyone else was in debt up to their eyeballs. The US had every intention of maintaining control over the world's resources at the end of the war in order to maintain its industrial output and avoid sinking into another depression (Kolko’s THE POLITICS OF WAR is by far the best book on the subject). The ultimate by-product of this is what you mention, namely cultural imperialism and a somewhat sanctimonious and patriarchal attitude towards the rest of the world.

Yeah, I'd have to convert them from .SHP to .BMP but I think I still have the tools to do this on my computer. I actually cranked up a game of PG the other day and had a blast. Still works great in XP. That game injected new life into computer wargaming on a mass scale. I think Strat. Comm. is easily that good and has enormous potential. And it's easier to mod!