anjin

Doh! There wasn't a problem after all. I had accidentally turned off the display of trees! Not sure how that happened, but what I was looking at was the treeless landscape. Once I turned the trees back on I could see exactly why the LOS was blocked. My apologies for being such a muppet.

The first thing I thought about was the position of the unit in relation to the windows, but unfortunately, that is irrelevant in this tower case - it is a fairly tiny room and you can't actually move closer to the windows. Oddly, you can see furthest on the diagonal - not directly out either window. I suspect the problem is due to an exaggerated impact on slight variations in the ground elevation (ie not significant enough to detect with the naked eye). I guess I will have to get the map editor out to examine it. I did make a similar tall building on an absolutely flat map and could see perfectly well in all directions. Those leaves of grass must have got in the way, despite being 5 floors up.

In the Commonwealth add-on there is a map 'Linking Up & Breaking Out', which has a 5 storey castle. If you place a unit in the northeast turret on the top floor, and look out northeast over nothing but farmland, low hedges, and fences, for the most part the LOS is blocked when there are no obvious obstacles. In fact, moving the LOS line a mere millimetre or two to one side or the other can result in a clear LOS being blocked. Again, there is no obvious reason why this should be given the relative empty nature of the terrain. A 5 storey building looking out over farmland should be a great location to place observers, but it is of limited value because of the way the game calculates LOS obstructions. It doesn't even come close to simulating the real world - which is a shame given how much attention is given to other aspects of simulating the subject matter.

Well I'm confused. Why do they need a "fair" way to announce via email the arrival of the game? Why not write a small routine, in say Access or VB, that automatically sends out the email to everyone at the same time? Sending out 10,000 emails should take no more than a couple of hours. We do this every week.

I'm not entirely sure I completely understand BTS's decision to give the info to the magazines first. Aren't we purchasers of CM the single most important group of potential customers for CM2? If I were running BTS's marketing department I would want to make sure, first and foremost, that every single person who bought CM would want to buy CM2. How many copies did the magazines buy that justifies them being at the head of the queue? I do understand the need for publicity, but I don't think BTS has a more important target market than us right here. We know BTS underestimated the market for CM (evidenced by the stock-out situations that occured), so we must represent a fairly healthy sales potential for the new game. So, BTS, how about putting *us*, not the magazines, at the head of the queue for information releases?

IIRC the term "Second World War" (or "World War II" - I don't remember which) was the winner in a competition to choose a name for the conflict. I'm not sure when this was, but the term "Second World War" was in use by 1947 at the latest. BTW, World War I was also known as the "Great World War" as early as January 1915, less than six months after the war started.