Joe Perez

Thanks guys. Increased work is not leaving much time for boardgaming, so I figured I'd try these again when I had a hour here and there to play around, and figure out why I couldn't get anywhere as far in it as the original CM games.

I installed the 3.0 Updates for both CMBN & CMFI. The installs went well and activation was successful. However, when I launch the programs, I still see CMBN v2.20 and CMFI v1.20. Since Battlefront is notorious for releasing patches that freak out Norton 360, I thought that Norton may have stopped the update, but checking Norton's History I don't see any files that were not allowed to proceed. Does the 3.0 install not change the version #'s at the bottom of the startup screen? Any help appreciated. BTW, I installed from the CDs, not any download installer.

Thanks. I had noticed that so it wasn't the issue. everything OK now, as it was the AV.

Sure enough, Norton had quarantined it. After restoring it I had to reinstall the patch, but nothing is not selectable now. Thanks.

PC version. I even inserted the Commonwealth DVD and went through the install...TWICE, even tho' it was already installed, and no change. All CW battles/campaigns un-selectable. Using Win 8. With a file manager I can see that there are directories related to the CW module, but without knowing what exact files to look for, I can't tell whether the install went smoothly.

I have the CMBN game and Commonwealth modules installed, along with the 2.0 upgrade. I installed the 2.01 patch, and all the CW battles and campaigns are now un-selectable, telling me I need the module (which I have). Anyone have a clue as to what may be wrong? Thanks.

This patch has gotten rid of the problem I had of only seeing guns and helmets for the foot units. Great!

I just installed CM: Italy on the new PC I bought (Physical disc version purchased direct from Battlefront). Trying to install it, Norton 360, blocked its install, getting rid of the .exe file that starts the game. I turned off the Norton Firewall and Virus protection, and was able to install it. When I tried to move the icon for it off the desktop and into a "Games" folder I created, Norton (now active) killed it again. Is there some kind of issue that causes the .exe file to be seen as a Trojan Virus? Any help appreciated.

I bought the three CM products when they were released but couldn't do anything with them because I had a crappy PC that chocked on the games. I just got a new PC and installed all the products, in order... CM: Normandy CM: Commonwealth CM: Fortress Italy Italy came with a "Game Engine Manual Version 2.0." Does the manual also apply to the original Normandy game? Did the Commonwealth install update the game engine for Normandy? Really looking forward to finally playing these. Once the "invisible soldiers" issue in Normandy is resolved I can dive into that, but for now it's off to The Boot.

I (now using Win 8)have this problem as well. I purchased all the games/modules (Normandy/Commonwealth/Italy) when they were released but only now installed them as I didn't have a PC capable of running them smoothly. The soldiers in Normandy have always been invisible since I installed all the products about a hour ago. The soldiers in Fortress Italy are fine, as visible as visible can be. Vehicles are fine, and look damn good to boot. If this is fact a .BRZ file, or anything else, please fix it, as the game is unplayable, or at not enjoyable, watching a bunch of Claude Rains running around.

Thanks for the info. I have the nVidia 6800 Ultra, so I should be fine. The vid requirement was my biggest worry.

I couldn't find anything in the Overview for the game that lists what the minimum requirements (Video, RAM, OS, etc) are for the game. Using an older machine (XP, 256 MB nVidia GeForce, 3.06 P5, 2GB RAM) I'm wondering if my machine will be able to run this game without having to skimp on graphics settings, or even run at all.

Thanks, I'll give it a looksee. Also, I have a friend who says that AI controlled Me 110s that use their rear gunner to play a burst card against him, are playing a response card against him as well, when HE responds to the rear gunner attack. Isn't that supposed to be prohibitied? Joe Perez

Without question this bug exists. It happened again when an eneny A6M5 that was neutral to me started off its own turn by playing a sicssors. The log box disappears at the end of the game, and even tho' the "save to file" is selected, I don't know how to retrieve the log, if I can at all. Joe Perez

At the start of the game I get that DOS-looking text box. It has the button "save to file" selected already, but at the end of the game the box can no longer be called up. I'm getting pretty fed up with this obvious bug that allows an AI aircraft to play a sicssors card during ITS OWN TURN when it is in a neutral position or being tailed, when it is only supposed to be able to play it during its own turn if it is in a disadvantaged position. It's not playing it as a response to anything, simply as an initiated action. How do I save the log to report this? Joe Perez

It AI is definately using the scissors during it's own turn, when being tailed, since it went from being tailed to then being neutral with me. If it did use it as a response, it simply would have negated my card (which wasn't played anyway) and our relative position would not have changed. Joe Perez

I am curious as whether or not this is a bug, or a change to the game system... I am now being constantly being confronted with enemy aircraft that using the "scissors" card or option against me when I am TAILING them! Since the scissors is being played against me when the enemy is not an "agile" aircraft, I know that at times it is the actual card being played against me. I have not had this experience until recently. It's my understanding that just as in the card game, a "scissors" can only be played while you are disadvantaged, not tailed. But now at least twice an aircraft I am tailing has used the scissors to get from being tailed to being neutral with me. Any info as to why this is happening? I believe it may be a bug, since I have also noticed that when I am the tailee, and I have a scissors card, I am not given the luxury of playing it. Joe Perez

Brian, Yes, that is exactly what I'm doing now, flying one-on-one dogfights with a "squadron" of 4 elements (to help offset the fatigue rules). Since I don't have enough points to buy any "extras" other than the essential "Draw Extra Card." The ability to choose the starting year was definately appreciated. As far as the campaigns go, I know that not all pilots have the same number of "extras" but it seems every mission I fly I getthe enemies that have just enough more than me to toast me almost immediately. Could my karma be that bad? Or just my flying? *o* Joe

Stalin-o, The original point I was trying to make is that the differences between some planes is nothing more than a single Performance or Horsepower point, and the more extra abilities that are heaped on a pilot, the more the differences in aircraft performance disappear. Yes, you can make the point that pilot ability can and *is* the deciding factor, but I'd prefer seeing how Hurricane I's can make do against Me-109e's despite having that one less critical Performance rating with pilot ability translated into HOW the players use the cards dealt to them, rather than each pilot with close to a dozen abilities, or extra cards making that difference in performance less important, if not non-existant. You're not being fair using the Mustang vs Me-410 example. Of course the thoroughbreds are going to leave the nags in the dust. Even *I* was able to shoot down an Me-110 when I got a superior single engined racehorce to go against it I called the German and Japanese MGs worthless because they weren't of very high caliber, and most of the 109's and Zero's stopping power came from the cannon. The Spits and Hurris had EIGHT MGs, harmonized to a certain range, which could cause decent damage. Of course cannon are better, and we know this because the Brits eventually replaced their MGs with 20mm cannon. But the point I was making in this respect is that every "cardboard" game I have ever seen that used numerical ratings for offensive and defensive abilities of the BoB aircraft considered the stopping power of Brit planes and the 109e to be very similar. And yes, you are correct about the number of cannon on the planes. Thanks for the correction. I was trying to remember the armament simply by what the layout of the guns was on a old air game called "Airforce" that I played 25 years ago. You jogged my memory and I now remember (I hope!) that the 109e layout MG-Cannon-MG-Cannon-MG. Be that as it may, I have always seen the offensive output of 109e/SpitI as numerically similar. That's why I don't see why the game has to give the 109 a damage bonus, and then even it back out by not allowing the 109 to fire until it gets at least into an advantaged position. A point I've been trying to make all along is that I don't like the idea, especially in the campaign missions, is that since each mission is supposed to be a microcosm of all activity in that "zone" over a day or so, these issues are being decided by "super-pilots.". From MY taste (and this certainly is the taste of someone more interested in the game from a historical perspective) I'd like to see the battles decided based on how the human and AI pilots use the performance of the planes they have, rather than how the matchup betweem Uber-Nazi Hans & Sir Rodney-the-Hun-Slayer play out, with the match decided by their 10+ abilities and extra cards. And I think I better quit while I'm behind and refrain from commentign on how I feel about the fatigue rules -_^ Joe Perez

rastak, I too bought a copy for a friend when I purchased my own, because we both have the "board" games but never got the chance to play face-to-face. I don't have anything against the "fun" part, but I still consider historical perspective to come first. I want to play this game to see how Me-109s compare against the Spit & Hurris, and how other planes stack up against each other, and why some planes just have a harder time against other models. That I do NOT get from this game. I find that the *flood* of abilities allowed eliminates ALL of the historical perspective. This game may as well pit Valkyries from Macross or Gundams against each other in space battles, since the abilities make the small differences between planes negligible. I also am at a loss as to why the designers chose to mess with the burst ratings of the planes, particularly when it comes to the +1 bonus and -1 penalty. EVERY game I have ever played featuring airpower from the time of the BoB made the point of the Me-109 and Spitfire being fairly similar in performance, AND total firepower, despite the 109 having a cannon in the nose. The Me's MGs were very weak guns, so the Spit having 8 MGs (even tho' they were .303s, not the most powerful), gave them pretty even ability to inflict damage. But in this game, since all the performance ratings of the two planes are similar, the Me causing TWO more damage points than the Spit when it scores (+1 versus -1) makes the matchup absurd. To comensate, the Me gets NO bursts in a nuetral position. Does anyone think the differences in these planes' performance was so different that the Me couldn't fire in a head-on pass while the Spits and Hurris could? What makes this justified??? In the board game, NO plane, even the early biplanes, have damage penalties, and the early German planes (and Japanese, I believe) certainly get no bonuses, because the TOTAL firepower was judged to be equal. The early Zeros were in the same boat as the 109s: a cannon in the nose. but a practically worthless pair of MGs. I'm finding the game to be even less fun every time I convince myself to go back to it "one more time" to give it a try, especially the campaigns, which continue to cause acid-reflux (I guess it's just because the opposing elements seem to start out with 4,000-card hands, and always mange to blow mine out of the sky in the first 2 turns, even when I conserve all my response cards for their attacks. ). As it is now I can only see the game for me as a tool to practice one-on-one dogfights, for the day when I may finally be able to hook up with my friend. Joe Perez

Brian & Dan, Thanks for the reply. Funny as it is, I pretty much figured out what the reasoning for including all these abilities was. I just don't care for it myself. I've never played role-playing games. They just don't grab me. My 35 years in gaming has been spent playing games as much to gain historical insight as to have fun. I understand what you guys say that from a marketing perspective that the game could get boring quickly for those brought up on computer games if it were ported straight out of the boxes. Role-players have always been the bigger sellers, even back in the days of TSR. I understand that the abilities are fixed in the campaigns and no more can be purchased, but there are simply too many of them given out. And giving ANY out to bombers I feel is going way over the top. I don't see how a B-17 flying in close is going to be able to use a "natural pilot" ability, or just about any other. Is the B-17 going to sissors with a FW-190? I guess you'd say that these abilities are abstractions, then. I have played about half of the campaigns, and have encountered situations where my element of Spitfires spending three full turns blasting away at He-177s were both shot down by the bombers, with one He-177 barely damaged. Whether or not something is built into the game to give the AI an advantage, I always seem to find MY bombers ripped to shreds immediately, regardless of what nationality they are, while the AI bombers repulse every attack. Since there are only two bomber in any escorted mission, and that mission is basically a microcosm of an extended period of time flying missions against an area, you can't have bombers felled with one shot. Even after losing 60 B-17s at Schweinfort, the target was bombed. Perhaps this is a problem related to the limitation on number of aircraft in any mission. As far as purchasing skills, I beleive that the system should give them out based on how you perform in the game. Pilots that fly a certain amount of missions and survive while their plane reaches damaged status may or may not randomly get a survivability ability. More kills? better targeting ability. And so on. You can certainly practice your way to becoming a "natural pilot" but if it were up to me (which it isn't) most of the abilities would be done away with in the first place. Thanks again for you time. Joe Perez

In the board games there are planes that have the special ability to play a "Full Throttle" card which can be used to adjust position towards nuertral by one, if you are tailed or disadvantaged. It can be used to respond to In My Sights and Maneuvering. Only certain planes (Corsair, Me 262) can use them. As far as I can see in the manage pilots section of the game, you certainly CAN buy special abilties for your pilots, in addition to extra cards. Not in the campaigns? Joe Perez

I know I'm going to get reamed over this, but I hope that those reading it will try to understand where I'm coming from before the tops of their heads explode. As I write this, Im sitting with all four boxed games from the Down in Flames series two feet away. In addition, I've bought all the issues of GMT's C3I magazine which had the DIF campaign add-ons, some of which appear in this PC game. When I bought this PC version, my hopes were that I could finally play the board game to my heart's content, since I don't have many face-to-face opponets available. Unfortunately, what I found were changes to the board games that surprised, disappointed, and saddened me. Rather than convert what I think is an already perfect game to the PC, the game suffers (for me) from the all-too-familiar practice of cramming as many bells & whistles as possible into a game (we used to call it "chrome" 30 years ago) to supposedly make it more attractive to people who just aren't satisfied with playing a good game. The original board games focus on you , the player, conducting the actual combat. Most of the campaign "decisions" are made randomly by drawing cards. If a turn contains 5 missions, you draw a card for the target (and possibly the forces involved) and then the players can interject a "resource" from their limited inventory that are gone once expended (Bad weather, no drop tanks, etc). Any special abilities of pilots are extremely rare, and mostly random. Player influence in what actually meets, and where, and under what conditions, is mostly random. Fly, die, and then off to the next mission for that turn. That's where I have the biggest beef with the PC game. In order to make the players feel like they are more involved, they get to buy (???) special abilities, and manage their aircraft practically down to deciding who polishes the propellar before engine ignition. That's about as "gamey" a function as you can have. Yes, it is a game, but the term refers to something that is/was not realistically posible/probable. Getting a random ability from the computer based on experience would be more realisic, but I'd prefer to not even have that. Why? I think the game is engaging enough for the average player without having to keep track of all these extras. And the fact that you buy them makes me think I'm playing a game of Microsoft's Age of Empires. What ever happened to making use of you planes capabilities to prevail in combat? It's unfortunate that effort had to go into this added "player involvement," rather than figuring out how to get more than two elements per side, like you can in the board games, and adding rules from the card games into the PC version. No ability to disengage? One of the most important aspect of the board game (that incidentally doesn't have a board) is that you can make a decision to break off if you've been jumped and gotten badly shot up. Forcing the player to stick it out in a fight to the death seems more than a little "arcade-ish." I decided to post this after reading Stalin-dude's post about the problems with the BoB camapign. The ENTIRE campaign seemed to have been screwed up by stuffing too many pilots with too many special abilities, like Thanksgiving Day turkeys. To have to fix the campaign by tinkering with the pilot abilities made wonder if they should have been included at all. Does all this micro-management make the game a better game? This situation reminds me of what happened to one of the best board games of all time, Avalon Hill's Squad Leader. What started out as a really good game dealing with infantry tactics, with an odd vehicle/gun thrown in once in a while, evolved into an overly complex game, which got more complex with each additional module, until it finally became ADVANCED Squad Leader, a game so involved that only the hardest of hard core fans still play it. Is this what will become of DIF, a game that only people who live and breathe the game are going to be willing to play? Dan, if you get a chance to see this, I appreciate your decision to bring the DIF family to the PC. When I first saw the release information, I had a boner that almost cracked my monitor screen. But unfortunately, I feel as if you've chromed the game to death with these special abilities, rather than let the players see what it was like for aircraft to up against enemy aircraft with different characteristics. The ace counters in the board game campaigns are rare, and only one in three bombers gets a "crew counter," and most of those are DUDS ! I think what I would like to see more than anything is a campaign editor to play campaigns offline, so I can pretty much just re-create the originals from the board games, and C3I magazine. This was a little on the long side, so thank you all for you time and consideration. Joe Perez Tenchi

There is something I may fail to understand. I just purchased the game and went online to try a campaign against the AI, Battle of Britain. I figured I'd choose the Axis, and when allocating resources I got a message that I could not place more than 2 elements in each target zone. That meant that if I put a bomber in a target area I could also place only 1 fighter. Needless to say at the end of placement I found in EVERY area 2 British fighter elements, and I was outnumbered 2 to 1 in EVERY fighter combat. It didn't take long for my 1 element to be wiped by 2 opposing elements, and then the bombers went next. Was there something I missed in the placement phase or are these rediculous matchups intended? Of course it occured that I could place NO bombers in a target zone, but then you automatically give up the points for that zone.

I don't see it in the sparse manual that comes with CMAK. Completely missed it in CMBB. Thanks for the info.