voidhawk

Yes, much better. I'd still like to see the ballast itself be more brown too, and the tops of the rails less shiny, but on the whole a very big improvement on the stock tracks. Now what we need is a train mod - hmm, what vehicles might lend themselves to that kind of treatment? voidhawk

[Pours over many fotos, recent and old...] European ballast, ties and rails were (and even now mostly are) uniformly rust-brown, except for newly constructed or cleaned (really!) ballast. I'd imagine that in the war years it was hard enough to keep the existing track operational, let alone consider renewing ballast or constructing new track. Even the shiny part on the top of the rail really isn't that shiny except when the light fall on it just right; when not reflecting light in this manner is actually looks darker than the rest of the rail as it is just dark steel as opposed to the grimy, dusty, and rusty sides of the rails. Also consider that most European trains *still* have rather, eh, "gravitational" toilet facilities... :eek:

I no longer use the rubber-block option, as they wore down too quickly and I had to keep re-applying the mod.

Oops, that was the "Arnhem - The Red Devils" operation, not battle, in case that wasn't clear from the above.

I just finished the CD's "Arnhem" scenario as the Allies (no spoilers below) with default settings etc. I was able to hold both North and South bridgeheads, with what I thought were pretty minimum casualties. However - the after-battle AAR screens seemed to show *much* higher casualty numbers than I had suffered; for instance, for 2 of the battles I had almost no casualties at all, yet the screens showed 50 and 54 casualties for those battles. In fact, the final AAR showed I had suffered 282 casulaties, which I think is more than the entire force to begin with - and I had most of it still left at the end of the operation! Also strange was that although the final AAR showed 0 Axis troops OK, the AI did not auto-surrender - is that something to do with Operations?

I found that using the "Classical Buildings" mod made Paris look much more like, well, Paris! http://www.combatmission.com/mods/terrain3.asp - voidhawk

"Lead with armor." voidhawk

When I received the game, the first thing I did (after reading the manual) was make a table of all the scenarios and operations and their corresponding dates, and then sorted them by date. I am now playing through all the scenarios and operations in historical order as the Allies, unless the briefing suggests the scenario is best played from the Axis side first, in which case I have skipped it for now. That does mean that the very first game you play is "Ham and Jam", that very exciting night missions! As the earlier (summer) scenarios use Magua's beautiful Normandy scenary, I am not really looking forward to the winter settings... I keep track of my playing record in the same table; so far all wins. I have just started the Stolberg operation (September 17? 1944), so many more games to go. Someday when I have more time I'd like to try some PBEM too. If there is interest I can email or post the table (or at least the scenario/date part of it.) I can't do so right now as I am, well, not at home.

Optimistic bump; still hoping for a solution to my scenario creation problem...

[i couldn't find anything on this particular problem using search...] I created a new scenario (actually a firing-range kind of setup), and populated the map with the hapless Axis victims. I then saved it (as a scenario, in the scenarios directory) as a kind of "baseline". The resulting .cmb file is about 4k in size. So far so good - I was then also able to load this scenario back into the editor, and then add some Allied forces. When I then save the scenario again (under a different name), the file size increases to about 3700k - even if I add just a single Allied unit! From this point on I can no longer load this second scenario into either the editor or the game itself; I get a "beep" and the interface hangs. This is all probably related to the huge .cmb file size. Does anybody know what is going on here? I'd be happy to email the original OK scenario that does not include the Allied units, and which does still load OK - the second, failing, file is kind of big... This is all on a PC, BTW. Thanks for any help! voidhawk

For what it is worth, I'm running a GeForce 2 GTS with the 6.50 drivers, and no matter what FSAA setting I use, the yellow "label" text (and only that text) is fuzzy. All other text is just fine. Also, increasing the resolution is not the answer for this game, as what the FSAA does here is to blur out all those nasty flickering pixels in the terrain and tree textures when you scroll around. With FSAA enabled (I use 2x2 at 1024x768), and with the Normany texture set, the graphics are almost photo-realistic! voidhawk