Philippe

[ September 07, 2007, 08:34 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Just make sure you download all of cmmos. A lot of things are squirreled away in the collection groupings.

If you do a complete install of CMMOS and click on the German Vehicles and Guns tab you will get a very colorful screen with a bunch of colorful icons. The first row consists of five different icons. Depending on which you click on it will change every German vehicle to mono-gelb, bi-color camo, tri-color camo, ambush camo, or hasty. I just tried it and have to remember to undo it before I play CMBO because I usually play scenarios that took place before that particular camo pattern was in use. If you poke around in your bmp folder you should be able to figure out the code for invoking the ambush camo. My cmmos install is very recent because I just had my computer replaced, so I can assure you it is in there. The whitewash coat probably replaces any particular camo pattern. But there's a snow covered set of buttons that work the same way as the summer set.

I think they were actually done by Fernando. Look for the mods that start Fernando_.

Last time I looked they were where they had always been, at combatmission.com in the cmmos section.

I guess I must be more of a newbie than I thought. Why is unbuttoning and buttoning better than just staying buttoned all the time? I thought that things that you did before you hit "go" in the order segment had very little impact on anything during the actual turn (apart from the occasional "hide" order). And I don't really like buttoning up all that much. It gets really hot and stuffy in those turrets, and my crews don't seem to react to new targets as quickly as they would if thew were fully exposed.

When I fire smoke, the effect is there, but really hard to notice unless you happen to be looking for it. I wonder if this has something to do with textures that are supposed to be semi-transparent (pink is the color of total transparency in CM). Is there some way I could tweak my video card, or some magic I could perform with anti-aliasing, to make the pink go away? Or is pink the color of cordite residue? And yes, I'm very gullible.

I'm breaking in a replacement hard drive and video card, and am fairly far along in installing CMAK. I've just noticed that when a tank fires and there is snow on the ground, the smoke from the blast has a light pink or lavender tinge. I don't remember seeing this before, but, now that I think of it, this is probably the first time I've ever played CMAK with snow. Is this feature intentional, will I find it when I get around to installing winter scenarios in CMBB, or is it a quirk of my video card/drivers? I seem to have been saddled with an Nvidia 8000 series and a reasonably up to date driver. I know which bmp is being effected (1800) and tried changing some of its properties. But the slight pink/lavender tinge to the smoke doesn't seem to have anything to do with the basic texture, and only seems to occur when there's snow on the ground.

If you go to cmmods.com and look for something called Scenario Depot Salvage number 6 under designer name padivine, you'll find a little gem known as the Vuolsami Campaign. They show up in the zip with names like VC_1_blahbalah, VC_2_blahblah. It's not really a campaign. The designer built a huge map, then cut it up into smaller sections for the individual battles. The briefings are really good, and if you play all 14 battles in order, you will not only be exhausted but you will have had a Combat Mission experience that comes very close to matching that Finnish Winter War movie that you can watch on YouTube. This is a CM experience that is not to be missed. Just make sure you spend a little time installing the right mods first (lots of Gurra, mchlstrt, Uncle Tgt, and Andrew Fox). You should also try to find the realistic Finnish flag pack (can't remember if it's at CMMODS or Mark Gallear's site). I believe it was done by Sergei, and it features the Finnish War Flag (which is what gets used at army rallies and military funerals) as opposed to the very non-military civilian flag (which is what shows up in CMBB). Many countries like the US only have one all-purpose flag, so this may leave some people scratching their heads. But many countries have more than one - e.g. the Germans with their Nazi Party/political flag and the Reichskriegflag (the one with a lot of crosses on it besides the swastika). The Finnish military flag is basically the same as the civilan flag, except that you have a red coat of arms with a rampant gold lion where the arms of the blue cross intersect -- much more dramatic to look at.

Gordon Molek's Crusader Mark II is still posted over at CombatMissionHQ, so if you download it that should give you a start.

I've also heard that putting your stationary tanks in hide mode will slow their reaction time a bit if they have to fire, but will also muffle their engine noises as long as they don't move. But I've always just taken this on faith and never really tested it.

Not sure I follow you, JasonC. I wasn't thinking about the concept that there might be an optimal force size as much as the concept that there might be a force size that was inherently sub-optimal. Don't pile on more troops than you can feed, don't try to maneuver with more units than you can control (unless you can hit the pause button). If the stack in a hex gets too high you'll always be in trouble, even if you don't have long-haired cats with bushy tails. Overstacking can cause a logistical and health catastrophe as well as loss of command and control. Napoleon's first two months in Russia may or may not be your overstacking health catastrophe, as for the loss of command control, I think that the tripping-over-your-own-feet factor was at work with Napoleon in 1813 generally and especially at Leipzig, and with Darius at Gaugamela. You can only control x number of corps if you have two or three times that many moderately intelligent ADC's who have a modicum of initiative and plenty of changes of horses. Or a lot of really inspired and insightful corps commanders who aren't constantly complaining that their #@$&&! of a boss is trying to get them all killed before they can retire. A contributing factor to the Roman defeat at Cannae was probably that the Romans had too many men and couldn't control them effectively. [Another factor is the confusing account of the battle -- still don't know which side of the river it was fought on]. So there seem to be two kinds of overstacking going on here -- beyond your logistical capacity (hello typhus) and beyond your command capacity. As an aside, the Roman defeat at Carrhae was inflicted by a Parthian army that was a third or a quarter the size of the Roman army. But that had more to do with bad preparation and tactics coming up against good preparation and insight than tripping over one's own feet (though Crassus may have done a bit of that too).

I note that someone posted something in the CMC Beta Forum a week ago, so it can't be totally dead. I have no idea if the interminable wait is a good thing, a bad thing, or a terrible thing. But my sense is that it doesn't bode well.

Please note that the Spartans lost the battle of Thermopylae, and, as a result, the Persians were able to burn the Acropolis of Athens, pretty much at their leisure. Greek hoplite armies were good at doing one thing only -- moving directly towards the enemy in a straight line that tended to drift to the left. Persian armies were good at maneuvering and making outflanking marches in the mountains, which is how they defeated the Spartans at Thermopylae. It should also be noted that you can't, in fact, pile on as many troops as you want in unlimited numbers -- sooner or later disease and starvation will lay you low if your army is too big. Herodotus' figures for the size of the Persian army that invaded Greece are impossibly unrealistic (the tail end of the army would probably have still been crossing the Hellespont during the battle of Thermopylae), but he also notes that Xerxes took much (most?) of his land forces with him when he left Mardonius camped out in Boeotia. The reason usually mentioned is the difficulty of keeping a larger army supplied after losing the naval battle at Salamis. Having more men than you can feed or control usually does more harm than good. The Judas Maccabeus factor is another question, though.

While I rather like typhus as a major contributing cause of the evaporation of armies in 1812, I still wonder how much of that attrition was due to out and out mortality. French and Russian losses were frightening any way you look at it, and French losses were certainly worse, though some of the drop in French numbers might have to do with Prussian and Austrian allies effectively dropping out. Nowadays we tend to think of losses in war as coming from combat action, but back then you lost far more men from marching around quickly than from actually fighting the enemy.

Marathon is a funny battle. I don't pretend to know what really happened there, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind about it that probably have a bearing on the "lopsided quality" issue. Because they lived in small city states, most ancient Greeks knew how large each national army was, and what proportion of their 'national guard' had been sent to fight in a given battle. Add to that the fact that most Greek city-states used pretty much the same tactics and formations, and you can be pretty sure that if an experienced Athenian was present at a battle between Athenians and Boeotians, his estimate for the number of troops involved on both sides was probably pretty good. He would know what his side showed up with, and he could tell at a glance if the enemy line overlapped his, and/or if they had more men than that length of battle line would suggest because of how they were deployed (looser or deeper). And I'm not even going anywhere near the problems that ancients had with large numbers, or the hash that manuscript transmission makes out of such things. The problem comes when a Greek has to fight someone who doesn't use Greek tactics and formations. I've got x number of men, shoulder to shoulder with locked shields, eight deep, and my formation fills most of the plain from the foothills to the seashore. Not sure what he's got, but he overlaps me on both flanks and it looks like his army is three or four times as deep as mine. Guess he probably outnumbers me two or three to one. Guess again. Phalanxes fought in tightly packed shoulder-to-should formations, but the Persians used something much looser. The result was that a Persian formation would tend to give way on impact, not because of any difference in valor or moral superiority, but because of the dynamics of a concentration crashing into a more dispersed formation. I'm sure the first few times the Athenians fought the Persians they were uncertain about the numbers they were facing because they were unfamiliar with their opponents' formations (not totally clueless, though, because the Ionians had been having military contact for several years). So the bottom line is that it is not entirely impossible that the numbers on the two sides were roughly equal, or that, perhaps, the Persian landing party was actually outnumbered even though it had a bigger footprint. Any way you cut it, it was a lopsided battle. The fact that the Persians gave the Athenians as much trouble as they did is a testimony to their fighting prowess, not to any supposed superiority in numbers.

My anti-virus defenses went bonkers when I tried to click on those links.

I've often found the Appuis-Feu site a bit hard to wander into, and for Anglophones it must be even worse. And I'm sure Francophones have a similar problem when they stray into TPG II (I know I do, and I'm relatively fluent in English). When I was still using my old computer I was able to download from Appuis-Feu from time to time, and many of the scenarios and maps were truly impressive. As things are set up now there is a bit of an iron wall (or at least a wall of nuisance) between the Anglophone and Francophone CM gaming communities. Which is a real shame, because there's some really good stuff over there (at one point I was even toying with the idea of translating one of R2's scenarios into English because I had enjoyed it so much).

Of course I'd buy it. And I wouldn't wait for it to hit the bargain bin, either. I would also suggest using a blatantly transparent, mindlessly catchy title like Combat Mission: D-Day. Americans would know what it was and would be more likely to buy it. It would also give us an excuse to start a thread about re-tooling CM slightly to better represent amphibious operations (i.e. landing craft and gun boats). Which would open a can of worms -- how about bridge demolitions with prepared explosives? Finns fighting against Germans in 44-45? Vichy French (used in France, North Africa, and Syria) and French resistance ? Indians and Moroccans (and a toggle switch to allow certain units from one side to have an alternate set of dark faces). And of course this would lead to people asking for a representation of armored warfare in Europe from 1939-1941, which would then solve the problem of those one-size-fits-all captured French tanks. And to have a few of those luscious multi-turreted Soviet tanks (and maybe an armored train or two) would be absolute heaven. CMx1 should have covered the whole war and been a bit more like a three-dimensional version of Steel Panthers. Even if it didn't cover the Pacific, it could have been more complete than it now is -- a system illustrating the evolution of armored warfare tactics in WW II. I really hope that CM:SF is a commercial success, and my guess is that it will consume all available attention and energy for the next year or so. But I don't want to wait twelve years to see BTS execute the fantasy outlined in the previous paragraphs for CMx2. Mainly because I know that long before they get to the comprehensive portrayal of WW II phase, they'll abandon the product and start working on CMx3. Steve probably believes that if he listens to us he won't be able to feed and clothe his camo collection. He may be right. But we can still dream.

I've often wondered about this. The dust in CMAK may be right for the desert, but it doesn't feel right for Italy. Part of the problem is that in real life I'm used to seeing lines of traffic driving over tarmac where they don't raise dust. (The visual effect that I associate with modern highways is the mirage shimmer on the horizon where light reflects off the surface of the road and looks a bit like water.) Though I do recall reading about tanks raising dust as they moved across the steppes of the Ukraine.

This was posted by Christian Ankerstjerne in a discussion board at missing-lynx.com. quote Pz.Kpfw. I Landwirtschaftlicher Schlepper Pz.Kpfw. II Landwirtschaftlicher Schlepper 100 Pz.Kpfw. III Zugführerwagen Pz.Kpfw. IV Begleitswagen Pz.Kpfw. Panther Pz.Kpfw. Tiger Ausf. E Pz.Kpfw. Tiger Ausf. B unquote While I'm still chuckling over the names of the Panzer I and II, I have no idea how seriously to take this list. I wonder to what extent these words represent actually linguistic usage. They look a bit like official names rather than colloquial ones. Any comments?

Andreas, check you e-mail. I've sent you the Berli scenarios, but I think I have everything else as well, if you're missing anything. I really do think we should use CMMODS as an emergency scenario storage back-up for situations such as this. That way if your system ever dies you can retrieve lost files from somewhere else.

At the risk of adding confusion to the process, I just poked around in my version of cmmos and what I seem to have done is that I added a few select Mike T rulesets to 4.03, not 4.05. (4.03 is the one that was tested to death and that still lives on the cmhq site). So what I seem to be running is a hybrid of 4.03 with some rulesets from 4.05, and no cmak capability. (you don't really need cmmos cmak because not enough conversions were done to make it worth the bother of installing). If you get really hung up with it, you might try dropping an e-mail to Gordon Molek who wrote the program. But if memory serves, you can add quite a few custom rule sets to 4.03, you just have to make sure that you get the nomenclature right, and that you remember to put the ruleset folders in the right place. There are also a couple of files that have to be in each one to make them work -- you can figure out what they are by studying rulesets that actually work (I'm talking about text files with one short line of info on them that you can actually write yourself if they are missing). Cmmos is breathtakingly logical, but infuriatingly literal -- you often discover that something isn't working because a space has crept in to the name of a file or a folder, and the program reads the space (or its absence) as a separate character. Your rulesets should all be in a folder with a path called C:\Program Files\GEM Software Productions\CM Mod Option Selector\CMBO. If not you will have problems. And make sure that there's no space between the words Rule, Set, and the three digit number (e.g. RuleSet001). The auto installer doesn't create the tabs. They're created by dumping the RuleSet folder with the right number in the right place. All the autoinstaller is supposed to do is the dumping. Somewhere on this site or in the program you should be able to turn up Gordon Molek's e-mail -- he wrote the program and has forgotten more about it than anyone will ever learn.

For whatever it's worth, you don't really need an autoinstaller once you have the basic cmmos program in place. Unzip whatever you've got into a holding folder, then look in the relevant section of commos, and either add the new folders to existing folders, or add new ones altogether. But before you start messing around with that make sure you understand (or remember) what cmmos does to make switches to the bmp folder. The process with cmbo is much simpler than with the other two -- all the bmp's with their extensions sit in the bmp folder unzipped -- you just have to make sure that the rule sets are in place, and that the program can recognize the rule sets. On this last point, I think the absolute latest version of the cmmos program is floating around cmmods somewhere. It's probably not in the cmbo section, but Gordon did some last minute tinkering when Mike T tried to expand cmmos to include cmak. I can't remember if I'm using it or not, but I suspect that if you look through all the cmmos material on cmmods you'll find the rule sets you need. Sorry if this is a bit vague, but I'm probably going to be putting out fires for the next six weeks or so.

There's a stickied thread on the CMBB forum about two or three items above this one. You might want to take a look and read what it says.