Philippe

Apparently flags aren't just magnets for AI opponents. One of the nice things about playing with Extreme Fog of War is that you should never assume that the status of a flag as portrayed is correct. You will often encounter situations where flags are listed as being under ambiguous control, but where a bit of thought will show that they are really controlled by the enemy. Also, remember that not all units are created equal for flag control purposes. If you have a truck crew sitting next to a flag, and he has an infantry squad with full ammo thirty yards away from it, you'll be lucky if the flag shows up as contested. Things are not really what they seem until the scenario is over -- that's the game's way of telling you that you should concentrate on winning the battle, and if you happen to control the flags when the shooting stops, so much the better. I'm a bit disturbed by the fact that you mention question marks. You really should go to CMMODS and look for my Little Semiotics mod. You'll never have a question mark on the battlefield again...

One final comment on the Gallic war, done without benefit of consulting my notes (they're thirty years old, so I probably couldn't read them anyway). I think Caesar was pretty much aware of what he was doing when he went into Gaul. He tries to make it look like an accident, but that was largely because he did some things which, on the surface, were pretty embarassing (e.g. attacking a Roman ally without provocation). The way Caesar gives his strategic plan an accidental look is to not show the full context of his early moves. He doesn't hide anything, but he deliberately breaks up his description of the background of events in Gaul so that it isn't immediately obvious to the innocent reader what is going on. And to make it even more confusing, he tells it out of order. Most of this background can be found in two places: just after the fight with the Helvetii, and just after the fight with Ariovistus. If you read the two passages together you realize what the real picture was. Reading Caear's background discussion of the campaign against Ariovistus before you read the campaign against the Helvetii makes his invasion of Gaul appear in a wholly different light. Caesar pretends he didn't know what was going on, and just happened to pick fights, one by one, with the top two power brokers in what was, in effect, a Gallic civil war. He gives his commentaries a contrived breathless quality of apparent discovery, a bit like noticing a pair of legs sticking out from under your house after the tornado plunks it down in non-antipodeal Oz. Only in Caesar's case, he made sure the house landed on exactly that particular spot -- by accident, of course. The Helvetii gave him an excuse to cross the border, and when he took them out he also happened to put himself in control of one of the two factions that was vying for mastery of Gaul. He then turned around and attacked a Roman ally, and in the process of wiping him out made the other faction his client as well. The net result was that with two well-aimed karate chops he took political control of about two-thirds of France, and did it in one extended campaign. You don't get that kind of result if you're just some dumb Roman politician stumbling around blind in the barbarian hinterland. The history of the Roman wars with the Ligurians come to mind, where every year some no-name ex-consul would make the legions trudge north so he could scarf up enough plunder to pay off his election campaign debts. The key ingredient in Caesar's style of Blitzkrieg was political analysis. He was something of a political genius, and knew exactly which joints to snip to make the whole thing fall into his hand. And this was done by careful advance planning and preparation -- maybe not the lumbering kind that we're used to since the twentieth century, but he knew exactly who to buy, who to flatter, and who to coerce. Much of his conquest was done in the first year, and the Gallic Wars is more about his fight to hang on to his conquest than to make it. Where did he have trouble? Around the fringes, and deeper into the interior. The further he got from the Greek cities in Southern France the worse his intelligence became. Belgium was just at the edge of his radar screen, and that was where his system broke down: when he went up there he was actually ambushed, and the Nervii came very close to ending his career at the outset. That was one of the reasons why he always dug in at the end of a day's march. Fuller always thought the practise was wasteful -- it probably was on the Northwest Frontier, but first century Gaul wasn't nineteenth century India. England, of course, was off the edge of his intelligence radar, which is why his first attempt to invade was such a disaster. And while that bridge he built over the Rhine makes for an interesting vocabulary lesson, his invasion of Germany has always reminded me a bit of the invasion of Cambodia. Caesar's genius (and his flaw) was the marrying up of his acute political insight with tactical muscle and the skill and daring to use them. The political analysis always governed, and like most good Roman generals he trusted a bit too much in his luck (Cicero on Pompey's luck makes for fascinating reading). But what is really impressive, given the number of seemingly hopeless situations he threw himself into, was how often he managed to pull a final rabbit out of the hat. And he didn't just do it once or twice. He wasn't invincible, but he could usually get people to do what he wanted. And he was probably the living embodiment of the dictum that war is politics by other means. He was always playing politics -- sometimes he would cajole, sometimes he would seduce, and sometimes he would use brute force. And he always made sure that he was the one who wrote the history books afterwards.

I'm sure Jason's gaffe was a typo. Latin gives everyone a headache, including me. I think we need to keep a couple of things in mind when discussing Caesar. First and foremost, he won. Big time. And his legacy was Octavian and the Roman Imperial system and a two thousand year cultural and political hangover. Very hard to argue with. Unless your last name happens to be Syme. Second, yes, he was very sloppy towards the end. Partially because he thought he had won, did some rash and foolish things, and almost didn't. But he still won, nevertheless. Was he Alexander? No, and he used to cry about it (he also wasn't too happy about the age difference). They had comparable charisma factors (very important in antiquity), roughly comparable tactical ability, but I think Alexander was ahead of him on both counts. He also trumps him several times over in the legacy department -- you can imagine the creation of an imperial roman system without Caesar, but it's hard to imagine Alexandria and Hellenistic Egypt without Alexander. When the Parthians used Crassus' head as a stage prop during a performance of the Bacchae at Seleuceia (named after one of the Alexander's generals), it was because Alexander had so internationalized Hellenistic civilization that it never occured to the supposedly barbarian Parthians that staging a performance of Euripides in the original was incriminatingly civilized. And he'd only been dead a couple of hundred years... We don't really know anything about ancient logistics. The main reason we don't know is that the ancients thought it was boring, made for bad literature, and didn't write about it. Every now and then something slips out that makes you realize that reality wasn't one of Livy's set piece battles. The fact is you couldn't move troops across great distances without some kind of advance planning because the troops would starve very quickly and then go home. And unless you were moving along a river line with good access to grain barges (lots of those in France), your pack animals would eat their loads almost as fast as they could carry them. Hence Xenophon's obsession with whether that next town three parasangs away will make a market. Finally, things worked on a different scale back then. Today if you invaded France with a couple of divisions armies of clerks would be needed to clean up the administrative details. Back then all you needed was the fastest talker in the west dictating non-stop to a couple of slaves and freedmen while he crossed the Alps carried in a litter. It worked because he didn't have to send out hundreds of memos, though he would probably have killed for a modern laptop with a wireless connection. And as for political and geographical knowldedge, don't confuse gaps in the modern picture with ignorance in antiquity. There's plenty of detail in Strabo, and it isn't regurgitated and translated Caesar. If Justin-Trogus and their sources had survived intact we'd probably have a very different picture. And don't forget that the Greeks had had colonies in the area for over five hundred years: there were plenty of people to talk to who could tell Caesar the name and political make-up of every minor hamlet between the mouth of the Rhone and the English Channel -- and do it in a civilized language. Central Gaul was Massilia's back yard, and Massilia was an important city and part of the Provincia Romana.

I suspect that much of Bluecher's success was the result of good staff work by his subordinates. Being a little bit delusional probably never hurts when you're in command, but thinking that you're pregnant with an elephant by one of Napoleon's grenadiers is a bit over the top ("Je sens un elephant la"). Didn't Rommel and Patton cross swords briefly in North Africa ?

\enters Gordian knot cutting mode MikeyD, I have a funny feeling that the problem with the bmp's (or whatever they call them in Apple land) is localized to a very few systems. If that is the case, you could always give the winterized version the same bmp numbers as the summer version, work it up in the midst of summer terrain, and, when it's done, either renumber the winter JagdTigger before uploading, or tell the downloaders to renumber it for winter on their own computers. Won't be the first time a mod has to be renumbered before use, and if there's a problem with some invisible property lurking in the image files, your avid fans will be more than happy to be the guinea-pigs that test it for you. \leaves Gordian knot cutting mode

Belisarius is a good choice. I'm just waiting for someone to say "Narses, now, there was a commander who had balls..." All the best, John. </font>

Vegetarian isn't so bad as long as he has a sense of humor about it. And given my relationship with animals, I'd be one too if I had to kill what I ate. But as everyone knows, chicken and beef come from cellophane packages, not live animals. Good thing I've never heard of avian flu and mad cow disease. Pasta Primavera is good for you, vegetarian chile is delicious, and there are quite a few meatless lasagna recipe's out there. Besides, most of the world can't afford to eat it anyway. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by scrapping your zip file, but I'll give it the worst case interpretation. You need to go two places: combatmission.com and cmmods.com. Combatmission.com is Madmatt's semi-unofficial CM page. If you dig around in the links sections (Resources in the upper right hand corner of this screen) you'll notice something called CMHQ. Go there. It has CMMOS 4.03, slightly more up-to-date versions of many of the mods that were on the Special Edition CD, and several really good mods as well. Most of the site is devoted to CMBO, but there are sections that deal with CMBB and CMAK as well (not that much CMAK). There are also several good articles for beginners on using mods by Mad Matt that you should probably read. They're written about CMBO, but I think they would do you good. Most of the mods currently available for CMBB can be found at cmmods.com. Go there, register, and spend some time looking around. And buried away in the CMBB section you will eventually find something called Scenario Depot Salvage -- this is Birdgunner's collection of Scenario Depot scenarios that I posted to cmmods to preserve them for posterity while people argued about what to replace it with. And remember. Please do everything very slowly and deliberately. You'll make far fewer mistakes that way, and things won't get lost in your computer. Set up the structure (at least) of the holding folders for your downloads before you download anything. That way you'll know where to put things.

Jochen Bleicken ? If you appeal to authority (Classical Trope # 227 you have to make it to someone other people have heard of, so that they can take your authority seriously, or not, as the case may be. You would have been much better off appealing to Theordore Mommsen. Except that nobody has heard of him, either. I'm not sure that I agree that Caesar was not that good a strategist. He made a few mistakes along the way, but always bounced back. And he always won in the end. He started as low-man on the Triumvirate totem pole, a milk sop to the Marian party. He ended up as the premier military leader of his day and de-facto ruler of the civilized world. And yes, what makes him very unusual is that he knew how to operate successfully at several levels at once: political (where he was an absolute master), strategic (where he was very good), operational, and tactical (and he knew exactly when it was necessary to risk his life in battle, and exactly what effect it would have on his troops if they saw him doing it). And a damned good writer. The Gallic Wars is a masterpiece of propaganda and disinformation, and done all the more brilliantly because almost everything in it is probably true. It had to be, because back then everybody knew the facts, so he couldn't lie. But he could rearrange them to suit his purposes. What's astonishing is that even to this day most people swallow his presentation of the sequence of facts hook, line, and sinker and don't ask questions (probably because they're second year students and struggling with the Latin). If you read the entire text you'll notice that the embarassing political stuff is all in there, just scattered throughout later parts of the account so as not to call too much attention to itself. He had a daunting task -- explaining why he had invaded someone else's country and attacked an ally without provocation, and he manages to make it sound like self defense. And his writing style, by the way, is unique, original, and astonishingly good. He may not have been Rome's greatest orator, but he was certainly Rome's smartest writer.

When determining whether someone is the greatest commander of all time the key criterion does not hinge on winning the only war they were in command of. You have to be a fantastic battlefield commander with strategic and operational brilliance. And some of your battles and campaigns have to be masterpieces. We aren't talking about good or really good here, we're talking about best. Belisarius isn't a serious contender for best, but he trumps Washington in spades. I can only think of one military action (the winter offensive against Princeton and Trenton) that really qualifies as brilliant. Most of his other successes were really the result of other people's work. And if the French hadn't stood up to a superior British fleet in the Chesapeake bay, Yorktown would have been a footnote to the history of successful amphibious withdrawals. On the other side of the ledger a lot of his military actions were merely ordinary, competant, or, sometimes, less than inspired. I fail to see why his disastrous defense of New York should be considered successful. Great commanders, let alone the greatest, give more breathtaking performances than that. Alexander didn't lose battles. Frederick and Napoleon both did, from time to time, but could usually bounce back. But the greatest commanders had a habit of producing textbook classics. Monongaheela is a textbook classic, of a sort, but not one that one really wants to be remembered by. Compare that to Arbela, Gaugamela, or Blenheim. In putting together the list of contenders for the greatest (aw, come on, we all know Muhammed Ali is the greatest), we really need to start with looking at who the Great Captains of history are. There are some really important names that aren't getting mentioned, and some of them are serious contenders for the other slot. Winnie's ancestor, immortalized in "Malraux s'en va t'en guerre", was really, really good and probably responsible for engineering the coup d'etat that made modern democracy in the anglophone world possible. And old Fritz of "Hats off, gentlemen, if old Fritz were alive today we wouldn't be here" fame was probably the greatest military mind of the Enlightenment. And I'm really dissapointed that nobody has mentioned Turenne (the theme song of Bizet's Arlesienne suite was based on "Monsieur de Turenne", a French folk song). Or the Marechal de Saxe, an Italian who conducted his staff meeting sitting on a portable toilet (but when the shooting started you really, really wanted him on your side). And it's hard to imagine Goethe writing Wallenstein if it weren't for his Swedish nemesis, Gustavus Adolfus, who revolutionized 17th century warfare (probably invented the modern battle maneuver) and who would probably have won greatest commander hands down if he hadn't stopped a bullet in the middle of one of his greatest victories. After he hit the Germans with leather canon and cavalry that actually charged at a gallop, warfare was never the same. I'm no fan of the Roundheads, but Cromwell and his New Model Army should be right up there. Which suggests that we probably need another category, one for people like Cromwell, Philip of Macedon, and Frederick the Great's homophobic father who created (or perfected) ground-breaking military systems. I haven't mentioned Montrose because though he could work miracles on a shoestring he came to a bad end. But he's a useful touchstone. Imagine that Montrose had suddenly morphed into GW, and then try to imagine his career lasting half as long as it actually did. I'm surprised JMM's crowd haven't come storming in here plugging for the Corsican Ogre. He may have lost in the end, but I think he may be the only serious contender to Alexander. He wasn't really that short (probably about 5' 7" if you do the conversion right -- eighteenth century units of measure were weird and confusing), and he showed, at one time or another, strategic, operational, and tactical genius. A little known fact about him is that he was also an administrative and financial genius, but, like slick Willy, just couldn't keep his pants on. If he hadn't blabbed everything in a letter to Marie Therese (who probably didn't care for him that much), Schwarzenburg never would have known that his last offensive in 1814 was a gigantic bluff. The Italian campaign of 1797-8 and the 1805 campaign (as well as parts of 1814) are probably some of the greatest masterpieces of military history. And Austerlitz was such a textbook classic that you probably can't learn anything from it. Napoleonic battles can be tough to evaluate, because he could have taught Carl Rove a thing or two about spin, but when you look at his little battles, he really shines (same holds true for Alexander, including the spin part). There was an old Roman saying that one of the most important qualities of a battlefield commander was luck. Although you can make your own to a certain extent, at the end of the day you either have it or you don't. The Great Captains had luck oozing out their ears. And they knew how to use it.

As I expected reinstalling Office a couple of times had no effect other than to add a lot of useless files to my computer. I have no idea what they do and can't even find them to get rid of them. So I resolved myself to taking the terrifying step of entering regedit land. I was just about to give up when I figured out how to create new keys and copy and paste file names and whatnot. Very scary, but very satisfying when it finally works. I even took a stab at associating a few things that had never been associated before (.art and .x files), and to my surprise it actually worked. So thanks once again, the problem seems to be resolved. I just hope I never get too comfortable mucking around in there, because when you start getting comfortable you start making mistakes.

Fascinating. The cause may actually be what the article suggests. Indeed, I did recently do a partial re-install of Office because I had accidently deleted it. In re-installing I only included Word and Excel and left out everything else. I'm tempted to try a full reinstall to see if that helps, before tampering with regedit. Thanks to John Tiller I've had to edit my registry a few times, so I'm no longer terrified by it. But I really don't like going in there unless I have to. If my full reinstal of Office tactic doesn't work (and it probably won't), I may have to start working on my deep breathing exercises (to make sure my hand isn't shaking when I perform surgery on my computer's cereberal cortex...) Thanks so much for finding that article. It makes me feel better to see that I'm not the only one having this problem.

Ok, let's take it from the top. First, what is the exact path of your CMBB scenario folder. Second, note that if you try to put a CMBB scenario into CMBO, or a CMBO scenario into CMBB, nothing will happen. (I only mention this because I notice that you're switching back and forth in your nomenclature, and if you happened to do that when you were copying files...) Third, go into your holding bin of downloaded and unzipped files and select one (and only one) file. Copy and paste it to the folder that it came from. You'll now have a small file named "copy of x" where x is whatever the name of the original was. Select that file (left click on it once with the mouse so that it becomes highlighted) and right click. A small menu will pop up, and one of the items, probably towards the bottom, will be "rename". Select it, and rename the file named "copy of x" to "aaaaaaa". Doesn't matter how many a's, just make sure that there are at least three. When the file is renamed, copy and paste it (just that one file) into your CMBB scenario folder. Then come back and tell us exactly (and I mean exactly) what you did, stroke, by stroke. The problem is that you are making some hidden assumption and not telling us about it. Whatever that assumption is, it is wrong, and it is preventing you from getting this done. So please, please tell us the exact path of your CMBB installation and exactly what you are doing. If you aren't explicit we'll have to guess, but our natural guess will be to something that works. And that won't be what you're doing. I have some theories about what may be happening but I don't want to waste time speculating until I know what is really going on.

I'm not sure if the image I was referring to is stored on my hard drive. If it is, it may take me a while to find it. In the meantime I'll look around the web and see if I can find the original source. I'm pretty sure it was posted on the CM boards within the last year, though I'm not sure which one or under what topic (i.e. can't just search because I don't know what to search for). I'll post anything interesting that I find along the way. In the meantime, I have a minor request. It would be nice to have license plate options for vehicles. I hate seeing SS or Luftwaffe driving around in Wehrmacht vehicles. One simple solution is to include a version without license plates. Another would be to include SS and LW license plates. I usually do this myself on the fly, but it's much nicer to have it done by the original modder.

A recent computer crash apparently reset the way my image files get displayed in my folders. BMP thumbnails still appear as little images, but JPEG's and GIF's now show up as little icons. This is bad news if you have collections of GIF's and JPEG's as raw material for mods. Makes it very, very difficult to find anyhing. I poked around in Properties for a solution, but nothing jumped out at me. I tried Help, but I don't seem to associate words and ideas in quite the same way that Bill Gates does. I eventually found something that looked like an elaborate procedure that I had never tried before. It might have worked, but I was too tired to attempt it and know from past experience that exhaustion breeds unrecoverable mistakes. But it also seems to me that there should be some very simple three or four stroke way of doing this, if only I could figure out what this is called. So to restate the problem: I use my folders as contact sheets and need to see at a single glance all the images of the different kinds of files that I collect (bmp's, gif's, and jpeg's). Clicking on them one at a time is a non-starter. As I'm set up now the bmp's appear as thumbnails, but the GIF's and jpeg's appear as icons. I can open them by clicking on them because I changed their properties to open in Paint (in the hope that that would make them behave like bmp's). I clearly need to do something else, but am not even sure which part of which program to mess around with. And I'm sure the solution to the problem is very simple, which is why I'm having trouble with it. Any thoughts ? [And if I can't figure out how to display my jpeg's, I'll never find that photograph of late war SPW camo that David Inglett wants to see].

As a postscript, I managed to get most of the problems to clear up, but am still scratching my head over why it worked. My friend is a lefty. She had the mouse configured in reverse. As long as the mouse was configured in reverse nothing was working right. I, however, can't work with a left-configured mouse, so early on I switched it back. As soon as I did, everything worked fine. When I switched it back to left configuration everything started to misbehave again. Switched back to right hand configuration everything worked. I'm assuming that she probably needs a new mouse and possibly a new mouse driver. Either that, or she became right-handed overnight and didn't notice. And I did find a hopelessly bent pin on one of her monitors, so the hardware had taken a beating.

I'm not sure if I saved the picture, but I'll certainly look for it. It may take a while though.

Since other lesser commanders have been mentioned, I think it is only fair to give Justinian's general Belisarius passing mention. Undefeated, he overcame ridiculous odds again and again on a shoestring. Procopius suggests that Justinian was afraid of him, but Belisarius was too loyal and honorable to revolt. He was probably the major component in Justinian's attempt to re-establish the Roman Empire. I'm a big fan of Hannibal, but I don't think he was the greatest commander. First, he was soundly defeated twice, once when he worked for the Carthaginians, once when he worked for the Seleucids. And he lost his most important major battle, the one the Carthaginians really couldn't afford to lose. His invasion of Italy was brilliant, but fell apart on the follow-through. To break the Roman hold on Italy he would have needed to control thirty or forty fortified municipalities in Central and Southern Italy. Without active and enthusiastic participation of at least half of them he would have had to fritter away his army in small garrisons, which is one of the reason he was always so painfully short of troops. The Romans ultimately beat him in Italy by following a strategy similar to the one the Germans used against Napoleon in the Great War of Liberation. If Hannibal had been Alexander he would have wowed the Greek and Southern Italian city states with his god-like charisma, and not need so many reinforcements. And if Hannibal had been Alexander, he wouldn't have lost at Zama. A more interesting question than who was the greatest commander is who would you want to have over for dinner. Temujin would be pretty challenging, especially when he would start calling for fermented mare's milk. Alexander would make a horrible guest -- he'd get stinking drunk, make passes at all the young boys, and probably pick a fight with one of the other guests. And he would keep twisting his head to one side and get this weird light in his eyes (tell-tale symptom of his famous pothos). Stonewall Jackson would be just as bad: he'd steal all the lemons from the kitchen and then stage a revival meeting just as you were trying to serve dinner. Napoleon would be awful -- completely self-absorbed, he was incontinent and would wolf down a multi-course dinner in under seven minutes. And get really offended if anyone wasn't working on the same course he was. Hannibal, on the other hand, would be delightful -- he'd stay sober, probably help out in the kitchen, and would keep the guests entertained with funny reminiscences of his travels in Spain, Turkey, and Italy.

I'm afraid I don't understand your post. What exactly did you do? The basic drill is to download the scenarios to someplace safe. Then unzip them to someplace even safer. Then go into that place and copy and paste the contents to your cmbb scenario folder. The most popular culprit problem these days seems to be that scenarios get unzipped directly to the scenario folder and don't show up because they're inside their own folder (which the program won't look into). If that isn't your problem please describe exactly what you've done in pornographic detail.

These mods look really nice and I'm really looking forward to trying them out. One thing I've been wondering about, and I hope this mod addresses it. I remember seeing a photograph from the Eastern Front of stugs and halftracks crossing an open landscape. It almost looked something from CM, except that who lets their halftracks get that close to the front? The photo was in black and white, of course, and a bit fuzzy, but you could clearly see the camouflage patterns. Each Stug seemed to have the same pattern as the other stugs, and each SPW had the same pattern as the other SPW's. And the two patterns were different -- presumably because the commander of each unit was responsible for supervising the application of camouflage patterns. One thing that was also very marked was that the pattern striping on the sides of the SPW were diagonals rather than vertical. So two of the tones of what was probably three-tone camo was forming something that almost looked like a shallow V rather than vertical markings. I don't know much about what camo should look like on vehicles, but I wonder if you could do a variant where there was a bit more of a diagonal tilt to the darker colored sections.

At the risk of beating a dead quadruped, I suspect that the presence of horses on a CMBB battlefield should be a lot like the presence of trucks. They really shouldn't be there, but from time to time it will happen and you won't be able to avoid it. Most horses that you would encounter would be transport horses used to pull wagons. Apart from propaganda photographs cavalry wasn't supposed to ride into battle, though I'm sure it must have happened a few times by accident. I remember reading an account of a Soviet cavalry assault and noticing that they left their horses several miles further back from the front than a CM player would normally leave his trucks. On the other hand, cavalry was the tool of choice for patrolling the large spaces between units on the steppe, and there must have been ambushes. Horses are high-strung and skittish about being stabbed, blown up, and shot at. Imagine the horse holders for a company of dismounted cavalry coming under a light mortar barrage. After a few rounds the horses will panic and scatter in all directions. To model this you would probably have to do one-on-one modeling of hysterical horses scampering around the landscape. And to get the right sound effects for the wav files you would almost certainly run afoul of PETA...

Alexander conquered just about anything in reach that he knew about and that was worth conquering. Including an opponent who was about fifty times his own size. And after that he had a problem because he couldn't be David against Goliath anymore. I'm not sure that I agree that he lost his sanity in the end. He never had it to begin with. He was just as crazy when he was leading his father's left wing at Thebes as he was when he was the world conqueror drinking himself to death in Babylon. It ran in the family, and was one of the reasons why Philip eventually became estranged from Alexander and Olympias (her habit of keeping live snakes in the conjugal bed was another). Today we would say that the guy was probably bi-polar and had a severe problem with binge drinking. He seems to have remembered everything he did when under the influence, but didn't live long enough for the brain cell loss to fog his mental acuity. It's not entirely clear what killed him. An unfortunate conjunction of too much booze, too much sex, an improperly healed wound, a bad case of malaria, and perhaps a soupcon of arsenic. I used to take the poison stories seriously until I realized that most of them were fabricated during the civil wars to discredit opposing factions.

Alexander. He had a god-like talent and never lost a battle. He even solved the tactical problem of how to defeat Scythian cavalry with a non-nomadic army. And he liked elephants (though he never got around to using them). When he died he was planning an invasion of Italy and North Africa that would certainly have been successful -- 4th century Rome and Carthage were not as robust as they were to become two hundred years later.

After the death of the Scenario Depot there were emergency dumps of all the scenarios from CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK to the CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK sections of CMMODS. So go to cmmods.com, register, and poke around in the mods until you find the scenarios. In CMBB they're listed as Scenario Salvage and there are about half a dozen zips. There's a similar arrangement for CMAK and CMBO. There's no way to search or sort what's in the zips, but there is an attached Excel file which prevents the download from being a totally inchoate mass. Be warned. The downloads include a couple of thousand scenarios between the three games.

An artist friend has Windows XP. Her mouse and keyboard are suddenly not working. I'm going to go in and take a look early tomorrow afternoon to see what I can do. Those who know me will know how funny that is, but this is an emergency (for her and for me). I have no idea what is wrong with her computer. It will probably prove to be something other than what was described to me. I am hoping that it is something simple like a corrupted driver or two. In which case I'll reinstall from wherever I can find them. My problem, however, is that I've never actually used a computer with Windows XP before, so I'm not sure how to go about it. I'm assuming that like most computer-related issues it is fairly self-explanatory, but I would really appreciate any pointers anyone could give to doing this in XP as opposed to 2000. And just in case the problem can't be solved by reinstalling drivers, I would love to hear what other things (besides loose wiring or faulty connections) would cause a mouse and a keyboard not to work. I'm told that her computer is a relatively late model Dell. And assuming that I succeed in fixing the problem and give her computer a tune-up (defrag, virus scan, memory tweak), any idea what I should charge? I'd love to say that this is CMBO- and CMBB- related. It is, in a way, but only in the sense that it will move me a lot closer towards being able to play them by PBEM again someday.

It's always a good idea to unzip things into a holding folder before you dump them into the ultimate destination. That way, if all your zipped scenarios happen to unzip to a folder, you'll know to take them out of their folder before putting them into your scenario folder. That may be why your new scenarios don't show up. And if that is the case, you probably have an accumulation of crud in your bmp folder from mods that you did the same thing to.