Philippe
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Posts posted by Philippe
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I really wish there were a way to set up revolt flags for these countries without having to display them before they enter the war. I like having Arab Revolt flags, but I don't want to see them before the revolts are successful.
I'm afraid I was under-caffeinated when I wrote that last post. The activation icons seem to follow the same order as the countries: the majors, followed by everybody else in alphabetical order. So you would expect to see an Ottoman Turkish icon standing in for Libya just before Mexico and Morocco. What you see instead of one pair of Turkish icons is two pairs of Turkish icons.
Is there a reason for there being two icons? I'm tempted to just change both of them into black Senussi icons, but was worried that I might be tampering with a game function. If I only change one, do I change the one on the right or the one on the left (I've changed the one on the right for now but don't know if it was right because I haven't got that far in my test game).
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The renamed German Symbols version 1.4 is now available at the repository.
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Another question about Libya.
I understand that when Libya enters the war the Libyan flag will change to the Italian flag, in the same way that Palestine, Syria, and Arabia become Ottoman after the Turks enter the war.
Is there a pair of activation icons exclusively assacotiated with Libya? I'm guessing that one pair of the two red Ottoman pairs is meant to be Turkish, and one Libyan. If that is the case, I'll need to turn one dark grey and black to represent the Sanussi.
Or am I over-interpreting this?
[i've essentially completed two different versions of the Call to Arms mod, with everything covered that I can think of, except for this last point].
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I would also like very much to know what the 'show turn summary' key is.
On a related note, I've looked around for a list of shortcut commands, but don't seem to be able to find one. Does it exist, or am I not looking in the right place?
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What I hope will be the last version of the German Symbols mod has been submitted to the Repository and is currently under review. I'm hoping that you will be able to download it in a day or two.
I few years ago I made a Reichskrieg flag mod for Strategic Command I, but after searching two computers and an external hard drive I have come to the conclusion that if I still have it, it's buried away so deeply that I'll never put my hands on it.
So I've made a new set of Reichskrieg flags for the HQ figure sprites, which is just as well because my graphics technique is better than it was six years ago.
The latest version of the mod (1.4), when it emerges from the review process, has two sets of flags that can be installed: one that includes the Reichskrieg flag, and one that that uses the same HQ flags as versions 1.0 - 1.3.
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I'm not even close to being an authority on this, but I think you have to think about Austro-Hungarian flags in their terms rather than ours.
The first thing you have to wrap your mind around is that they didn't really have a concept of a national flag in our sense. The other thing to keep in mind, especially if you're a vexillologicaly impoverished American with only one national flag, is that most countries have several national flags, with different flags for different functions.
I was rather surprised when I started looking at period images at how often the Yellow-Black flag was used. Part of the problem is that the double-flag naval ensign is Austria-Hungary's flag more by wargamers' urban legend than anything else. I'm not sure that you would really see it anywhere but on the mainmast of a warship (apart from on the occasional foreign propaganda poster). What was used from time to time was a similar combination flag without the coats of arms, a double tricolor as it were. I've seen a few simple red-white-red Austrian flags from foreign sources, probably the result of ship ensigns from foreign visits. But given how nationalistic the Hungarians were supposed to be, it's odd that there aren't more green-white-and-red tricolors around, with or without St. Stephen's crown.
So why didn't the Yellow-Black flag cause the Hungarians problems? I suspect that the reason may have had something to do with the fact that the Yellow-Black flag is a dynastic flag rather than a national flag. You can be loyal to your feudal sovereign in a dual monarchy without being subservient to the other country. The Yellow-Black flag is a way of saying we're all loyal to the Hapsburg dynasty, regardless of nationality. And in the Hapsburg Empire there were a lot more than just two nationalities, even though it was a dual monarchy.
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The latest update to the Symbols mod converts the Bulgarian flag into a plain tricolor.
Back up your originals and read the mod notes. The mod mimics the folder structure of the game, so once you've taken a look at it, copy and paste the mod's Battlefront folder (and its contents, of course) to wherever you keep your Battlefront folder.
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A pair of interesting Russian propaganda posters. One gets the impression that neither the audience nor the artist were all that familiar with the flags of the Central Powers.
Click on the MediaFire link to see a larger version of the image.
The Austrian flag looks like the 1894 Naval Ensign which may or may not have double as the national flag, perhaps at embassies overseas. The German flag is the Naval Ensign which was also sometimes used by the army.
http://www.mediafire.com/view/x3fe8jl283m8mud/kp06755.jpg
The artist may have been unsure of what flag to use for Austria-Hungary, so he used the WW I Naval Ensign. Because he also wasn't sure that anyone would recognize the flag, the artist wrote out the name of its country in Cyrillic lettering across the bottom stripe. The bottom stripe of the Hungarian half of the flag is in a different color than the bottom stripe of the Austrian half. The flag is correct in that the Austrian half occupies the hoist (against the flagpole), whereas the Hungarian half occupies the fly (the outside).
http://www.mediafire.com/view/4mu14f2u33lu1fd/Russian%20poster.jpg
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Flags of the Central Powers as they appear in German and Austrian propaganda posters. Use the MediaFire link for looking at the images more closely.
This is a German poster welcoming Bulgaria to the Central Powers. Austria is the yellow-black bicolor and Bulgaria is a plain tricolor.
http://www.mediafire.com/view/528gobz54z3gdpc/Central-powers-flags.jpg
Another German poster. The colors of the Bulgarian flag are in an unusual (and probably incorrect) order.
http://www.mediafire.com/view/l20m020d92dluqp/89376.jpg
Another German poster. If you look closely all the flags are there, and use the same color scheme as in the first poster.
http://www.mediafire.com/view/2jntc1uv3tdgjje/germ120.jpg
An Austrian propaganda poster. When they needed to portray their own flag, they apparently thought it was the bicolor of the black-yellow monarchy (so-called after the landfarben of the Hapsburg-Lorraine dynasty).
http://www.mediafire.com/view/cctja50x1ed11g8/aus21.jpg
A German propaganda poster showing the original three Central Powers. Once again Austria uses the plain yellow-black bicolor and Germany uses the plain black-white-red tricolor.
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Thanks for addressing the Syria/Palestine flag question. I'm putting together a flag mod for WW I and it was one of the more troublesome questions.
In the mod I'm currently thinking of using French flags for all of French North Africa, though I may break down and make a Tunisian flag. I hope when you update the game you'll arrange to have the Moroccan flag on display (and the Algerian flag will, of course, remain French).
If you've seen the Libyan thread you'll realize that that flag is a problem as well, although easier to solve. Does the Libyan flag currently turn Italian when Italy enters the war (in which case I would suggest that you might consider using the Senussi flag as the pre-war flag)? If the flag doesn't go through any declaration of war changes, it should be Italian from the get-go (rather than Turkish).
I hope that in future versions of the game you figure out a way to have Syria and Palestine fly the Ottoman flag in August 1914. Giving them revolt flags makes them look like they were in revolt at the start of the war, and they weren't. For my mod I had pretty much decided that I should leave them alone, if only because changing them would have eliminated the Revolt in the Desert flag from the game.
I'm currently grappling with what to do about the Austrian flag, the Russian flag, and the Persian flag. I may have found the solution by looking at a collection of WW I propaganda posters, which gives some surprising answers to what flags people thought their opponents were using, and to what the flags were that their opponents were actually using. I'd like to put some images of these posters on this website, but I need to find a new visually acceptable image hosting site because last time I tried to use Image Shack it didn't seem to be free anymore).
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Libya should not be flying an Ottoman flag. It should probably use an Italian flag, or, if you want to take a really dim view of how much control the Italians had over the country, the Senussi flag (a crescent moon and star on a black field -- the Turkish flag with a black background).
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"Italian Libya was formed from the colonies of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania which were taken by Italy from the Ottoman Empire in 1912 after the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 to 1912".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Libya
"The Italo-Turkish or Turco-Italian War (Turkish: Trablusgarp Savasi, "Tripolitanian War"; also known in Italy as Guerra di Libia, "Libyan War") was fought between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Italy from September 29, 1911 to October 18, 1912. As a result of this conflict, Italy captured the Ottoman Tripolitania Vilayet (province), of which the most notable sub-provinces (sanjaks) being Fezzan, Cyrenaica, and Tripoli itself. These territories together formed what became known as Italian Libya.
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The Ottomans had to withdraw all their military forces and administrative agents from Libya according to Article 2 of the Treaty of Ouchy in 1912 (per Article 22 of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.)[10]
Although minor, the war was a significant precursor of the First World War as it sparked nationalism in the Balkan states. Seeing how easily the Italians had defeated the weakened Ottomans, the members of the Balkan League attacked the Ottoman Empire before the war with Italy had ended.
The Italo-Turkish War saw numerous technological changes, notably the airplane. On October 23, 1911, an Italian pilot, Captain Carlo Piazza, flew over Turkish lines on the world's first aerial reconnaissance mission, and on November 1, the first ever aerial bomb was dropped by Sottotenente Giulio Gavotti, on Turkish troops in Libya, from an early model of Etrich Taube aircraft.[11] The Turks, lacking anti-aircraft weapons, were the first to shoot down an aeroplane by rifle fire.[12]
It was also in this conflict that the future first president of Turkey and leader of the Turkish War of Independence, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, distinguished himself militarily as a young officer during the Battle of Tobruk".
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I've managed to upload version 1.2 to the Repository.
The latest set of changes include corrections to the flags of Yugoslavia, Romania, Egypt, and Transjordan.
The Commonwealth is now using two very different flags. When you see it on the big map it is flying the green Egyptian flag (what Egypt was using in WW II but not WW I). If you look at the convoy and war maps the Commonwealth is flying a plain Blue Ensign.
Transjordan uses a flag that is very similar to the Arab Revolt flag. You would expect Palestine to use a variant on the Blue Ensign, and it did for things like the police force, but the Mandate itself was using the Union flag.
Romania's non-military non-royal standard flag was a plain tricolor, as was Yugoslavia's.
The mod itself is nested inside a bunch of folders, the first one is named Battlefront. To install the mod unzip it into a safe (and separate) place, back up your originals, and copy and paste the mod to wherever you keep your Battlefront folder. In other words it's a manual install but I've made it very easy for my fellow luddites.
Please give me a shout if you see anything that needs attention. It's really easy to overlook things, and unlike the Pope I'm not infallible when it comes to research. The thing about flags is that you can be absolutely certain that you know what the proper flag should be for a certain country at a particular moment in history, because you've only read the relevant entry at FOTW a score of times. And then when you go back and read it again, it either says something else because it has changed over the years, or your memory is simply playing tricks on you. And sometimes you just interpret it differently.
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I'm currently attempting to upload version 1.1 of my German symbols mod (and not too successfully, which is probably why the file hasn't appeared yet).
If I ever manage to get the thing posted, version 1.1 has the following changes from the previous version:
A tiny (and probably invisible) correction to the positioning of one of the German flags (the double flag-pole is now gone).
The Greek flag now uses the more familiar striped coastal flag rather than the inland flag.
The Finnish flag is now the national flag rather than the war flag. (I really wanted to use the war flag in its proper context, because it is one of my favorite flags and has a medieval swallow-tail. The problem is that the war flag would have been flying over the capital even when the country is at peace. And I've been known to change my mind).
Some of the Hungarian national flags no longer sport the coat of arms. The problem is actually somewhat similar to the Finnish one, but it was easier to keep the hobgoblin of little minds at bay. I'm also inordinately fond of the crown of St. Stephen.
These changes are coming about because I'm working on a mod for WW I, and there's spillover.
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I've been looking at the North African and Middle Eastern flags in the two WW I games and a few of them could benefit from some TLC.
Morocco:
Morocco was a protectorate and should fly its own flag rather than the flag of metropolitan France. There's a perfectly nice version of the Moroccan flag already included in the flag sprites, so it's probably just a question of fiddling with the code so that the engine points to the Moroccan rather than the French flag. This cannot be modded.
Algeria:
The portion of Algeria that appears on the game map was, in this period, part of Metropolitan France and not a protectorate. Consequently Algeria should fly the French tricolor and not the flag of post-WW II independence. This can be modded.
Tunisia:
Tunisia was a French protectorate (like Morocco), but without quite as much independent national identity. Nevertheless they should be flying their own flag (red and somewhat Ottoman-looking) rather than the flag of Metropolitan France. This can be modded.
Egypt:
The Egyptian flag used in the game is correct for the WW II period. During WW I the flag was red, and looked fairly similar to the Ottoman Empire's. This can be modded.
Palestine:
Not sure what to do about this one. The flag that should be flying over Palestine is the flag of the Ottoman Empire, not the flag of the Arab Revolt from a few years later. Don't know what the modding status of this one is, and am not sure what would happen if the Revolt flag were to be replaced with the Ottoman flag in 1914 (I'm concerned about what the flag will be after Allenby and Lawrence liberate the region at the end of the war).
Syria:
Same issue as Palestine.
This can't really be addressed properly in a mod, so I hope it can get fixed in a subsequent patch.
If anyone cares to discuss this further, my e-mail address hasn't changed and I can still be contacted at padivine at juno dot com.
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I wasn't planning on making a career of posting mods here, so the title and description of the mod in the repository is not exactly what I would like.
To find the mod, go to the second page of mods for Strategic Command WWI The Great War and look for something called Graphics. The real title of the mod is the title of this thread, and got buried away in the text of the mod description.
This is a very simple graphics-only mod. All it does is change every instance of the more palatable fantasy German symbols used in the SOE Campaign for an historically accurate one, and adjusts the shade of red on the 3-D German HQ flags to be closer to the red on the flag used for national capitals.
Many years ago I made a mod for one of the earlier iterations of Strategic Command that used the Reichskriegflag. This time around I opted for the Partei flag, even though I prefer to use both (Reichkrieg for the headquarters and Partei for everything else). If I had gone the two-flag route for the Germans, I would have had to mod the Finnish flag, which is currently a non-swallowtail variant on their war flag (rather than the more familiar national flag).
The mod comes with a textfile of installation instructions that I strongly suggest you read before installing. The mod itself comes in two parts: the textfile just mentioned and a set of folders that mimic the folder structure of the game. Unzip the download into a safe place (do not unzip it into the game folder), take a look at it, pretend to read the installation instructions, back up your originals, and the follow the instructions. You don't really need to back up your originals, but it will save you having to reinstall the game if something goes wrong.
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I realize that AOD is an expansion, but do I have to buy the Global Conflict Gold bundle, or can I just get plain unenhanced Global Conflict (not the Gold version) and leave it at that? If I can just buy the cheapest version of Global Conflict and get AOD to run, I might consider getting Assault on Communism as well (assuming that both AOD and AOC only need the vanilla Global Conflict program to run.
Any assistance in clearing this up would be appreciated.
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I had been thinking of getting the CMBN big bundle but am a bit surprised that I have to buy version 2.0 and then upgrade to 3.0. Why can't I just buy a version 3.0 bundle and have done with it?
My other problem is that I installed avira anti-virus today and the first thing it did is permanently disable the CMBN demo. Try as I might, I can't seem to get Avira it to let me run it. It's not just a question of disabling during installation, because any time I run a scan I'm potentially looking at a $100+ piece of software getting disabled.
These two experiences are making me wonder whether I really need CMBN enough to put up with this level of aggravation. Any assistance (and useful commentary) from the powers that be would be appreciated.
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My questions are probably directed at the moderators since I have a funny feeling they know the answers to my questions.
But first, a belated hello to Hubert after too long an absence!
I don't own either game yet but want to get Breakthrough at the very least. What I would like to know is whether or not Breakthrough is a stand-alone game. Can I run Breakthrough without owning The Great War?
Assuming Breakthrough can run on its own, is there any content that I would be missing if I didn't get both games (apart from the WW II material) ? For example, does Breakthrough have a scenario that is equivalent to The Great War's 1917 American entry campaign (I don't know what to call it since I haven't seen the game)?
I compared the demo for each game and my sense was that (not surprisingly) Breakthrough was a more mature iteration of the game system, and has what for me are several irresistible scenarios as well (Franco-Prussian War, Balkan War, Russian Civil War, and the one about what may or may not have been Karen Blixen's boyfriend in Africa). The two WW I scenarios in the demo are very similar to (but still different from) their counterparts in Breakthrough. The Kaiserschlacht scenario has the better name and covers a smaller area than the Ludendorf scenario, but I prefer to see the overall effect an offensive like this would have had on the front as a whole.
The one thing I found myself wondering (but didn't have time to track down) is whether the Central Powers using auto-deploy will exactly replicate the historical deployment in the 1914 scenarios. My sense is that it's probably pretty close, but if it isn't, I would really like to know how to simulate the historical deployment before I start making departures from it. I want to be able to play the Schlieffen plan and know that it's going up against Plan XVII.
The one thing I haven't come across is any mention of the Caporetto offensive. Is that included anywhere, or will it eventually show up in a patch (I don't really expect you to answer that last one).
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Each game has a separate BMP folder. For a mod to work it needs to appear in the appropriate folder. If you want something with a shared bmp number in CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK, you need to copy it into all three folders. If in only two of those, then it needs to be in the two appropriate folders.
Before you try making mods, make absolutely sure that 1) you have a back-up of the unmodded bmp folder for that game; 2) you absolutely understand how the skin underlying that particular mod works; 3) that you have an accurate list of which bmp's go into the mod (this is surprising difficult, at times); and 4) that you understand what size limits and dimensions and size multiple of proportions are involved. It's not enough to notice that the same vehicle occurs in all three games -- the three games might use different numbers of bmp's (or differently numbered bmp's for the same thing!). Finally, you have to be aware that many bmp's do double or triple duty in several different skins. A few bmp's still have more or less unknown functions, and a few can still turn up as weird and rude surprises (what's that German truck dashboard doing on the end of the gun barrel of a Commonwealth whatchamacallit). If you want to mod something, gather together all the previous mods and examine them closely. You'll usually find that most people overlooked a few textures, and a few occasionally creep in that don't belong. Dummy mods with exaggerated unrealistic colors and numbered parts are very useful for smoking this kind of thing out. Read everybody's notes (you'll find yourself wishing they were more verbose), and be aware that there are five or six things that can't be modded (e.g. mortars, bazookas, schreks).
But most of all, beware. If you start modding things you've taken the first step on a long and dangerous slope.
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The wire mod works for all three games (CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK). Back in the day there was a belief that one should only post mods to one game, so I posted the mod to CMBO. (Truth in advertising: at the time I only owned CMBO, which is why if you look at the original screenshot from combatmission.com -- Madmatt's unofficial CM site -- very closely you'll recognize buildings that didn't get ported to CMAK until much, much later).
The information packet included with the mod shows the actual sources. And the top coil of barbed wire in one of the jpeg's is literally the graphic source for the entire mod (one coil, distorted, reused in lots of seemingly random ways).
The color palette (in terms of brightness) is probably more suited to CMBO than CMBB (which to my eye uses a darker palette). If I were doing it again I would probably make the CMBB wire (but not the supports) a little darker -- and possibly rustier.
This may turn out to be a visual fetish born of my old video card, which gave up the ghost about a week ago. For some reason it tended to make metallic colors a bit too bright, e.g. the trim on the edges of the german officers' hats in the otherwise wonderful ATF mods.
(My heart is in my mouth over what is going to happen to my computer in about a week when my video card gets replaced. Last time I lost everything, but my one consolation is that through the heroic efforts of Der Alte Fritz, if my computer does go kaputt, at least I'll be able to reconstruct the Combat Mission part of it.)
P.S. -- once I can run programs again my return to the CM world is scheduled for mid- to late fall. I hope my old opponents will still be speaking to me by then.
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Two computer deaths and three years ago I had a link on my computer to a site that was a repository of military music. About a third of it was German, but what was interesting about this site was that it had a lot of good material from other countries like Italy.
The reason I'm interested is that I'm actually looking for 18th century Prussian music, and quickly discovered that googling the names of well known military marches is a very bad idea.
So if anyone knows what I'm talking about, I would really appreciate knowing how to get back there (assuming it still exists).
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CMBO 2 with higher graphics is also known as CMAK. There are only a few vehicles and unit types from CMBO that don't show up in it, so many of the CMBO scenarios have been redone for CMAK. Check out the CMAK mods, particularly David Inglett's ETO mod, and take a look at the non-Italian scenarios in the CMAK Sorted Scenarios on CMMODS.
Apart from that, BTS has made it clear that there will be no going back to CMx1, which is a shame since several things that would have been quite logical to cover were left untouched (e.g. France 1940, a retro-fit of CMAK features to CMBB). As much as I love the Sealion mod, it doesn't really satisfy the craving for real French and Belgian units and the early tank battles of the summer of 1940.
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Well over half the textures that you would be likely to want to do substitutions with can be found by looking inside cmbo cmmos and looking up whatever you happen to be interested in.
If there's something particular you're interested in, then just find a mod of whatever it is and whatever bmp's they used is probably your list. To be sure if it's accurate, consult several mods of the same thing.
Having said that, the cmbo cmmos lists are surprisingly accurate because a lot of people pored over them to make sure they worked.
Last I looked you could find cmbo cmmos at combatmission.com.
Tannenberg
in Strategic Command - World War 1: The Great War 1914-1918
Posted
I seem to recall that the Russian general Samsonov's response to that scenario was to blow his brains out.