Philippe

Aren't you forgetting '56 ? I would think that at a tactical level Suez would be a blast, especially with the British and French involved. Come to think of it, Bay of Pigs could be fun as well. But I don't think Steve wants to do amphibious assaults right away.

I wouldn't really know about this kind of thing 'cause I'm only a dumb fureigner. I thought that affect and effect worked the same as affected and effected (e.g. "Lots of the people on the Forum are affected, but the smart ones aren't effected by this".) But hey, I'm so old-fashioned that I think that wench is a term of endearment used for flirting with the opposite sex in taverns.

Hmm...Let's see now... They have lots of affect but no effect ?

Mods only change what you see, not what happens in the game. Having said that, if you put really good camo on your units, play at a realistic size setting, and don't turn on the bases, you'll probably lose them.

And please don't use black as a setupzone and unit base color. It tends to become completely invisible in a background with a dark palette.

Actually, you already have both sets of them on your cd's. Since you're bound to run into this kind of problem again when you're doing active mod switching, I would recommed making a parallel instal of the games, grabbing the original bmp folders, and sticking them in a safe place under the label "original bmp folder" or some such thing. And if you start playing around with sound mods you'll need to do the same with your wav folders. If you need help doing the parallel instal without overwriting any of the mods you have already installed, just holler.

I wonder if that was really the first mention. I just did a google search on "Space Lobsters" and was surprised at how many hits I got. It would seem that Space Lobsters are standard fare in the 21st century.

Oh my God - he's a hippy! Burn him! </font>

In theory a game on the war in the South Atlantic in 1982 could be very interesting. I think there is something like that over at Shrapnel, and I know there has been some treatment of it in boardgaming. What makes the situation exciting is that it is a bit like Space Lobsters in the sense that it is a war that is being fought over impossibly large distances. To get the real flavor of the thing (and the cold, empty vastness of the South Atlantic) you have to show the strategic game, the naval war, and the air war. They all intersect at the same point on the map, and if you get one of the wrong... I am sure there must be at least a score of good, small tactical actions on the ground with this one. But what would really make for a South Atlantic trilogy are the what-ifs. The generals were fighting their secret war and trying desparately to hang on to power when they hit on the scheme of liberating the Malvinas. But for two or three years prior to that it was touch and go with Chile: there were naval incidents off Tierra del Fuego and small troop deployments (had to be small -- the terrain is too inclement) that eventually led to mediation by the Vatican (or P2, depending on how conspiracy-prone you are). So the alternative to the UK v.Argentina was almost a nasty shooting war that would have stretched across the foothills of the Andes from Tierra del Fuego to the Gran Chaco. Varied terrain, many different climates, more or less modern weapons, some cavalry, and huge egos. I think the junta may have decided to go after the Malvinas because it would have been a lot less nasty. Besides, the best vineyards down there are in Mendoza -- did they really want to see it turned into a warzone? (Ignore me, that was rhetoric -- they were too thick to really care). The other what-if, much less likely, would have involved some kind of attack on Brazil. The war would have been fought out in the general neighborhood of Uruguay, and would have been quite nasty. An equally stupid war because Argentines wouldn't be able to go to Brazil for Carnival in the summer. But it would have had enough manpower and relatively modern hardware behind it to make it interesting. 1982 was the very beginning of the Latin debt crisis, and because western bankers were funding their deficits with euroloans, most Latin countries hadn't figured out that they were bankrupt (and Walter Wriston never figured it out). The game modules that I'm describing would be a smash hit in Latin America, especially with the military crowd. And you could follow it up with an unrelated (and non-hypothetical) module covering fighting between Peru and Ecuador over the Corridor del Condor. Ecuador likes to get into little fights with Peru to take attention away from the political comedy at home. I've seen it happen twice, and I know there were Italian trucks and Chinese roadbuilding equipment in the OOB's because I know the guy who financed them (much to his horror a photo of the comandeered trucks ferrying Peruvian soldiers to the front appeared in the Financial Times a week after he closed the deal). Ecuador and Peru don't really want to fight each other, it's a bit like the posturing that goes on just before closing time at raunchier bars. But the point of contention is a disputed zone deep in a jungle which grows over rumored deposits of oil-laden sludge. Given the current price of oil it's probably worth fighting over again. One drawback to going this route, though, is that the Forums will probably pick up about 20,000 new members, all of them speaking Spanish. You might have to revisit your English-only policy.

I can't say that I'm terribly fond of your current name: there are lots of better choices. And if you're going to change it, now is certainly a better time to do it than later. If nothing else it will help you avoid being referred to as "the poster formerly know as...", which would be a bit confusing since that title is usually reserved for Prince. It's a pity that Seanachai isn't awake at this hour - I'm sure he would have some marvelous suggestions. In his absence I would propose Koala Bear (no underscore) assuming it hasn't been used already. People like them, they'll know you're from Oz, and it is always better to provoke a tolerant rather than a negative reaction when someone sees your screen name.

I'm not really sure you should be losing your innocence just yet, but I believe the answer to that question and many more can be found at CMMODS. You have to register, but you can set the little pop-up to remember your screen name and password. I can never remember mine. CMMODS is the current repository of most of the CM mods, and due to a set of unfortunate circumstances is also temporary refuge of the thousands of scenarios that escaped the demise of the Scenario Depot. The site is a bit slow and takes some getting used to (make sure to bring a good book to read if you don't have broadband), but once you become familiar with what is posted there you will have been assimilated.

The anonymous and probably apocryphal Luftwaffe pilot who blasted 007 into oblivion, leaving no trace of his own passing in the USAAF or RAF records. The attack was one of the great early triumphs of stealth bombing -- so stealthy that after sixty years it still hasn't been detected.

*gulp* What do you have against her??? :eek: </font>

Since I think my response got lost in the update, I'll try again. I don't really enjoy argument for argument's sake, so I probably won't be going back in until I have something useful to add. Having said that, I'm trying to get in touch with the few surviving WW II vets that I know to see what they think about it. If an army institutes an extensive training program about something, it often means they had detected some weakness -- most of the testimonials that I saw in the thread were about modern training, so not that relevant (to my addled brain). So far I haven't come up with anyone remembering much about whether most people could read maps or not. But I did come up with a training anecdote from an ETO vet who mentioned that whenever they put aircraft silhouettes up for identification the tent started chanting "BFP, BFP", which meant "Big Effing Plane". So much for taking training in WW II seriously. Aviators' silk maps often didn't survive contact with civilians because they would get traded for favors and converted into stockings -- but we weren't talking about that kind of map. My credibility, like my odd sense of humor, is situational. So is yours, and I'm not too worried about it, either. If you think it that much of a concern send me an e-mail. We really shouldn't be discussing this here. Like Euripides I tend to look at people as they actually are, whereas I suspect you're a bit more like Sophocles, extrapolating back from their current training regimens and imagining that they were as they should be.

CM is a tactical unit simulator, not a tank simulator, so though I would like it to model everything, it only needs to model enough to make the tactics work. What is being considered is how all the pieces relate to each other, not how one piece behaves in the universe. Panzer Elite, by contrast, is more of a simulator and should model things like shell fligh-times, overturning vehicles, and collisions. As an aside, if the terminology and mechanics of bogged and immobilized are being retained, I'd like to suggest renaming 'bogged' to simply 'stopped'. Less colorful, but also less confusing when it happens on a railroad crossing and has nothing to do with soft ground. In CM parlance that Panther tank in the place de la Concorde that I mentioned earlier was probably 'bogged'.

A quick note on tank-ramming as a tactic. I would love to see it implemented. And I would love to play an opponent who tried to abuse it. Because playing bumper cars is, ordinarily, just about the lamest way I can think of to take out an enemy tank. While you're closing to ram he'll probably blow you to hell.

I agree that tank-ramming is such a rare occurence that it is probably not worth coding. I'm not so sure about basic collisions, though. Vehicles run into things by accident all the time. The result is dented tree, crushed fender, bruised elbow. But sometimes it is much worse. In a perfect world I would start moaning and groaning for more collision effects. Most of these would be accidently self-inflicted, by the way. In that context ramming is just an obscure subset of the class of common everyday collisions, some of which do damage, some of which don't. But as I hinted in an earlier post, I don't want to see collision effects without collision avoidance AI and vehicle convoy behavior. Vehicles run into things all the time in CM. Usually you don't notice. In the real world there would be a sickening crunch, and one or more things might get broken (including you). If I send a jeep or a truck flying down a road and am sloppy about how I take a curve, I probably just hit a wall when I was going 35 miles per hour. I really, really, seriously would not want to be in that vehicle when that happened. Most of the time you hug a building with a tank, and bump into it moving slowly. I'm sure the real life result would be a few kicks and insults to the driver from the other passengers. But sometimes it would result in a thrown tread. Or a small dent or hole in the wall. Or both. I'll be the first to admit it. I'm a lousy driver. I manage to do something like this to myself ever couple of turns in a typical CM scenario. I should learn to be more careful. And note that if the bumper-car effect were fully implemented in CM, people would be a little more careful about the distance they maintained between vehicles. [Which reminds me -- we probably need an intermediate speed or two as well as a vehicle follow command so that we can do column movement manually].

I suspect that one of the reasons that you don't see many of the consequences of vehicle collisions in CMx1 is that the AI is extremely bad at collision avoidance. A simple thing like trying to get a halted column of tanks to move down a road almost always results in collisions unless you intervene with some aggressive micro-management. If collision effects had really been modeled, it would be pretty hard to launch an attack with more than one or two vehicles in it. When large heavy vehicles run into things, armored or not, the laws of physics tend to make things go splat. People complain about bogging now -- just wait until they start running into things and really start throwing treads.

During the liberation of Paris in August 1944 a Sherman tank named Douaumont commanded by Marcel Bizien rammed a Panther next to the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. You couldn't pick a more conspicuous place for a tank battle. Apparently the Douaumont had stumbled suddenly on the German and had fired an HE round to no effect, then followed that up by a smoke round at 30 yards instead of an AP round. As the Panther's gun turned slowly towards the Sherman, the only thing Bizien could think of was ramming, which caused the German crew to abandon the Panther. Apparently the German tank had already been damaged and immobilized by a French tank destroyer, and this was the last straw. Bizien met the commander of the German tank later on when he passed a column of POW's. This incident is described in Is Paris Burning ? by Collins and LaPierre, and was clearly very unusual. I doubt that the Sherman did much that day after the ramming incident.

There are many different sound mods for CMBB at CMMODS. Just spend some time there looking around. One of the most interesting is Nightcrawler's. Unfortunately most of the sound files have a slight scratching sound just at the end of the file. The result is that when you use them you hear a very frequent background scratching sound that resembles a damaged LP. It can be easily clipped off with a sound editor, but it's a pain to have to perform that much surgery on so many files. Much worse than pink spots.

If you must go for something that modern, I would suggest Katanga in the 60's. Nice foreign intervention, and even a bit of cannibalism. But are we ready for Belgian nuns turning up in the recipe threads? Other modern bush wars should include the Toyota Wars in the Sahel -- Chad and Mauretania. Interesting studies in what low tech solutions can do to high tech armies under the right circumstances. The Polisario drove the Moroccans to such distraction that they resorted to Roman methods to stop them: they built a wall in the desert to seal off threatened areas.

That's nothing. I've got a better one: caches of medical supplies on the map...under waterfalls.

Gordon, what do you think accounts for the difference between Zaloga/Grandsen and the comments in the threads? Could your quote have been referring to first year of the war, with the Italians turning green later on? And were there really only two types of tank-like units in the CSIR ?

No, thank you for asking the question and thank you for following up. For every person who asks a question there are probably ten lurkers too shy to embarass themselves in public. I'm especially pleased with your follow-up. I wouldn't have thought of that, and it has been added to my mental list of why things don't work the way they're supposed to.

At the end of the day what the law is or isn't doesn't really matter. When dealing with a large corporate legal department the issue is whether you are going to act in accord with their recommendation, and whether they have enough internal clout to string you up by the balls if you don't (and they usually do). So if CDV's legal department thinks that it will save their shareholders potential legal liability and expense to be overly-conservative about how they comply, it doesn't really matter what the law actually is or what outsiders think. Internal corporate policy takes precedance, and there's nothing that a small U.S. company can do about it when dealing with a transaction of this magnitude. You don't risk rocking the boat unless there are seriously large amounts of money at stake. And you don't go to court over something trivial like forcing the German government to allow you to use nazi emblems in a computer game if you expect anyone in Europe to take your business sense seriously in the future. Doesn't do great things for your credibility.