Philippe

Isn't impersonating an officer a Federal offense?

What I especially enjoyed about our friend was the way he lost his sense of proportion, kept posting repeatedly and maniacally, and then slid from rude to malicious when he felt he wasn't getting enough attention. I think it's time to clean the air waves.

I seem to recall a certain discussion about Tigers in Normandy and airplanes a few years back. Someone who was very abrasive and opinionated claimed to be working for a government think tank. I guess they must have canned him. Now what was that guy's name... P-51 ?

Juardis, I actually take it very seriously, and it's very similar to one of the ways I would like to see things done. But it's dependant on a couple of huge unknowns, foremost of which is whether the TAC AI can successfully take over the soon to be invisible unit. But I also get the feeling that Steve is coming up with his own trademark solution to the problem that does something similar while involving several different combinations of elements. So I think we may be in wait and see mode on that one. Note that your solution only resolves aspects of the problem with information you don't know. The maddening issue is what to do about the fact that your scout on the left is more or less in command, sees tanks, and you immediately counter the threat by moving up tanks from your right backfield. That speaks to the God problem and overly accelerated pace of battle at the same time.

I think I follow part of that, but I'm not sure. If there are no objections, could we relax the English-only rule in the forum just for a second, and maybe you could try explaining your thought in a bit more detail? I'm feeling denser than usual and can't quite grasp the implications for the God problem (I actually started to type Grog problem).

My take on what I think I remember of those threads was that it probably will be moddable, though maybe not in quite the same way as CMx1. Modding CMx1 is really easy in the sense that you don't need an editor or any special knowledge to manipulate the skins stretched over the hard-coded frame. There are plenty of games out there that don't give you instant access through bmp's, but can still be modded using the right editor. I'll have to admit that I've always shied away from learning anything about that (except for the Vargas pin-up girls on the noses of my B-17's), but there are many large, thriving modding communities out there that get the same effect, but use different tools to get there. Steve probably didn't go into this much because what the skin is made out of that you stretch over a frame (if that is even what you do) is heavily dependant on a lot of coding decisions which either haven't been made yet, or which he (for good reason) doesn't want to shed light on. So I will continue to have faith that I will eventually find some use for the stockpile of (tasteful) nineteenth century naked nymphs cavorting. If nothing else, when I checked it out earlier this morning I found some mis-filed raw material for German Unit Portraits, and got three images out of it.

My take on what I think I remember of those threads was that it probably will be moddable, though maybe not in quite the same way as CMx1. Modding CMx1 is really easy in the sense that you don't need an editor or any special knowledge to manipulate the skins stretched over the hard-coded frame. There are plenty of games out there that don't give you instant access through bmp's, but can still be modded using the right editor. I'll have to admit that I've always shied away from learning anything about that (except for the Vargas pin-up girls on the noses of my B-17's), but there are many large, thriving modding communities out there that get the same effect, but use different tools to get there. Steve probably didn't go into this much because what the skin is made out of that you stretch over a frame (if that is even what you do) is heavily dependant on a lot of coding decisions which either haven't been made yet, or which he (for good reason) doesn't want to shed light on. So I will continue to have faith that I will eventually find some use for the stockpile of (tasteful) nineteenth century naked nymphs cavorting. If nothing else, when I checked it out earlier this morning I found some mis-filed raw material for German Unit Portraits, and got three images out of it.

My take on what I think I remember of those threads was that it probably will be moddable, though maybe not in quite the same way as CMx1. Modding CMx1 is really easy in the sense that you don't need an editor or any special knowledge to manipulate the skins stretched over the hard-coded frame. There are plenty of games out there that don't give you instant access through bmp's, but can still be modded using the right editor. I'll have to admit that I've always shied away from learning anything about that (except for the Vargas pin-up girls on the noses of my B-17's), but there are many large, thriving modding communities out there that get the same effect, but use different tools to get there. Steve probably didn't go into this much because what the skin is made out of that you stretch over a frame (if that is even what you do) is heavily dependant on a lot of coding decisions which either haven't been made yet, or which he (for good reason) doesn't want to shed light on. So I will continue to have faith that I will eventually find some use for the stockpile of (tasteful) nineteenth century naked nymphs cavorting. If nothing else, when I checked it out earlier this morning I found some mis-filed raw material for German Unit Portraits, and got three images out of it.

I don't think I care much if Steve's primary objective isn't maximizing shareholder wealth. Actually, I find that refreshing and rather encouraging. I want Steve to produce the best CMx2 that he thinks he can, and if it's different from anything I can imagine, so much the better. I like surprises, and if the final product were a slavish imitation of my suggestions my ego wouldn't be flattered and I would quickly become quite bored. CMx1 was good because it wasn't what we would have come up with, and CMx2 will probably be better, and for the same reasons.

The text in question runs forty-odd pages without punctuation. To read it in less than ten minutes you would have to be skimming, and will make it seem like one long (lurid) blur. I suppose if I were to pick a 'significant' time-frame, do it in 7 1/2 minutes (the name of another famous woman's sexual memoir from the 'sixties).

I agree that restricting command flexibility isn't optimal, and as I mentioned in my post, having to memorize lists of restrictions and the circumstances under which they come into play isn't much fun. But one thing I find myself wondering about lately is just how instantaneous battlefield communication actually was in WWII. Surely they didn't all have radios tuned to the same frequency all the time did they? I would imagine it might take a good half a minute just to get their dial-ups to work. So I guess what I'm asking is how much better is WWII communication at this geographic scale than 19th century communication in real practise? For the more modern stuff all bets are off because everybody probably has a Jagged Alliance-style headphone plugged in their ear. But I hope we aren't over-estimating the efficiency of communications in the earlier era. I'm not trying to guess at a solution, because that can only be arrived at by someone who sees all the pieces in the puzzle. And this one's a doozy.

Roqf77, While you are to be applauded for your choice of historical sources, I think you have misunderstood the point behind Michael's "stream of semi-consciousness" remark. Michael was certainly not alluding to your mental state. He was paying you a compliment by suggesting that your writing style was more organized than the normal "stream of consciousness" approach. To get a handle on what I'm talking about, try reading the last chapter of Joyce's Ulysses in less than ten minutes some time. The problem, however, is that being a bit fussy Michael likes his writing styles pure and undiluted. So his comment should probably be read as a suggestion that you dispense with capital letters and punctuation altogether, or model yourself after Lytton Strachey. One or the other. As for defective mental states, I doubt that anyone here seriously believes that you have abused yourself over a long enough period of time to be missing the brain cells to qualify. That is not the case with most of the rest of us, and I'm still blushing over my contretemps with Michael and asparagus brought on by my own well-advanced lack of wit.

A traditional board-game way to try to make a dent in the God problem is to set activation limits on forces under your command. There were several pre-modern tactical games a few years back that made a distinction between officers and commanders. In CM terms I supose you could think of these as tactical hq's like platoons, and strategic hq's like companies and battalions. In the systems I was alluding to the strategic hq's would give a small range of enabling commands to the tactical hq's, which would be the elements in charge of actually moving the troops around. The nature of the strategic command would effect the kind of tactical orders that could be given. So in the canonical case of moving your tanks from the right backfield to the left foreground as soon as one of your skirmishers on the left spots enemy armor, the 17th century paper boardgame solution would be to construct a set of rules that restrict strategic movement: a unit is in reserve, in tactical engagement mode, in regroup mode, in strategic movement mode, or whatever. The mode would place very restrictive limits on what you could and could not do. And switching modes would require an order from a higher command, and that higher command would need to have mode switching availability. Using a method like this instantly gives meaning to the chain of command, and whether or not your telephone lines are cut, your radios work, or you have fresh horses for your ADC's starts to make an enormous difference. Games that use this approach often have several layers of strategic commanders, and they become more effective the more they are in touch with elements higher up their own chain of command. The reason that I am spelling this out (besides wanting to see CMx2 adapted to the English Civil Wars -- I want to mod Montrose's kilt) is to suggest that a partial solution to the God problem is to let the player see as much as you want (he has to see too much in order to move the pieces around if the TAC AI isn't all powerful), but to severely restrict his ability to do anything about his knowledge in a timely manner. If your tanks are in strategic reserve mode, it may take a few turns to accumulate enough activation points to buy the switch to strategic movement that allows you to shift them across the board. This kind of mechanism is really ugly in board wargames, and not much fun to play. However, adapted to a computer game the uglier parts of a system like this could be made completely invisible to the player, and could be made to feel natural and intuitive as well. To be honest, however, I have a funny feeling that Montrose didn't wear a kilt. But I'll bet Cromwell wore a morion.

One area of the game that would benefit from a rethink is the mechanism by which commands are given. The problem is that, as Tom is suggesting, at this point we're all too inured to the current system to be able to imagine another way of doing things. But another way of doing things is exactly what I'm hoping for from CMx2. Blinkered by the past I can't make as incisive a commentary as I would like, and, in any case, a detailed commentary about what orders should be different, or how going about giving them should be done differently, is meaningless at this point, especially if you can't see most of what is going into the game. Thinking back to what I don't like about the user interface in CMx1 (besides a more rousing victory screen sequence that presents the opportunity to mod some naked elves cavorting -- screenshots of 19th century painting on this topic available on request), what it comes down to is the rather useless impressionistic comment that it is a bit clunky and hard to use. Leaving aside discussions of march column and vehicle column commands (but I really hope you're going to do something about that, Steve), I think what might help a bit would be a few command shortcuts, maybe sequences of hotkeys that don't appear in the main menu. For example, I don't use the group command because it doesn't really do what I want it to do, but it's a neat idea. Unless there's something about it that I don't understand (and there's a lot I don't understand, including why there's air) it would be really nice to be able to set waypoints with it. That way you could navigate a platoon around an obstacle (like avoiding a clearing that would be suicidal to enter, or moving around a flank keeping a small hill as cover between you and the enemy), and then go in and shift a few waypoints on individual squads which you noticed were slated to move in less desirable patterns. Something like this is not unrealistic, it's simply the mechanistic version of the captain telling the lieutenant to walk his platoon around that hill, or to take his fully deployed platoon across the river over that bridge (try that one with the current group move command !). I'm not trying to turn this into a discussion of what features would be neat to add to the interface. Neat is not the point. I still fume that I think it makes no sense to even attempt to use Franko's rules because the interface simply isn't designed to allow it -- I can't control the camera well enough at FPS eye level to give reasonable commands in a reasonable amount of time, even though I would dearly love to operate in that kind of information deficit. But I think this brings up another aspect of the God-like knowledge problem. As things stand, one of the unspoken roles of the human player is to repair gaps in the interface by human intervention. The problem is that to be able to intervene effectively, you have to know too much. The ideal would be not having to intervene at all, but that will mean shifting the mechanical burden back to the TAC AI. Is it up to it? One of the things I like about not having a waypoint-linked movement penalty in CMBO is that it allows me to assign what I consider to be a realistic movement path to my units. Left to my own devices my troops and vehicles in CMBO move somewhat more realistically than in CMBB (especially when they go around bends in the road). I think it's areas like this that Tom's uncorrupted CM player would pick up on right away -- the rest of us are too used to the status quo to even remember why the interface didn't seem natural too us the first time we used it.

Please dont hijack the thread. </font>

When you get tired of the graphics of CMBO (or if you want fully implemented snow graphics), swing over to CMHQ at combatmission.com, the old semi-official site run by some of the BFC crowd acting as private individuals rather than in their corporate capacity (hope that makes sense). While you're there, read an old essay by Madmatt on basic modding, and download something called the MDMP packs (they're not that big, and I think there were two of them). From there, spend some time looking at something called the Third Party Mod section. You can eventually graduate on to CMMOS, after which you'll be ready to start exploring other sites, particularly Cmmods -- but don't do that just yet or you'll go into conceptual overload. If you've just installed CMBO for the first time, you might want to make a copy of the bmp folder and the wav folder and stick them in a safe place and/or for comparison purposes before you start changing anything. You will eventually need more scenarios, and the place to go for that is the Scenario Depot, which has something like 1700 plus CMBO scenarios. But again, don't overload yourself just yet. You are about to be assimilated. I hope your wife loves you very much and is very tolerant, or that you have a really good pre-nuptial agreement. At least she'll never have to worry about other women ever again. If you share the computer you may have to consider getting a second one, because she'll never get you off it...

I'm not sure they'd let you do it, but the West Kennet Long Barrow has always struck me as an exceedingly good spot for a picnic. As for the Druids, well...let's just say that most of the sites we've been talking about pre-date the coming of the Celts by a thousand years or so. Druids are historical. Megaliths are really old. What makes the early prehistoric stuff so much fun is that it is so old that there is absolutely no contact with anything we have written records about. The people/s who built the megaliths were almost certainly pre-Indo-European, and probably spoke something that sounded a bit like Basque (the only survivng pre-Indo-European language in Western Europe that I can think of at the moment).

Unfortunately the only one I know died about five years ago. However, there's an extended discussion of this by Robert Graves. The only problem is, I can't remember exactly where it was. I'm pretty sure that the passage that I'm thinking of isn't in Goodbye to All That, but is probably tucked away somewhere in one of his books of essays, probably in the Oxford Addresses on Poetry (or something like that). He may have mentioned it in the White Goddess when he was discussing Ogham stones, but it was probably in the essay in which he gave his theory for the real meaning of 666. And that may have been in the MIT lectures. Bottom line is that as an officer in the trenches he had to censor his men's mail, to make sure they didn't mention things like the name of the bell steeple in the village just behind their dug-out. The only one I remember was "XXXDYWIWRD?" used as a post-script. Come to think of it, how could something like that not be in Goodbye to All That?

An interesting feature of the old Battleground Napoleonic and ACW games was that you could turn control over most of your army to the TAC AI, limiting your role to, say, specifically that of a Corps commander while the larger battle raged around you. Now I'll admit that I never really got the hang of playing that way, and from what I could tell the TAC AI did really stupid things. I don't think Tiller ported that one over with him to HPS, but the concept (though not the execution) was very good. Personally I'm intrigued with the concept of figuring out how many new orders ( = how many ADC's with unblown horses do you have saddled up and ready to go at HQ) an HQ can really give, and at what distance. With WWII technology I suspect that the number is very low, simply because the typical company headquarters may have the odd radio, but apart from that is probably lacking in the mechanism of communication available to an eighteenth or early nineteenth century battlefield corps or division commander, even though the physical distances that need to be covered in both cases are about the same. If the master sergeant has laryngitis and the swift-legged corporal hasn't come back yet from delivering new orders to that machine gun up the road, it seems to me that units would either be acting on the basis of the micromanagement that you gave them at the begining of the game, or would surrender themselves to the control of the TAC AI. This is very different from only making a move every two turns, because if you artificially eliminate one set of moves (which you probably shouldn't be allowed to make anyway, but that's a different story) the units that are not receiving orders will probably only behave in a convincing manner if they are in the middle of a route march across the map (not in column, of course, because CMx1 AI doesn't handle column movement very well) and aren't under fire. Steve and Charles don't need any help in coming up with a list of things that would trigger the TAC AI taking control. I just hope that they can get the TAC AI up to snuff to the point where command is by exception rather than the norm. An odd, useless thought occurs to me as I write this. Supposing that one of the things that gets transmitted down the chain of command is a micromanagement opportunity. Normally a unit would be under the last set of detailed orders given (probably at scenario start) or the TAC AI. But the arrival of a radio message at platoon hq (or the arrival of a 1:1 swift-legged corporal, or perhaps some semaphore waving), could temporarily lift the micromangement ban on that hq and every unit under it that was still in command range (and I'm still not sure I understand why some command ranges are longer than others if it isn't defined by the strength of someone's vocal chords). If you use an approach like that you'll be starting to model the behavior of units larger than a platoon. And the pace of battles will slow down a bit, simply because it will be harder to get your platoons to maneuver. You will also be starting to focus in on the difference between between a modern army amply supplied with radios (lots of micro-management opportunities) and the Soviet army on the morning after the purges (lots of TAC AI control).

I'm not so sure that's really a bad thing. The scenario time-limit is one of the most artificial and unrealistic elements of these battles, and what is needed is to give the player the same lack of a sense of time that the AI has. I would really love to see a scenario extension feature that worked a bit like the ceasefire or surrender button. While some of the problem can be placed on the doorstep of the scenario designer, very often realistic play is penalized by the time-limit, causing a scenario to come to an end in mid-firefight. The battle should be over when it's over, not when the time limit does a lights-out number. That would normally mean that, for whatever reason, the attacker would stop attacking and pull back a bit, and the defender would either dig in or disengage. As it stands now there is not much incentive not to fight to the last man and the last bullet, simply because the penalties for thinking like an eighteenth century French monarch (Apres moi le deluge) are not severe enough. Fixing this would make it possible to have scenarios about fighting retreats, withdrawals under fire, and, perhaps, scouting and reconnaissance.

I don't have any good examples ready at hand, but I remember reading that British soldiers in WWI regularly attached otherwise incomprehensible acronyms to the ends of their letters to their loved ones to get around the military censors, who apparently removed anything contrary to post-Victorian decorum as well as anything that might have military value. Of course, what they considered too racy to talk about in public wouldn't even provoke a yawn in the 21st century, though what they actually did in private sometimes made the Hellfire club look tame by comparison (read the footnotes to Richard Burton's translation of the 1001 Nights to get a bit of the flavor for this). WWI Brits were particularly good at decyphering acronyms because of their extensive training in making sense out of otherwise incomprehensible crossword puzzles (the NYT crossword puzzle is a joke compared to the incredibly cryptic clues in even the easier British crosswords, which only a Brit can understand). Using strings of letters to represent complex phrases is entirely dependant on a unified, shared verbal culture. Our own is too fragmented at this point for effective condensed communication. WTICRWIWTA (Would that I could remember what I was talking about).

In theory a battle and an operation could take place on the same piece of terrain. But in practise an operation will occur on a much larger map. A battle will show the events of half an hour to an hour of real time, an operation will show the events of one to two days. You rarely see all of an operations map during one of its battle segments, but there are some that are so large that if you manage to keep pushing forwards, after a few battles you can get lost on them. The battles in an operation are a little different than the battles in the battle section in that if you were to play the same operation twice, the only battle that would be the same would be the first one. This is because operations are much larger, much more fluid, and much more dynamic. The new front lines, reinforcements, and replacements tend to be based on what happened inside the larger event. Operations are *not* composed of a string of set-piece events as in some other games. This is more realistic than that. I don't know CMBB all that well, but it works the same as CMBO in this respect, and I can assure you that even when they cover the same material the difference in treatment and time scale is large enough for it not to matter.

I think the downloadable index is the BFC version. It's useful, even when the pagination is off.

A

Fionn was an asset to the community and will always be missed. Perhaps when cooler heads prevail someone will institute an annual Fionn's again awake event, in the hopes that he has learned to master his temper.