Philippe

I haven't been there in decades, but I would imagine that Stonehenge is so overrun by now that it would be hard to get a very good sense of place from it. In my younger days my favorite summer sport was finding megalithic ruins. The more out of the way the better. I still have fond memories of crawling into the Stoney Littleton long barrow at sundown. (Don't try this at home, kids). For a more accessible experience with a healthy dose of English charm (assuming that it hasn't been totally spoiled), I would recommend a visit to Avebury and (time permitting) Glastonbury. Avebury is built inside the site of a large megalithic ring that was at the end of an avenue of standing stones, a bit like what you find in Brittany. The village used to include a nice manor house with some lovely gardens that you could visit. A visit to Avebury is one of the most memorable ruin-visits that you're likely to have in that part of the world, right up there with New Grange in Ireland. Avebury isn't all that far from Glastonbury, the site of a medieval monastery that supposedly housed the mortal remains of King Arthur. Lying in the shadow of Glastonbury Tor the area is quite magical and probably was Avalon. You have to drive across the Salisbury plain to get to Avebury and Glastonbury, so you can stop at Stonehenge for a few minutes on your way out. What I'm describing is a long trip, so you'll need to start early, and might want to have dinner on your way back. Salisbury used to have nice pubs, a glorious cathedral, and a late-Medieval version of the Round Table (in the Middle Ages the difference between true and should have been true was a trifling technicality that everyone ignored).

And a good one. If he can't find the page he'll start staring at the table of contents like I did. You can learn a lot of useful things that way. I wish there was a CDV version of the index...

Note that there are different versions of the manual. In mine (the US CDV SE version) that passage occurs on page 100.

If you really insist I could always mod my Red Twins mod and give the girls pointy ears...

The mortar crew shouldn't go anywhere near the edge of the clearing. Get an officer close enough to the edge that he can see to a spot near the machine gun, then have him spot indirect area fire for the mortar, which is far enough back that it doesn't get exposed. With any luck the footprint of the shellfall pattern will overlap the machinegun's position. Make sure the officer approaches the spot from which he acts as a spotter as discreetly and stealthily as possible, and from outside the machinegun's line of sight. If that doesn't work, just remember that you're supposed to go around obstacles, not rush them head on.

I sense a certain level of disconnect here. I'm not entirely sure I understand how the last few posts relate to this comment.

One additional comment from a confirmed non-tactician. I always watch for spotting rounds -- the other guy's. That's how I know when to order my infantry to run like hell. I've escaped many an artillery barrage that way.

Another reason why I would love to see units that are out of command operate under an information blackout and TAC AI control only (unless you send a runner).

My understanding of extreme FOW is that the information that you see may not be accurate unless you have someone standing on top of the spot that is being reported to you. Multiple kills of dead vehicles are quite common. I really wouldn't worry about it, unless I wasted a fire order on a corpse. And even then, that kind of thing happens in RL. Even if this were a bug (which I doubt) the chances of it getting patched are approximately nil at this point. So I would just learn to live with it, and realize that this is one of the many reasons why reports of enemy casualties are always inflated.

Take another look at the main forum, scroll down the page a bit, and you may be surprised to find several opponents finding forums organized by language. That's generally considered a better place to post for this kind of thing.

Wouldn't it have been possible to set up some kind of point ratio limit, like no more than 1 sniper per a certain number of points on that side? And if that limit only applied to QB's and not scenario designers, it would accomodate the occasional weird scenario (that I'm not sure I would want to play anyway).

Singed feelings aside, I think one of the things that I really appreciate about Steve and his colleagues at BFC is their honesty. While elegant corporate manners aren't in the greatest supply in the computer gaming world, I get a belly-full of elegant corporate etiquette from the real world on a day-to-day basis, and when well done it can sound quite sincere. BFC is a small shop, and Steve is not so much a representative of the company as development team leader. While it can be certainly be very creative (and I've seen it raised to an art form on more than one occasion), I really don't want that kind of intellectual muck clogging his synapses when he's trying to create what promises to be a ground-breaking game. So if ragging on whiney customers helps keep his intellectual arteries unclogged and the juices flowing, I'm prepared to cheer on a torrent of abuse. Steve is a cook and this is his kitchen, and he's sharing more than superficial insight into the process. I've known some pretty crabby cooks in my time, and you have to expect a few carrots whizzing past your ear from time to time. The question that we should all ask ourselves is the following: do we like PBEM for the camaraderie, for the thrill of beating another human, or because it gives us a better game? I think that the need for PBEM would diminish dramatically if the AI were really up to snuff. It's pretty good as it stands, but I hate discovering that I can't play the side that I want to in a scenario because I know that the AI won't be up to mounting an adequate attack, or realizing, after the fact, that I just stomped the AI in detail because it couldn't organize a well-timed and co-ordinated counter-attack. Solitaire play is the most convenient form of play, but PBEM seems to be the cure for (inevitable) deficiencies in the AI. A few years back Robert Graves translated a poem by a retired Spanish bullfighter that went something like this: Bullfight critics ranked in rows Crowd the enormous plaza full But only one is there who knows And he's the one who fights the bull.

At the end of the day the method that you use to take screenshots is unlikely to improve the quality of your images that much. Better to gain facility with something readily available and learn the basics of image cropping and composition. The nice thing about the print screen button approach, besides the fact that it is already native to everyone's computer and doesn't require downloading any programs of questionable provenance, is that because it is slow it will force you to think about what you're doing. I used to live with a photography teacher at one of the New York art schools, and it was a standard procedure to make her students use a pin-hole camera for at least one month, and to only shoot pictures with tape over the view finder for another two. So please feel free to ignore the techno-junkies and go ahead and use the print screen button (which, on my computer, happens to be located in the upper right hand top row, just above the Insert button -- but your keyboard may be different). You've already paid cousin Billy good money for that thing, so you might as well use it. But having said that, you really should read Soddball's thread that is permanently lodged in place as the second thread in this forum. It answers this question, and many others like it that you are likely to have.

Inspiring. Their agitprop has moved my heart.

It's one of the few operations I've actually played. From the Allied side it's a blast, and you have to fight your way into town across an enormous map. Afterwards, when you see detailed maps of that part of Normandy, you look at them very differently. [i was a little puzzled at first about who, exactly, St. Come was, but then I realized that since the circumflex accent usually represents an 's' that has dropped out of the language (as in hotel), he must be the french hilltop half of the medieval saintly pair of Sts. Cosmas and Damien.]

Download the file into a warm dry safe neutral place that will be easy to find. Unzip it to that same warm dry safe neutral place. Copy and paste it to the CMAK,CMBB, or CMBO folder as appropriate. Close the folder, launch the game, look in the battle (or operations) scenario list to make sure it's there. Click on it to make sure that it runs and isn't corrupted. If everything is OK, you can go back to the safe warm dry neutral place and start deleting. You should also check out Der Kessel and Boots and Tracks. Look in the Resources section in the top right-hand corner of this page for links.

And I haven't noticed anydifference between firing infantry small arms at 40 meters and at ten. Not a big deal, really, but somehow it doesn't seem quite right.

I'm not sure I would want to play CM in real time even if that were possible.

I'm not sure I would want to play CM in real time even if that were possible.

I'm not sure if this is what you want, but if you mean the PDF file of the user manual, on certain Euro-CDV versions it's apparently on the CD. So take a look in your folder or on the CD. If you mean a manual specifically for PBEM, I can't help you. The regular manual, however, discusses PBEM in almost pornographic detail (without pictures). By the way, do you happen to have seen any good color illustrations of uniforms of the CSIR ?

But not an old hand at navigating forums. There's an Opponents wanted section organized by language if you scroll down the page on the main menu.

What you micro-manage depends pretty much on where you are in the CMx2 development tree. If you're shoving platoons around micromanaging can mean giving orders to individual soldiers (I hope not!). But if you're in the fourth game of the series and exploring brigade level relationships, the game won't work if you're mired in that level of detail because it will simply be too time-consuming to issue your orders for a turn. BFC's two-horned monster is that they're dealing with a potentially sliding scale problem, ranging from reinforced companies in the early games, to who knows what in the later ones. I would expect a certain lack of clarity in their discussions about this, because they themselves probably don't know how much leeway they'll eventually need to have. So I don't see much of a contradiction in pushing companies around and saying you're 1:1 based on individuals, or pusing brigade-equivalents around and saying you're 1:1 based on platoons. You'd better build some flexibility into the engine to capture the whole range. I love large scenarios, but never play them. Why? Too many decisions. I want to see divisional-scale battles played out in CM scale, but to attempt to play something like that involves three hours just to give the orders for one turn. You know that within weeks of CMx2 coming out scenario designers will start to up the scale ante, and we'll all complain that we can't have the Battle of Kursk in the new engine at 1:1, even though our Pentium X's with 100 gigahertz of ram can handle it. Ambiguity can be a good thing, especially in the begining. A key question that will determine how effective the upper reaches of the sliding scale will be (if there is even going to be a sliding scale) has to do with identifying the conceptual elements that aren't currently modeled by the system. Fireteams are one of those, but think about how many people in a division don't actually point guns at other people and pull the trigger -- how much of their ultimately combat-critical activity are you going to model? You certainly don't want to fall back on the old boardgame cop-out of attack factor halved if Line of Supply is cut. You don't even want to have a Line of Supply, you want to have 1:1 trained goats pulling tea-carts. You don't have to show them, but for 1:1 they have to be there. I think the fireteam question is also bedeviled by the differences in national practise. The CW sometimes clear houses two men at a time. But do Germans? Russians? Poles? And what about when they're not clearing houses? The idea of squads split down to their smallest tactical elements is appealing in a company level game. At a division level it's a nightmare (this is starting to sound like the split squad debate). I think what you do is decide how many orders you can expect someone to give in one turn (probably less than a hundred), decide how far up the scale you want to simulate, and work backwards from there. A hundred fire-teams/vehicles probably implies ten platoons at most, or something like it.

That's a great list, with some interesting material in it. It might have a tad too many options in it though. One of the things I hate about John Tiller games is staring at that realism menu, and wondering if the most realistic thing I can do is to just turn everything on (and I'm pretty sure it isn't). The choices of all, nothing, or somewhere in between are pretty much all that I can get my addled brain to sort through on most days, and if I can't sort through more than three or four items, I pity what the poor casual gamer is going through. Hey wait a minute...I *am* a casual gamer...

I care. This has a big impact on how many dancing girls we can squeeze in.

Looks really good. I can't wait to use it. I have a question about the machine gun, though. What is the difference in effect between your machine gun and Juju's? If your version of it is different in some vehicle-spcific way, won't that spill over into other areas? I get the impression that that particular bmp shows up in several places, and I'm not sure which ones. To put it another way, will Juju's mod out of the box look optimal on your Stug, and/or will your version of it look better on your Stug than anywhere else (wherever that might be)? The most obvious difference between the two is that his is twice as long as yours (in pixels). I'm sure your version of it looks better in this context (that's why you picked it, of course), but what will the spillover effect be? I still don't know my way around CMBB well enough to know what else uses it, and/or if it matters.