Philippe

There used to be a lot of Indeo codecs posted in the download section of Strategy First's website. It may not be immediately obvious that that's what they are, but there used to be two or three there. I was having touble with something they had produced (Prince of Qin?) and they clued me in to the fact that many of these codecs are interchangeable, even though they appear to be game specific. The upshot was that after I solved my Strategy First problem, I could suddenly see the intros to half the John Tiller Games that I had never seen before. So try downloading a few of them -- they may solve your problem, even if you don't have the game that goes with them. Do not spend money to allow yourself to see the CMBO intro. I saved mine because it is amusing to see what unmodded Playmobiles look like when they can move on their own, but if you spend money to see that you'll be really furious.

Digging a foxhole generally involves more time than many of the scenarios. The defender gets foxholes in scenarios where it is assumed that he has been in place long enough to create prepared positions. In order to simulate fall-back or alternative positions some players split their squads on defense to get extra foxholes (not gamey when you realize that some units will prepare two or three sets of fall-back positions in real life). The problem with doing this, of course, is that you have to scramble all your half squads around on the first turn or two of the scenario to get your full-strength squads back together. Think of this as the scramble to general quarters at the start of a battle. Be sure to take a look at the sticky threads at the head of each forum. The Tips and Tricks Forum is a good place to ask tactical and game questions.

The other place that you might want to check out for mods is the CMMOS section at CMHQ, which can be found at combatmission.com.

The relevant passage that I am relying on from FOTW is as follows: quote During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April-May, 1943, The ZOB (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa or Jewish Fighting Organization or Yidische Kampf Organizatzion) led by Mordechaj Anielewicz and composed of members of leftist and ultra leftist youth organizations: Dror He-Halutz (= Freedom - The Pioneer, unites two youth movements) - (5 fighting units), Ha-Shomer ha-tzair (= The Young Guard - Still exists today in Israel as the youth movement of MAPAM (United Workers Party) which is part of Meretz Party) - (4 units), Bund (socialists) (4 units), PPR (Polish Workers Party - communists) - (4 units), Gordonia (Named after A.D Gordon, the main spiritual leader of the labour movement) - (1 unit), Akiva (Bnei-Aqiva, a religious youth movement. Still exists today in Israel as the youth movement of MAFDAL (National Religious Party) - (1 unit), Ha-No'ar ha-Ziyoni (= The Zionist Youth) - (1 unit) and Po'alei Zion smol (Zion Workers - Left (split from Zion Workers) - (1 unit) hoisted the Zionist flag (now Israeli flag) alongside Polish white and red flag over the bunker at 18 Mila Street, at least during the first few days of the Uprising. The other group of heroic fighters, not associated with the ZOB for ideological reasons,but allied with them just prior to Uprising, was 250 fighters strong unit of ZZW (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy or Jewish Military Union) also known as Irgun (Irgun or Irgun Zva'ei Leumi (National Military Organization) was the military wing of the Revisionist Zionist Federation. BETAR (Brit Yosef Trumpeldor) was its youth movement, still exists today in Israel as the youth movement of Kherut movement, part of the Likud Party.whose members where associated primarily with Betar, right-wing, revisionist Zionist organization. That group was led by former Polish Army officer Pawel Frenkel and cultivated excellent relation with Polish Home Army and the Delegation of Polish Government in exile in London.They distinguished themselves with unbelievable courage while fighting from their compound on Muranowska Street, from which they were flying the double bi-colors: white over light blue and white over red. Those flags were clearly visible from the "aryan" side over the walls and stayed up well into the second week of the Uprising. unquote As an aside, I used a photograph of Mordechai Anielewicz for the face of the battalion commander. My source was black and white, but the photograph had clearly been repainted.

Actually I wasn't trying to use a national identifier. The rationale behind the background flags is that I use national war flags. So the Germans get the Reichskriegflagge, and the Finns, if I ever get around to them, will have the blue and white flag with the lion in the coat of arms, and so on. After my fourth re-reading of the Warsaw Ghetto section of Poland at the Flags of the World website, I came to the conclusion that I had to use one of two flags: the flag of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa-ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization), or the flag of the Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy-ZZW (Jewish Military Union), aka the Irgun. I already used the ZZW flag as the flag for victory locations, and I thought a more inclusive flag would be appropriate. The ZZW seem to have been in the minority in any case. There is some doubt that the flag shown on the FOTW website for the ZOB is actually correct, but my admittedly imperfect understanding is that what I have used (which eventually became the flag for the state of Israel) was also used by the ZOB. If it turns out that the FOTW ZOB flag is correct, I can make the change very quickly.

I've just made a few changes to my Warsaw Ghetto Semiotics mod. I've added five unit portraits to replace the early period Russian partisans, and have included an alternative to the Irgun flag. This mod is provisional, and I may use a different approach to the portraits later on.

...decorative bushes... Hmm... I want a shrubbery. (I won't do that again, promise).

I haven't gotten around to playing the Ghetto scenario yet, probably because I'm not entirely comfortable with the subject matter. But once I work my way past that, and after I make a set of replacement unit portait faces for the Russian partisans (I'm toying with the idea of black and white photographs of actual resisters mounted on color flags) and figure out how to make them speak Polish (what we really need is a set of Yiddish replacement sound files for the Russian ones, but that isn't going to happen), I'll probably take a look at the scenario and ask myself if the resisters aren't overarmed and oversupplied with ammunition. Doesn't the unit design of CM force you to give almost as many serious small arms to a platoon as were available to the entire Ghetto? And shouldn't all the resisters start with ammunition set to low? That wouldn't make much of a game, of course, but highlights why what they did was so incredible.

There's nothing to debate. The answer is whatever floats your boat. It really isn't a question of one being better than the other. Different people prefer different styles of play, and it's probably not a good idea to make someone who likes one style to interract with the other. Apart from their benefits to modding and learning specific weapons tactics in solo play, Quick Battles are good if you want a bunch of war toys shooting at another bunch of war toys. People who are into gadgets love QB's because they can pick their weapons. The drawbacks are that computer-generated maps aren't terribly realistic (though the program has gotten pretty good and sometimes produces credible terrain) and the most critical component of the scenario design process is missing: the designer. A scenario without a designer can quickly degenerate into a stand-up shoot-'em up a la High Noon (some people love that). The action is occuring for no rhyme or reason, and though the program is getting better at steering you into force match-ups that might actually have occured on the battlefield, the flow of the action is not organic and the force allocation is dependant on what toys the two players feel like playing with. This last drawback also happens to be a major source of the QB's popularity. Another problem is that the AI is not as good as it appears to be the first time you encounter it. A lot of its behavior can be influenced by a canny designer, and random computer flag generation simply won't do that. Left to its own devices, the AI will probably not give you as good a game on a randomly generated map -- it needs to be massaged and tweaked and tricked, and that can only come from playtesting. QB's are never playtested. Designed scenarios are entirely dependant on the quality of the desinger. There is nothing worse than a sloppily designed scenario. It's almost as embarassing as getting beaten by the AI: the computer can generate a mediocre to middling scenario on its own, so to produce a worse looking map and a force mix that is unbalanced in two-player and incapable of responding coherently under one-player control is inexcusable (and often a symptom of poor research and testing). Self-expression is all very well and good in finger-painting class, but please don't inflict it on the rest of us. So why play a scenario? A good fictional scenario designed by someone who understands that the word 'fictional' does not mean that he can emote in his sandbox because we are all equally talented can be a real gem. Fictional scenarios are meant to be illustrative, the condensed essence of what happens in a certain type of situation. The situation didn't have to actually occur, but what is being shown is so typical that for research purposes a well-designed fictional scenaro can almost be described as hyper-historical. Unfortunately fictional scenarios don't come with psychological warning labels so I rarely play them. There are, however, a few designers who produce really good ones, so I always take a look at their work. Using the term 'fictional' before the word scenario does not excuse the slovenly from doing research -- very much the opposite. I had an epiphany a while back when I was helping to playtest an historical operation. In the course of doing some extra research I struck up a correspondance with the host of a website dedicated to a particular unit that was disbanded shortly after the battle. It suddenly dawned on me that if I hadn't been playing that scenario I would have known nothing about the steepness and muddiness of the banks of that river, that a battle had taken place there, that real people had fought and died there, or even what their names were. We may not realize it, but an historical scenario is a cyber-memorial to those that fought and died on both sides: that place, those events, their deaths (or narrow escapes) can often only be rescued from oblivion by a well-designed and carefully researched historical scenario. That's a huge responsability, and is one of the reasons I don't design scenarios. But the designer should never forget that what he owes the dead, and the least he can do is to represent the moment of their deaths as accurately as possible. The problem, of course, is that very few historically correct battles are playable. They are almost never balanced, because any commander who attacks with a 1:1 force balance should be shot, relieved of command, and relegated to latrine-cleaning duty for the duration of the war. In an operational game where you don't always know the exact forces involved you might tinker with the OOB's until you get a range of scenario outcomes occuring within the range of likelihood of what actually happened. One of the luxuries of working on a larger scale (divisions, corps, armies) is that if you figure out what you're really modeling, a lot of nit-picky details don't have to be dealt with as long as the end result works out right. You can't do that so easily in a tactical game: it's either balanced or it isn't and, more importantly, the situation is either interesting or it isn't. One of the quibbles I have with the victory system in CM is that it makes it very difficult (probably in the Japanese sense) to represent interesting situations that have a major force imbalance. So probes and recon operations are shaky at best, and forget about fighting withdrawals (my personal favorite). The best scenarios as a class are probably the semi-historical ones. Leaving aside the designers who will use the 'semi-' label as an excuse for sloppy research ("I'm too lazy to find a real map on the web ... think I'll just use my favorite paintball field"), a semi-historical scenario allows the designer to produce something playable, on the battlefield where it actually took place, with the units that actually fought there. It's not historical because it will get adjusted for play balance and, more importantly, play dynamic. Ironically, (as any good simulation modeler could tell you), an adjusted 'semi-' scenario will often produce a range of playtesting results that are more true to life than that of an historical scenario, simply because the designer may have designed around reproducing the outcome rather than around mimicking the chrome. A good semi-historical scenario will probably produce a better game, but will be just as immersive (and respectful of the dead) as an historical scenario because it will try to use the real terrain and extrapolated OOB's. Having accurate OOB's for both sides and accessible accounts of the battle from both sides is something that isn't going to occur that often with battles of this scale, and I suspect that it will be something that almost never happens on the Eastern Front. And very few of us read both Russian and German (I have enough trouble with German).

Do all of your CMAK SPW's work in CMBB even if they aren't explicitly labeled as compatible? (There are some really nice halftracks in there, by the way).

On a more serious note, that weird logistical tail that never gets modeled (except as an obscenely abstracted Supply Line) is what make the difference between play war chess and the real thing, especially if it is particularly cumbersome to move. In the time frame of a one hour action it shouldn't be movable, but in the context of a larger operation it is the kind of thing that can really show the difference between a platoon and a company. If playing at the battalion level all kinds of strange issues start coming into play that have a profound effect on a unit's ability to move around the map (where exactly did we leave the food/clothing/shelter/ammunition/wounded/gasoline/comfort girls?). Imagine if units ran out of ammunition in a really long battle as quickly as they do in CMx1, and you were dependant on horse-drawn wagons for resupply. The location of your supply dumps would suddenly become critical, and you would start paying very close attention to the road net. I hate the fact that in most board games you can send your division spinning off in a different direction on a moment's notice. Real logistical tails are meaningless in a skirmish, but come into their own at battalion level.

I'm a little saddened to see the Space Lobsters receding into the distance, because that may mean field kitchens are too complicated to code. I was so looking forward to new and exciting culinary choices, like extra-terrestrial bisque. And I really do have images of mobile bread and meat kitchens from about 1940. The germans seem to be wearing their practise uniforms -- appropriate, since chefs are supposed to wear white. The bread, however, looks very uninteresting (probably tasted that way, too.

The site seems to be back up again. Let's hope it stays that way.

A wonderful mod indeed. Keep them coming. And it's really good to see you back, Manx.

I have finally released version 3.0 of the German Unit Portraits mod. I'm keeping version 2.0 available in case someone finds the faces too baroque. I may fiddle with the images so more over time, but this is the last major release. So if you come across any good headshots please send them my way. And if any of these faces really annoy you I'd like to hear about that too so I'll know what to think about changing. These are the faces in the mod, sorted vertically by the three periods. In each grouping the faces represent crew/infantry/lieutenant/captain/major or tank commander/tank platoon commander. From top to bottom the horizontal rows represent Infantry, Mechanized Infantry (and Cavalry), Mountain, Panzer, SS Infantry, SS Mechanized Infantry (and Cavalry), SS Mountain, SS Panzer, Luftwaffe Infantry, Luftwaffe Panzer, and Volksturm. The mod has been posted at CMMODS. I intend to do several more nationalities, probably starting with the Italians.

A picture is worth a thousand words (give or take), and Image Shack provides free hosting. I'm only nagging you because I was curious to see what it looked like. All of my web-scrounging time is supposed to be devoted to finding german soldiers.

One thing that has been nagging me of late is that engagement ranges seem a little close, and ammunition supply seems a little scanty. These two concepts are to some extent related. When playing CMBB I tend to give my infantry covered arcs that wouldn't be out of place in the nineteenth century. Why? Because my troops burn through ammunition so fast I don't want them wasting precious bullets on something 500 meters away. So that makes me want to fight battles with modern weapons at ranges that would do Wellington proud. And that probably has a lot to do with why CM battles are so quick and bloody. Now there's probably a feature in CMBB that I haven't found yet which reduces the rate of consumption based on range to the target. (That might be a nice feature if it doesn't already exist). But I'm really wondering if troops normally went into battle carrying less ammo than they could squeeze off in seven and a half minutes. How many minutes of ammunition should they be carrying? And shouldn't it vary depending on whether they're taking pot-shots at targets 500 meters away, or fighting for their lives at short hand grenade range? And doesn't a squad tend to have a little more ammo available to it than just what the men are carrying for their own personal weapons? And isn't this even more so the case with a platoon, and a company, and a battalion? I guess what I'm saying is that it doesn't seem like it should take the two or three hours that can elapse between battles in an operation for the Islandhwana memorial munitions sergeant to dole out a few extra clips of ammo in the heat of battle, one Jagged Alliance-style bullet at a time. I'm not groggy enough to know the extent (or even existance) of the small internal ammunition reserve intrinsic to each level of unit ( i.e. the extra machine gun ammo belts strapped around the company clerks shoulders), or what is a reasonable lapse of time and/or what level of being in command should be required to have access to this. I'm assuming that a squad should have ready access to any extra ammunition that it was already carrying ( = why units low on ammo keep firing), but that for each higher level of ammo it needs to draw from there should be an increasing delay. And at some point some sergeant is going to have to run around carrying boxes of ammo from the back of the horse-drawn cart that gets used to move the company'e extra ammo supply. Or something like that. Notice that implicit in all the above is a need for maintaining a chain of command all the way up and down the line. No command, no staff sergeant throwing an extra box of goodies in your foxhole in the middle of a firefight. If you add to that some of my strange ideas about the need for evacuating the wounded, you could really begin to simulate the logistical tail without having to resort to taking global morale hits for losing the favorite sheep or mobile soup kitchen. The Aid station idea, by the way, is that certain hq levels have to designate an aid station for their command at a specific spot. As they take casualties, there would be a tendency for the loss of units from the line to be slightly greater than what was actually suffered, to simulate the wounded being carried back to the aid station. The extra loss would reverse itself when the 'stretcher-bearers' got back to their unit. Units with higher morale would be less likely to detach 'stretcher-bearers', and the length of time the bearers would be absent would depend on the distance from the unit taking losses to the (immobile) aid station. There would be no need to represent any of this with actual figures while it was going on because it is really an abstraction (maybe a medic playing with his shoelace at the aid station when he gets busy), and there should be some kind of penalty (akin to losing the field kitchen or the favorite sheep) if the aid station got hit by a large shell, or run over by a truck. Speaking of field kitchens, I've got some great black and white shots of German military mobile bakeries and wurst wagons, and I'm itching to do a mod of one of them. I'm also itching to mod mobile field brothels (ever wonder what the title of the opera "La Fille du Regiment" really means?), but that's another story.

I don't really have such a big problem with plotting every inch of the move of every vehicle in a column, though I'm not too fond of it. I'm primarily a CMBO player, so though this is irksome and annoying, in CMBO I can live with it. I've actually become fairly good at micro-micro-managing the speed and driving maneuvers of each vehicle as it wiggles its way around the curves in a long road while keeping its position in column, and not rear-ending or getting rear-ended by anyone. The problem is that procedure, which didn't work too well in CMBO, got even worse when it moved to CMBB. I'm aware of some of the little tricks and I've probably used them all, but the problem isn't my micromanagement skills, the problem is that using those skills has become very difficult because of the command penalty, not to mention the fact that I shouldn't be micro-managing something that boring at all in the first place. I have a funny feeling that that the drain on system resources and programmers' time from putting in place a truly effective follow command would be prohibitive. So at the risk of intentionally offering a second-best solution, I would propose that whenever a vehicle waypoint touches a road or track it sets off some kind of flag in the system. After that, for each contiguous waypoint that also touches the same road (defining that will be a bear without tiles) the player should be given the option to pay or not to pay the command penalty for the extra waypoint. What this would do is allow the micromanagement that prevents you from creating unrealistic and artificial traffic jams when you start crashing into things that in real life you would slow down to avoid. An alternative would be to program an intentional deceleration before a vehicle hits something (instead of after), giving a column a chance to slow down around a bend without giving itself spasmodic fits. And yes, I know that tank drivers aren't all from California and don't think it's normal to drive 70 kmh bumper to bumper.

Hmm... I think a good candidate for the first CMx2 title would be the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay. That could be followed up by the Spanish Civil War, and then maybe a game about the birth of armored warfare in WWI. This last will be possible because by then the engine will have been refined enough to handle multi-turreted tanks. And then, when excitement for mainstream titles is at a fever pitch, they should bring out a whole game focusing on the tank battles in Mongolia at Khalkin Gol, perhaps with an add-on dealing with the Winter War and Japan's blitzkrieg advance down the Malay Peninsula prior to the fall of Singapore. Then, to round things out, a whole game devoted to Japanese armored warfare against China in the 30's and 40's... And in case anybody is snickering, I just want to remind you that those Paraguayan biplanes are not to be sneezed at.

One of the obstacles to finishing this mod is my nagging suspicion that I don't fully understand the way the game uses images of SS infantry as opposed to SS mechanized infantry. The simplest approach, of course, would be to use the same images for both. But as you can probably tell by now, I hate that. The mechanized infantry image gets used for cavalry. Fine. But the infantry image shows up in a lot of cases where I could have sworn the units were mechanized. At first I had thought that some of the strange foreign volunteer units would show up as SS infantry. They probably do, but I haven't noticed many scenarios that seem to use them. The big surprise was when SS infantry started showing up as the image for units that I could have sworn were mechanized. Though the problem may be that I've looked at too many late late war scenarios where everything was probably getting reduced to infantry ("We're the VI Panzer Armee because we have six panzers left"). So any help in clarifying my thinking would have a major impact on moving this process along. The other main thing that has to happen is that I need to stumble on these images in game and see how I feel about them. One thing that I've noticed is that gamma in Paint is not the same as gamma in Photoshop (Photoshop is deceptively brighter), and the gamma and something else seems different (possibly the magnification of the 55x57 pixels) in game. So far I've been pleasantly surprised that things that I thought would have far too much magenta in them didn't when I stumbled on them in-game. Of course, how things look in-game on my computer is going to be different from how it looks on anybody else's, but I have to draw the line somewhere on what I'm willing to worry about.

This isn't the right forum, of course. There's an opponents wanted section several sections below this one if you go outside to the main forum. It's organized by language, so it's pretty hard to miss. Just a guess, but I suspect more people would send you e-mails if you listed your address in your profile.

CMMOS is a bmp-switching engine that will exchange specific sets of textures for other sets of textures if it receives instructions about what textures to look for and replace. The instructions for each set of textures are called "Rules". For example, a Rule will tell CMMOS to find DD's grass mod and copy it over whatever grass textures are currently installed in the game's bmp folder. A group of Rules affecting the same textures but with different mods is called a Ruleset. So if you look in a CMMOS Ruleset folder, the first thing you'll notice are all the funny little numbers, but the second thing, if you look closely, is that all the rules in the folder are pretty much about the same subject (grass, tanks, uniforms, buildings). There are two mod managers out there. McMMM is apparently a bit easier to learn to use. CMMOS is a bit trickier, but seems to be able to handle complex tasks more easily. If you just want to switch in and out of a single texture, you can do it in McMMM or CMMOS. If you want to install a certain mod designer's tank, show a little damage on it, change the ID number from the side of the turret to the back, add an areal recognition panel, and then do this for each unit in the theater in turn (i.e. change the divisional insignia on all your vehicles, depending on which scenario your playing), then you're better off in CMMOS. The best way to learn CMMOS is to download 4.03 from the cmhq site at combatmission.com and read the instructions and readme files carefully. It's a bit difficult to get through the first time, but there are lots of pictures, and you don't have to read the whole file (unless you're totally nuts and want to try to write your own rules and rulesets the first go round). I'm also told you can do a search on this topic, but I have no idea what you'll find if you do. CMMOS for CMBO is slightly different than CMMOS for CMBB because it was the earlier incarnation. About 95% of all available mods for CMBO were converted to CMMOS format, so if you are interested in CMBO CMMOS is your best bet. The number for CMBB is probably less than 40%, and the number for CMAK is much less even than that.

I've done a little more work on the German faces, so now we're up to about version 2.91. I'm hoping that by the time the last of the feedback trickles in I'll have resolved the one or two issues that I still have with some of the image choices. The end is in sight, though. I'm running out of substitute images (partly because I stopped collecting them), and the ones I've used are resisting repositioning. I know there are still a lot of good color images out there that could be used, but I don't have access to them. I'm sure there is at least one or two good images in each Osprey book that doesn't show up on the front and back covers, so that means about a dozen more images, at least. That part will have to wait until I can buy the books and a high resolution scanner. In the meantime, so that we're all on the same page, here's what 2.91 looks like:

Probably because the next guy in line actually has two...

And the reason for this ?