Philippe
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Posts posted by Philippe
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Just checked the Sorted Scenarios at CMMODS, and if you look in the section for the summer of 1943, Tigers on the Farm was included.
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The Vista compatibility issue is getting more complicated: Bill Gates gave a press conference a week ago and said he was very excited about Microsoft's plan to release Vista's successor a year to eighteen months ahead of schedule. That may mean that Vista will only get foisted on new computer users for another year. If I were about to get a new computer I most certainly would not get one with Vista, and if I were a game designer I would think twice about devoting too many resources to Vista compatibility.
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People who play CMBB and CMAK eventually stop playing CMBO, except for nostalgia reasons. They're very similar to CMBO, but the improvements are very significant.
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Yes, you are correct, CM wasn't designed to reproduce Hollywood scenarios. What it was designed to do was to show how far from reality Hollywood scenarios are. If you play too much CM you'll have a hard time watching war movies because you'll see how absurd they are.
AFAIK the AI will end up defending (or attacking) anything with a flag sitting next to it. If you entrench a tank it can't move. I don't know what happens if you use the dig in command with a jeep or a truck.
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Once you start thinking about the history of the Nisei-American units you can't help but be moved and disturbed. What went on reveals aspects of American character most would prefer not to acknowledge. The Germans have far worse skeletons, but the Good Guys' closets were not completely clean. Perhaps our parents were only human after all...
On an unrelated note, R2, the author of 'Les Samurai de Roosevelt' also wrote a scenario called 'Les Cobras fumantes' about an assault by the Brazilian contingent in Italy. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but I've started the translation anyway because I really like R2's maps.
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I love people who are so self-involved that their communications make no sense whatsoever to anyone other than themselves.
This is the CMBB forum. If you have a gripe about CMSF, take it there.
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I can't make sense out of that.
Why don't you tell us exactly what you've got, and exactly what you're trying to do.
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FYI, one of those links (I think it was the third one) gave me a virus.
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The fall seems likely.
Which year we're talking about is an entirely different story.
A good thing, too, as I'll never tire of traffic analysis.
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You really should post this in the tech forum rather than here.
What you're describing is very depressing.
You want an answer from Schrullenhaft and/or Matt. I would suggest sending them an e-mail.
Most of what they will say to you will probably boil down to the fact that back in remote antiquity, when CMx1 was conceived and made flesh, the primal makers were unable to anticipate the development of the Vista operating system and its wacko interaction with the (possibly undertweaked) Nvidia drivers for any card more recent than the 7000 series.
The kind of thing you're describing, by the way, causes me to shake in terror. Last year my 7000 series started doing that, and got worse, and worse and worse. The good news was that after replacing the card (which didn't help much) the company I bought my system from (Dell) finally threw in the towel and replaced and upgraded everything (even though I was past warranty). What frightens me about your story is that the troubles with my old card started in early April: I'm not going anywhere near the software that I was using when the troubles started for fear of setting off a progressively deteriorating condition.
Having said all that, I do realize that it would be much simpler just to sacrifice a virgin to the aberrant computer system god. Trouble is I don't know any.
The more rational among us would probably comment that your problem has something to do with the way Vista interacts with that series of cards. And I think Redwolf would probably tell you that there is something fundamentally wrong with the 7000 and 8000 series to begin with. I'm not an engineer so I can't comment. I like them both when they work (which I've seen them do with XP), but once they start to go, all the sacrificial virgins in Yucatan won't save your visuals.
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Cmmods.com is the clearing house for all cm mods. Go there, register, and search in each game. (The registration won't get you spammed -- it's really to discourage bandwidth theft). The site is a bit clunky, but the search engine is very good. Andrew T. Fox did uniform mods for all three CM games: I don't know which one you're talking about, but his uniform mods are all there under slight differnt designer names.
By the way, welcome to the forum. Please note that this is the part of the forum reserved for technical problems -- normally you would ask your question in the section dedicated to the game you are referring to (CMBO, CMAK, or CMBB).
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From the Center for Military History's account of the Sicilian campaign:
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The battle for Troina began on 31 July, when the Germans repulsed an advance by the 39th Infantry Regiment, a 9th Infantry Division outfit temporarily attached to the 1st Division. The setback forced Bradley and Allen to orchestrate a massive assault. Over the next six days the men of the 1st Infantry Division, together with elements of the 9th Division, a French Moroccan infantry battalion, 165 artillery pieces (divided among 9 battalions of 105-mm. howitzers, 6 battalions of 155-mm. howitzers, and 1 battalion of 155-mm. "Long Tom" guns), and numerous Allied aircraft, were locked in combat with Troina's tenacious defenders. Control of key hilltop positions see-sawed back and forth in vicious combat, with the Germans launching no fewer than two dozen counterattacks during the week-long battle.
The experience of Col. John Bowen's 26th Infantry Regiment was fairly typical of the action around Troina. The 26th's assignment was to outflank Troina by seizing Monte Basilio two miles north of town. From here, the regiment would be positioned to cut the Axis line of retreat. Bowen moved his soldiers forward on 2 August supported by the fire of 1 battalion of 155-mm. howitzers, 4 battalions of 105-mm. howitzers, and 4 "Long Tom" batteries. Despite this weighty arsenal, German artillery fire and difficult terrain limited the regiment's advance to half a mile. The next morning one of the regiment's battalions lost its bearings in the hilly terrain and wandered around ineffectually for the remainder of the day. A second battalion reached Monte Basilio with relatively little difficulty, only to be pounded by Axis artillery fire directed from neighboring hills. The 129th Panzer Grenadier Regiment launched a major effort to retake the mountain that afternoon, but Bowen's riflemen and machine gunners, supported by the artillerymen in the rear, repulsed the attackers.
For the next two days Axis artillery and small arms fire kept the men on Monte Basilio pinned down. Determined to hold Troina for as long as possible, the Germans reacted strongly to the threat the 26th Regiment posed to their line of communications. Axis pressure practically cut off the men on Monte Basilio from the rest of the 1st Division, and attempts to resupply them by plane were only partially successful. By 5 August food and ammunition stores were low, and casualties had greatly depleted the regiment, with one company mustering only seventeen men effective for duty.
It was at this point that the German infantry attacked again, touching off another round of furious fighting. During the battle, Pvt. James W. Reese moved his mortar squad to a position from which he could effectively take the advancing German infantry under fire. The squad maintained a steady fire on the attackers until it began to run out of ammunition. With only three mortar rounds left, Reese ordered his crew to the rear while he advanced to a new position and knocked out a German machine gun with the last rounds. He then shouldered a rifle and continued to engage the enemy until killed by a barrage of hostile fire.
Through the efforts of men like Private Reese, the 26th Infantry successfully held its position. The United States recognized Reese's heroism posthumously by awarding him the Medal of Honor. The Germans acknowledged the 26th Regiment's gallant stand by evacuating Troina later that night. Hard pressed by American forces all along the Troina sector and unable to dislodge the 26th Regiment from its position threatening his line of retreat, General Hube withdrew the badly damaged 15th Panzer Grenadier Division toward Randazzo.
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I think you may not be looking at the site carefully enough. I've posted about half a dozen introductory music mods (some for CMAK, some for CMBB), and several others have done the same. There's a lot of sound material in the CMBB section, and there also used to be quite a bit in CMBO. Off the top of my head I know the Oddball material is in there somewhere, and he's not alone. And there's a very large language substitution mod from about three years ago in CMBB.
Switching individual sounds is a problem, because they all tend to be related to each other in groups and volume: it's pretty weird if your 81mm mortar makes a loud bang when it goes off but your 150mm HE explosion sounds more like a muffled sprrt. If you do one gun or explosion you have to do them all, and make sure they sound right in relation to each other.
Why don't you try sending Oddball an e-mail? I'm sure he know where all the sound material can be found.
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CMMODS is the central clearing house for mods, and quite a few other things (e.g. the emergency stockpile of scenarios from the original and now-defunct Scenario Depot). Sound mods aren't as extensivly covered as graphics mods, but they're still there.
I can only think of one language mod off the top of my head, but it's very good: the sound quality is a bit weak, but the voice acting is very much superior to what came with the games. There are a quite a few replacement sounds, some of them fairly extensive, and everybody and their cousin has done alternative introductory music.
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For reasons that I don't fully understand there aren't very many scenarios dealing with this particular battle. In trying to get a handle on why I came across this archived article from Time Magazine, which I've decided to quote in its entirety in the interest of rescuing this battle from oblivion.
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Time Magazine Monday, Aug. 23, 1943
In the dispatch which follows, TIME Correspondent Jack Belden describes the last hours of the bitterest battle which American troops fought in the Sicilian campaign.
The Germans had halted their long retreat at the rocky hilltop town of Troina. Used to driving the enemy out of one position after another, Major General Terry Allen's 1st Division sent one combat team against the town. The Germans ate it up with machine-gun fire and drove it back. Reserves were thrown in; for the first time in Sicily, the whole 1st Division was engaged at once. Every night the Americans advanced, every morning the Germans counterattacked, driving the Americans back down the slopes before Troina. On the evening of the fifth day A.P.'s Donald Whitehead and I arrived on the scene.
Our planes had just dive-bombed the jutting rock of Troina where it stuck up like an island amid the circling mountain peaks. Black smoke curled upward in columns, merging into one big black cloud beneath which Troina disappeared like Camelot fading into the mists. We drove our jeep around a cliff to where an ambulance had halted beneath a ledge. Beyond that no car could advance, for the road was mined. By the ambulance lay a soldier who looked up at us with the tender, inquiring gaze the eyes of wounded men often seem to wear. A first-aid man gently scooped him up and deposited him in his butcher's wagon.
"The front's over there," he said, waving toward a hill, and drove off. We climbed through rocky fields. There was not a living thing to be seen. Except for the bang of hidden guns and the geysers of black smoke, we seemed to have the battlefield to ourselves.
We picked our way up the hill until we came out by a road culvert where Lieut. Colonel Hugh Matthews had set up his battalion headquarters. Weary, grey and pinched-looking, he was whittling nervously on a stick.
"I thought these bastards would fold before this," he said.
"I'm so beaten up, I'm just occupying evacuated positions." He led us to the edge of our hill.
"See that?" said Matthews. "One of my companies took the wrong road in the dark and attacked that slope right in the face of machine-gun fire. The company commander was wounded twice, but he pushed on and smashed that position. Now," he added, as we walked back toward the culvert, "there's only one officer left in that company." The officer in question was Lieut. Melvin Groves. We found him lying by the culvert with a black look on his face.
"Sometimes this is too goddam much for me," he said, spitting out a straw.
Another voice chimed in: "Everyone's getting battle-wacky. One private who never saw a mine in his life before went around picking fuses out of mines. He dug up 37 of them with his bayonet and then marked them with toilet paper. No normal guy would do that." "The radio two nights ago said Troina had been captured," a lieutenant said. "We must have taken Troina; our broadcasters never lie." By now it was dark and we prepared for our nightly attack on Troina. On the opposite side of the road at the other end of the culvert, Major Chuck Horner, whose battalion was to put in the attack, had set up his phones.
Night Vigil. At 9:30 Captain Alan Morehouse, once a schoolteacher in Darien, Conn., led 90 men of K Company out on the road and headed over the slope of our hill down into a ravine and up toward another hill in front of Troina.
The men bunched up on a hillside before the culvert and each one paused to get at a distance from the man ahead of him.
There was a dim crescent moon overhead, shrouded by wisps of clouds. As the soldiers paused in the column, I said to them: "How you doin'?" A big fellow sighed and answered: "This is tough. Can't sleep in nighttime for moving. Can't sleep in daytime for shelling." Around midnight, Horner took his unit out of the culvert and moved farther uphill, preparing to follow Morehouse if he was successful. We had not been long in our new spot, and had just set up our own telephone and radios, when a voice called us and said that a shell had landed squarely in the middle of the culvert we had just left. The Dawn Attack. We sort of fitfully dozed for a while. At 5 o'clock the snapping of rifle bullets coming across our slope woke me and I heard Chuck talking to Morehouse on the phone.
Morehouse was nowhere near the top of his hill objective, and suddenly we realized that another daytime fight was in progress. The news shook us a bit and Chuck's voice was irritable as he said: "Move out, goddamit. Get that machine gun before it gets light or they'll be on us again." Half an hour passed .during which dawn crept over the hills. Morehouse again reported that he had made no progress, and again Chuck Horner spoke to him: "Listen, Al, you got 90 rifles and machine guns. You going to let one machine gun hold you up? We're not getting anywhere by not moving. We'll be here another year at this rate. Why can't you get 'em going? Open up with every rifleman. They can't hit every man there." We started walking directly up the road until we came to a narrow pass at the very top of the hill and looked out at the battle scene below us. On our right was a high long ridge that led straight up to Troina.
Lieutenant Robert Cutler was about to lead our L Company in an assault on the lower slopes of this ridge. On our left was another hill, half green where grape vineyards had been planted and half yellow where wheat was planted. Up this slope Morehouse and K Company were now attacking, and we could see their red tracer bullets shooting very prettily into the green of the grape vines. Thrush! Wham! a shell with terrific velocity flew over our heads through the pass.
We turned tail and ran downhill and again a shot whistled over our heads with terrible speed. There was no approaching whine to it like an ordinary shell"just a madly swift thrush and then a crash as the shell exploded. "That's tanks!" cried someone. Hurriedly, Chuck Horner ordered a mortar barrage. The order had scarcely been given when over our heads there was a musical singing noise like the sound flocks of Peking pigeons make when the Chinese tie whistles to their tails. Wooo, woooo, wooo. A line of smoke was spouting along the whole top of the ridge among the green grape vines, making both them and the yellow wheat dirty. From the midst of the flames and smoke we saw figures running downhill toward us. "They've got their hands up," yelled Whitehead, and then we saw 16 of them running madly toward a grey stone hovel halfway up the hill. To one side of the stone house an American soldier sat on a rock almost nonchalantly holding his rifle on the running men. Those queerly quick tank missiles again shot over our heads, and again we retreated. It was not pleasant to go back & forth around that ledge, for at the top of it, facing downhill in the direction we had attacked three nights previously, was a German machine-gun post, and in it a dead German soldier. He was on his knees, his body hunched forward in a tense position, as he had been in the act of firing when he was hit. He was headless, and there was a bloody stump sticking up from his shoulders that was his neck. Whitehead and I knelt behind some stones. Soldiers of the reserve company lying about began talking among themselves. A voice said: "I'd like to go back and see cows for the rest of my life." Another voice said:
"You know that malted milk"the hard, cold kind?"
"You're knockin' yourself out with that kind of talk," said a third voice. A fourth one said: "So the woman took me in her yard, and she and the kids filled up a wooden tub with water and then, while I was taking a bath, they washed my clothes." His words were muffled in a heavy clatter of machine-gun fire. Throughout the rest of the morning there was fierce struggle to beat off the German attack with our artillery. Coordination between artillery and infantry observers was difficult, but word came back that the Germans had started to run out of a gully.
"Come on, pour it in there, and we'll chase them as they go," said Horner over the phone. Our men began to go forward.
Out on a ledge, I saw them trying to work themselves up the opposite slope that led directly into Troina. It was an eerie sensation to watch through an artillery telescope the movement and deployment of these small groups of men. We could see the enemy's position and many things our men could not see. There was a dark patch of burnt wheat through which ran a ditch"a perfect sort of defensive trench where the Germans lay concealed from our men coming up the slope toward them.
We watched, half afraid that our men would fall into a trap. But down there below us was a crafty young officer. We could see him detach himself with three soldiers from the rest of the men and go forward in a low crouch, shifting from side to side, as if they were bloodhounds sniffing a trail. Suddenly 50 yards from the trench the officer's hand flew out by his side and urgently motioned his men to lie down. Then the officer crawled forward through the bare wheat and around small rocks.
In a moment he halted, got to his knees and divested himself of gear that he had been carrying on his back. Then he rushed forward and with a violent motion threw a potato masher grenade into the trench. As the officer rushed away smoke rose from the trench. Then bits of dust began kicking up around the officer from a machine gun on the far flank of the trench which the officer had not been able to see. We watched him crawl back, put on his gear again and then collect his three men.
Unfortunately for us, there was a report that German tanks were coming up the road. Our telescope was whisked away.
The Long Afternoon. Throughout the long, hot afternoon the usual fog of war settled around us and everything was confusion. The usual battlefield rumors flew up & down the lines in chaotic profusion.
At 3 o'clock our planes dived one by one on some target behind Troina. Because-there was no flak, we figured the enemy might be withdrawing. The sounds of battle grew less, and finally, when a heavy formation of B-25s struck at the town at 7 o'clock, we stood boldly up on our ridge and watched. All firing seemed to have ceased, as if both sides were watching the blasting of Troina, which, though only a mile away, vanished again behind the curtain of black smoke.
After the planes had gone a hush settled over the battlefield. Soldiers left their foxholes and stopped to chat with one an other. In the strange quiet, men's spirits began rapidly to soar. Chuck Horner said: "This is the hardest battle we've had since El Guettar. I think"cross your fingers"we're going to get Troina tonight." Another Night. Except for the small pocket on our right, the Germans seemed to have departed. Chuck Horner chose a patrol to scout the approaches to the town. As the sun sank behind the hills, casting its last rays on the cliff of Troina, Major Horner gave Lieut. Mastyl, who was the leader of the patrol, his last instructions: "If you get up to the town and there's nobody there, fire two red flares. Then come back to L Company and direct them on the route you took toward the town. Then I'll bring the whole battalion forward." In the middle of the night Mastyl and his seven men returned. Halfway out, said Mastyl, he had been machine-gunned. He tried to work his men around a slope on the blind side of the gun, but immediately ran into another. "We couldn't get past," he told Major Horner. "I thought I'd better come back."
Another Dawn. At 7 o'clock in the morning two Italians came into our lines saying that the Germans had evacuated Troina. We wanted to believe them, but we did not let our hopes run away with us. Horner gave last-minute instructions to Lieut. Everett Booth, commander of Company I, who was to go out in full strength toward the city: "Never mind the banks or anything like that. Head straight for the mayor's office and set up the battalion command post there."
In a moment we were off, straight down the road as if we had nothing about which to worry. Off the road a little way we observed a grave, placarded with a small square wooden sign on which was a cross and the words, "Hier Ruhen Soldaten USA" (Here lie soldiers of the U.S.A.). A few yards farther on we saw a big cross with a German helmet stuck on it like a scarecrow.
A soldier said: "The hell with the war," and we walked on.
At that very moment a volley of rifle shots rang out of the fields above us at the base of the stone ramp guarding Troina.
Bullets cracked and sang by our ears, causing everyone to throw himself flat on the ground.
We had scarcely time to think when planes shot out of the sun, dived low and bombed the town and in front of the town.
At 7:55 another wave of planes circled and strafed an area just to the left of us and still this side of the town.
It was getting uncomfortably close.
At 10 minutes past 8, a group of dive-bombers swung in from the left and circled back in our direction, and suddenly swooped straight for us in steep whining dives. A crash shook the earth directly in front of us, and smoke and the smell of burning was in the air. The ditch we dug our faces into was only one foot deep.
At. 8:25, another wave of planes dived over us.
Private Robert Martin took a card out of his pocket and showed it to me. It was a birthday greeting from his wife, and it read: "Birthday greetings to my better half. What sunshine means to flowers, what leaves mean to a tree, what springtime means to songbirds. ..." Hrumph! hrumph! hrumph! the bombs fell, and I ducked, and then looked up and read the last line of the greeting: "That's what you mean to me." "Songbirds, huh?" said Martin, looking up into the air.
After 15 or 20 minutes, when no more planes appeared, we crawled out and around to the right flank and headed once more toward Troina.
The City of the Bombed. Looking through glasses, we saw that sheets and drawers and white pieces of cloth were hanging straight down from windows in the face of the cliff. We ventured upward in column, passing along the way a ghostly old woman lying amid crumbling plaster and shattered timber, who stretched out her hands to us, stared out of sightless eyes, and moaned like the wind whining through pine trees.
We went on to the church. Light was shining through a hole in the roof. Below it an unexploded 500-pound bomb lay on the floor. Some American soldier breathed heavily in my ear: "God, that was a miracle." We turned around to look at the altar. It was still intact.
Before it, kneeling on the ground with his helmet and rifle by his side, an American soldier was silently praying.
In the mayor's office we found a few of the living wounded that our soldiers had pulled out of the wreckage. On a wooden bench lay the thin form of a girl about ten years old. Her black hair was streaked with grey powder plaster. One of her legs was completely wrapped in bandages which our company had placed there. In her two hands she clutched a cracker which a soldier had given her. She didn't move, but only stared at the ceiling.
On another bench sat a boy about 13, naked save for a pair of drawers. Over his body were red scars where he'd been burned. Our medics had no salve for burns with them, so the boy sat there, shivering from head to foot and in great pain.
For a long while he remained silent, but finally his lips began to tremble, and his body shook with great sobs.
A little girl, not more than eight, sat down on the bench and gently pulled the boy's head down in her lap and stroked his hair. Little bird chirps came from her lips as if she were saying: "Don't cry, don't cry." Chuck Horner was standing by the door with a grim expression on his face. "I never wanted to capture a town more than this in my life. But now. . . ." He made a helpless gesture.
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I really wish they would. It would make all of our lives a lot easier.
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That's almost as sick as when I posted images for sound mods.
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Cmmods is where everything is kept. It's such a heroic task to keep a central posting zone running you simply learn to love its idiosyncracies.
The only thing worse than having to click on a separate tab to see the image is when the guy that posted the mod is too lazy, disorganized, or confused to post an image at all. Then you have to download the bloody thing just to see it. It's better than it used to be when I had a dial-up, but it's still slow.
And I really hate it when there's no readme file. These days that only tends to happen when someone is reposting something from someone else from before the great crash, but it's still awful.
There are a few specialty sites out there with mods (Gautrek, Mark Gallear, George McEwen, Zimorodok, Appui-Feu), but cmmods is the central clearing house, and that's critically important. Maintining something like that is pretty expensive and a labor of love, so however he chooses to present it to us is fine by me.
You might want to try getting your hands on the US CDV edition -- it comes with a separate disk of mods and doesn't have the German market bowdlerizations built in
[ March 07, 2008, 11:50 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]
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Would that she could pay us a visit, but, alas, she won't.
So that means the rest of us will be forced to resort to traffic analysis until the happy (or sad) day.
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My CMAK came with printed but shortened version of the pdf manual, as well as the pdf manual.
So when I really want to look something up, I usually go to the CMBB manual instead.
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This is what comes from poting when you're in too much of a hurry. I mentioned the ambush pattern as an example of a type of camo that was only used on tanks and not on halftracks. Didn't mean to suggest that your halftracks were in ambush. Sorry for the confusion.
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Assuming that that camo pattern was used on halftracks (and I'm never comfortable assuming as I understand that the ambush pattern wasn't used on halftracks), it would be great to have variations on that pattern on all the different 251's and 250's. I mention variations because different units applied their own camo, and the guy in charge of the support vehicles probably had his men paint the stripes on differently from the guy in charge of the transport halftracks.
Doesn't have to be anything radically different, just not identical. Just be sure that was used on halftracks before you go crazy with it.
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All of the old scenarios can be found at cmmods in the Sorted Scenario collection and the Scenario Depot Salvage.
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If you remember the name of that Soviet vs. Tiger scenario, please mention it because I would like to take a look at it at some point. There was a scenario like that in Steel Panthers, and I always wondered how it would play in CM. The Steel Panthers scenario was historical or semi-historical, and I think it involved Michael Wittmann.Originally posted by The_Enigma:I remember playing some scenario where you were given a few Tigers only and had to halt a Soviet tank advance through a town.
I remember using one to block each of the main roads through the town and destroyed something like 30 T34/75 in the process, only loss being one Tiger imobilised, so not really a loss - although he ended up being surrounded by T34s and destroyed them all.
Agaisnt someone else however, i remember racking up quite a few kills with one Tiger agaisnt my mate in a CMAK scewnario - think it was like 7 kills or something.
Looking for CMAK 'Left Hanging' Scen
in Combat Mission: Afrika Korps
Posted
On the off chance that that isn't the exact title of the scenario, you might want to take a look at the North Africa section of the Sorted Scenarios at CMMODS.