Alsatian

And white targeting lines for smoke, which a tank might do on it's own in the middle of a turn in order to protect itself from a newly discovered anti-tank gun, enemy tank or some other threatening surprise.

Make it so. If you ever need data entry slaves, include me.

Gimme. I live in Arlington, work downtown. My job wraps me up in DC architectural history, neighborhood planning and tourism, so I make my living knowing the history and geography of DC. We'll have to see how I do with the 10,000 points though. bmeyer1.....at......comcast.net. Put Combat Mission in the subject line so it doesn't get filtered.

I very much disagree that early or imperfect scenarios should be filtered out of any SD Revival. They may not be great, they may be embarrassing to designers, but they represent the history of the game and even in their mistakes could teach a future scenario designer what not to do. Or also, an imperfect scenario is better then nothing and a future designer could start from there, instead of at point zero, to make a great scenario. What if historians, libraries and museums only kept Thomas Edison's final patented light bulb, and threw out the 100s of imperfect experiments before it? I'm sure other inventors learned from Edison's failures. I'm sure sure Edison learned from his own failures too. If as a community we throw away our failures, we throw away the lessons and wisdom gained through them as well. Inevitably, that means some future designer would just repeat the mistakes of the past....doomed to repeat it and all that.

Admiral, Thanks for SD. It was invaluable to our community. I'm no computer genius, but if you have need for a team of keyboard grunts to help rebuild, I'll give you as many hours as I can. Considering all the the CM hours you've given me, I figure I owe you.

What the hell was that battleship gray thing that looked like a conning tower on a sherman hull? It was at the bottom of your photos on the first link.

David Chapuis, How about these counters to kind of clear up what's what? and I couldn't see what happened to your second MG and it looks like you had a shreck get plugged.

I'm looking forward to bicycle infantry vs. cavalry, myself.

Thanks DavidI. That's exactly what my opponent and I figured out and we're off and running. And so, if you don't mind...ahem: woo and hoo.

I'm trying my first CMETO PBEM and am running into a problem. My opponent has sent me a setup for one of the scenarios in the pack, but when I go to open it I get the error message that we're not running the same version of CM. I've tried to work around the problem a couple ways and here's what I get. Open PBEM in CMETO: error message on splashscreen that we're not running the same version of CM. (I'm on CMAK v. 1.03 and CMETO v. 1.0) Open PBEM in CMAK: game opens up to Allied set-up, but with CMAK mods, not CMETO Open HSG-A Hard Lesson in CMETO as single player, Allied side: uses CMETO mods. What fixes do my opponent and I need to try?

The approach march just before contact. My typcial behavior is tedious planning of the approach march, particular attention to every turn's orders. Then right around Turn 10, I get bored, lose focus and start rushing the march into a sprint. Typically, at this critical moment, my opponent's main line of defense turns out to be just 20 meters ahead. So, with alarming regularity, my methodical march morphs into a nasty, bloody melee.

Hamsterkampfwagen?

This is awesome. Like a whole other CM game. Thanks for organizing scenarios especially. Don't know if I ever would have found and played them otherwise.

In the final turns I had one flag secure. The second was in doubt and not worth the casualties. I was willing to hold one flag and concede the other whether it stay neutral or go to the attacker. If I had known one flag was dynamic, I would have rolled the dice and attempted to control the second flag as well, no matter the casualties. It turned out that the flag I had secure was the bogus flag, but like I started with, I didn't even know that was a possibility.

I understand the concept of dynamic victory flags. If dynamic victory flags are in play, the attacker gets to pick which flags are real and which are bogus. The defender does not know this and so is forced to defend all flags. Should the defender's scenario briefing tell him that dynamic flags are in play? I argue that the point of dynamic flags is not to trick defenders out of a victory, but to force a change in their play behavior. If a defender is not aware that dynamic flags are in play, then he will not change his play behavior. I'm asking what other people think because I just finished a scenario as a defender and the briefing did not tell me it was a dynamic flag scenario. I was a little miffed at the end. If I had known that 1 of the 2 flags was bogus, and only 1 flag was real I would have played the scenario quite differently.

I wonder if she would marry me?

********Spoiler************ ***Even though there's not much more to spoil*** ************************* I was very successful once I realized to be patient and use all 45 turns. After losing some StuGs needlessly hurrying forward, I used my ACs to reveal the Soviet AT guns. Then blammo with the mortar carriers. First company swept out the first ridge with MG support from all the halftracks. Second company waited far back in cover til most Soviet infantry was cleared, then raced for the large woods on the right. First line of Soviet infantry too engaged to bother with my second company. After the first ridge was completely cleared and routed, I brought up the 88s under smoke from my mortar carriers and PzIVs. Enough smoke to keep both guns covered during their entire setup time. Got second company into the large woods/scattered trees with the platoon of captured T-34s (which rock) breaking through there too. T-34s cleaned out all Soviet armor on the other side of the trees. 88s killed everything they could see. Brought the PzIVs up the middle with remanants of my first company to join the battle for the big flag. They raced through the firefight onto the the furthest small flag where they linked up with my surviving T-34s.

When I was last on this discussion, there was a dialogue--paraphrased--about how evil people may or may not do good. Today I came across this short essay. Read it all the way through (5 minutes) and you'll see how it relates to the question above. I think it's very well written. Life and Death If it's moved down the page, find the article with this title. Life and death One morning twenty years ago this month, I opened the front section of the Washington Post and read that my friend Stephen Peter Morin had been executed by the state of Texas for capital murder. There are two reasons that that sentence, while accurate, felt awkward to write. First reason: it has been a long time since I thought of Morin as a friend. He was a twisted, manipulative and malevolent person, and if I hate anyone in the world or out of it I hate him. Second reason: I knew him as Ray Constantine. But Morin was his real name, and for a number of months in 1981 I spent just about every day with him, generally enjoying his company. "Ray Constantine" rode up to the front porch of my mother's house on his bicycle one day to ask whether she knew of apartments he could rent. Her current partner is one of my favorite people in the world, but my mother had phenomenally, staggeringly bad judgment in men in those days: by that evening or the next, it seemed, he had moved in with her. "Ray" was a smooth talker, and closer to my age than to my mother's. My mother had had a string of failed relationships with a string of increasingly sleazy men, the previous one ending just a week or two before. Full of the self-righteousness only a twenty-one-year-old boy with a disintegrating mother truly knows, I exploded at her in mortified fury, telling her that she was being incredibly stupid and allowing herself to be set up for another romantic disaster. She said he'd be moving in and that I'd better get used to the idea. So I did. "Ray" decided to work his way into my good graces by getting me a job - always in short supply in 1981 Buffalo. He lied his way onto a union painting crew and then vouched for me. I joined the union and worked with him all summer. Three things about that summer stand out in my mind, aside from the monotony of paint, hauling kegs of tar to roofs, and a story about a ladder that will come a bit later. The first was heading to DC to the giant march in support of the striking air traffic controllers. The second was finding out that my mother had ordered a copy of my birth certificate to give to Ray so that he could get ID with a different name on it. I intercepted it in what was likely the luckiest moment of my life. The third was just before Ray and my mother left for their trip across country in her van. I wandered by her house one humid night - I'd moved out to my own place, what with my union paycheck - and found Ray sweating, attaching carpet to the walls and ceiling of the van. He was struggling to hold the carpet up as he put rivets into metal; I stepped up and helped him. My mother is a hero, by the way, though she treated her children shamefully in the process. She and Ray went from town to town, San Francisco, Denver, Las Vegas, and into Texas. In each town Ray would disappear for a day or two and then show up again, a worried look in his eyes, insisting they leave town right away. The third or fourth time it happened, she realized she'd heard news in each town of a local woman disappearing and then found murdered. [Mom offers a slight correction to that last sentence in comments, below.] There was an uncomfortable period in Texas in December after he found out she'd turned him in to the police, and before they caught him. And then they did catch him, and he went to trial and pled guilty to capital murder and asked for the death penalty. On March 13 1985, after the executioner probed veins for 45 minutes looking for one that wasn't collapsed - raising the ire of the ACLU for a time after - Stephen Peter Morin was put to death by the state of Texas for the murder of Carrie Marie Scott, whom he was attempting to rob. There's a way in which Scott was lucky: he did not rape and torture her the way he did some of his other victims, some of them in the van I helped him soundproof. In the van I helped him soundproof. Morin's last words, as reported by the state of Texas, are a marvel of manipulative sociopathy: Heavenly Father, I give thanks for this time, for the time that we have been together, the fellowship in your world, the Christian family presented to me [He called the names of the personal witnesses]. Allow your holy spirit to flow as I know your love as been showered upon me. Forgive them for they know not what they do, as I know that you have forgiven me, as I have forgiven them. Lord Jesus, I commit my soul to you, I praise you, and I thank you. Covering up amoral, murderous violence with a coat of Jesus? Too bad for poor Ray. A little later, with better PR, he could have risen rather high in the Texas GOP. I find myself unwilling to grant the possibility that the sick **** said a single truthful thing in his miserable life. He sent me a letter from death row, calling me the closest thing he'd had to a brother. I destroyed it after one reading. Who tries to get ID with his "brother's" name on it to use on his murder spree? He told his attorney he didn't remember killing anyone. Why the fake IDs, the soundproofing of vans, the sudden desires to leave town? He wanted to manipulate the cloying, puling conservative Christians in the Texas penal system: what better method than ostentatiously coming to Jesus? If ever there was a person who deserved the death penalty - and still I do not believe there ever was - Stephen Peter Morin was that person. The world is far better off without him, and I find some consolation in the fact that his putative hopes of forgiveness in the hereafter dissolved into the permanent blackness of non-existence. I only wish he had died before he could have killed Janna Bruce, Sheila Whalen, Carrie Scott, and as many as thirty or more other young women. Twenty years later, and his memory still brings me to a shaking rage. And yet. A wooden forty-foot ladder is a heavy thing. Set it against a house on ground saturated by a week of summer rain, and it will tend to slide. Climb that ladder with a two-gallon bucket of paint, and if the ladder is leaning against freshly-primed clapboard three stories up, it will tend to slide quickly. A quarter-century of exploring the precipitous landscapes of the West has thoroughly blunted my acrophobia, but that morning, thirty-five feet up a heavy ladder that was sliding rightward at about half an inch a second, I froze. And watched myself slide. And "Ray" saw, and got from the yard to the third-floor window in about five seconds. Speaking calmly while he hung out the window, he persuaded me that I was unafraid. His words filled me with an odd strength. He persuaded me that I could take the ends of the ladder I was on - which I could barely lift in the best of conditions - and jump it back to the left and verticality. And I did it: I pulled back violently on the ladder and slammed it back into place. In reach of the window now, I helped Ray tie the ladder securely to the window frame as I sobbed in relief, then descended on increasingly shaky legs. Ray met me as I reached the bottom, grabbed me in a bear hug, kept me from slumping to the ground.

Saw the film this weekend and highly recommend it. It's a nearly 3 hour long drama, not a documentary. It can't spin off into the background of every character (although I appreciate this board telling me about Mohnke's war crimes on the western front), but it frames the questions of how this happened in a very challenging and productive way. Frau Junge's real life interview circa 1988 at the end of the film is worth the price of admission. To see how the Herr and Frau Goebbles, and many other Nazi leaders, couldn't live in a world without National Socialism is chilling. The evil for them was truly all consuming. Their example comes closest to painting how this could happen again.

Well, OK, if the debate is winding down, how about the Active Edge Advocates busy ourselves with playtesting our heresy Borrow a map from a scenario, edit it to add board on both flanks, run strips of water down the original map edge (so neither side can wander over into the new area). Then opponents agree on: parameters for additonal troops to be placed in the extra area; and agree that orders will not be given to these flanking forces for the duration of the battle. And, HEY!, no lumping all your flank forces on the edge of the original board for fire superiority. During game play, each player's flanking forces should do their own auto-targeting. One big thing lacking from this playtest is that the attacking player's flanking forces aren't advancing abreast of the main board. Any other details, rules and parameters can be worked out in the test. But still, this might keep the Active Edge Advocates busy enough to leave Battlefront alone for a while.

CM already abstractly models dynamic flanks: strafing runs by airplanes. CM already accepts that there is some random ordinance beyond either players control that might show up at any time, so why not apply the same logic to map edges? Since board edges are already an abstraction, I don't see any logical problems using an abstract flank capability to address the issue. That is, if the issue even needs addressing, which it sounds like it doesn't. But I don't want to go to work, so here's my two cents. I still see some sort of abstract, generic settings by the scenario designer as a solution. Designer gets to set basic abstract stuff like flank defender unit mix (infanty, armored, VG, etc.), set the flank attacker unit mix. Specific units randomly generated, just like in a QB. Do that for both flanks. Also set aggression levels (does the left flank of the attacker hold and fire, or is it advanding too). Then during game, some flank defender fire has to be dedicated to the attacker in front of it; probably most, so only a portion of fire from the flank should bleed over into the board. The whole game, flank progress is kept track of. Maybe the flank defender gets attritioned down to nothing or is overrun, that would mean the map edge gets friendly for the attacker. Terrain on the flanks could also be set, just like the parameters of a QB already are. If the designer says the flank is woods, LOS is more limited, so less fire bleeds over into the board. If flat, open ground, then more fire bleeds over. Hell, take it to it's most abstract and just let the designer have the ability to determine the level of flank fire for both defender and attacker: none, sparse, moderate, fair, heavy, don't even think about it. Seems to me plenty of unit commanders in RL were frustrated by flanking units they had not control over. Why not the same lack of control in CM flanks? That logic is already applied in the form of airplane strafing runs.

During the move/advance over that much open ground, does anyone find a benefit by splicing in short distances of sneak? Does it have the same effect as hiding in the way Tigrii just described? I think it helps, so I do it, but I haven't tested it and I'm not positive.

Even if it's a repeat question from earlier in the thread, maybe it can move the thread along... Any chance the system requirements to handle CMX2 will be put out in advance of the game? My machine is almost 5 years old. It would be nice if I can hold off on a new machine until I know what CMX2 will need. PS--please put hexes in CMX2

Take it with a "progaganda" grain of salt, but the unit history for the 30th Infantry has a picture of a 90mm AAA being set up for AT duty at a bend in a forest road.

Somehow program the TacAI not to put it's HQs at the front of the platoon. Keep them in the back so they survive long enough to actually command it's platoon.