fischkopf

Looks great! Really does. Here's hoping that an industrial bombing strategy will at least have a chance of succeeding!

Yeah holy cow!! The increase in scale is blowing my mind! Can't wait to send away my $25 (?) and get a copy of this!!

WaW is just awful. Honestly, Axis and Allies plays much better, until you've exhausted all 7 possible strategies.

Q4 2005. Thank you, Moon! I know it's not official or anything, but at least a ballpark idea is very appreciated. Keep up the good work Hubert! Can't wait to play this one!

Yeah, the problem is just that some people (myself included) _need_ to be given a new expected date. Eg: Fall 2005. You know, it doesn't have to be specific, it can even be shifted later, but as far as I can tell we haven't heard any formal date since the 'ole Q4 2004. So everyone's just been wondering? How long? 3 months? 6 months? Who knows? But it's annoying! I'd like to have a rough estimate. Not to sound too bratty, but I love SC1, one of the best games I've played, so I have a lot of emtional investment to SC II!

Sigh... yeah I think this is a little rough on the fans. Im removing the Battlefront bookmark and I ll check back in a couple of months...

June 22nd? [ May 18, 2005, 12:01 PM: Message edited by: fischkopf ]

Exactly!

Very excited about Age of Empires III. Empire Earth II is too similar to EEI, which I enjoyed for a bit but found a little gamey. There's also Slitherine Sofware's Chariots of War. It's kind of Civ knock off, based off their older Legion. There's a free demo. I've installed it, looks like it might be fun...

Actually it will work, but you have to play Greenland. You can watch the rest of play the great powers and wage total war against each other. While you hunt seals or something.

In all fairness, people who played Axis and Allies should rememember the large number of TCP/IP bugs that the game shipped with. A good number of these were eventually fixed with patches.

I completely agree Jon, it's Axis and Allies without the fun and with a whole helping of tedious mechanics thrown in. Terrible!

Ja, it would just be nice to not have to wait for that industrial production sound to finish at the end of each AI's turn, etc...

I just couldn't resist commenting that I've now uninstalled and packed GGWAW. I can't imagine that I'll ever take it back off the shelf. Honestly, Axis and Allies is a better game. The complications that have been added to it to make GGWAW are just that, complications. Maybe I'll crack open SC1 again... Civil War: Bull Run is still got me thinking, and Stronghold 2 ships today, maybe that'll be diversion enough...

That's also my excuse for insanity, thank you.

Well the spring rains will be coming soon and so it's not a good time to launch. Getting stuck in the mud would be a serious problem. That leaves early summer as the next available window...

Hmm, I think it's more likely to be a matter of months.

After really trying to get into GG World At War, and still not enjoying it at all, I'm reminded of the first time I played the demo of SC. Instantly in love! I hope Hubert takes whatever time is needed to make SCII as much fun. I want a quality wargame, and I've waited 31 years for it, so I can wait a quite few more months...

That's a cool idea. I'd like to see that tested out. Talk about paper tigers

Thanks for link Ham, that's a fascinating read.

Thanks for interesting article, ev.

Yes, registry key protection is weak. That being said, how many players would/could backup and restore registry keys after each replay of a turn? Now the hidden files. They are not as easily found as you think. Because you can programatically change the modification date of a file in win32, you need just create the file once at install time (different filename for every install), modify it when a turn is loaded, then hack it's modification date to the original value. Someone doing a Windows search will not pickup the file as modified. There are ways around this, but they are indeed that much harder. So think about it. To replay a PBEM turn the player has to backup the registry, find the hidden file (not easy), then restore both the registry and the file. Just to replay a single turn. Compare this to the present case where they just have to delete the PBEM turn and replace it with the one attached to the email. Hmmm. So is this pointless? It think it would dramatically cut down on PBEM replay cheating. Very few people could figure out how to circumvent it, and of those that did few of them could be bothered to do it for every turn. I agree that the .exe should be CRC checked in some manner, although hacked .exe's will be rare compared to re-played PBEM turns.

Lol you're prolly right about my being able to find PBEM opponents. Thanks for considering. Good luck w/ the game.

Ok, last post, and I promise to stop all this craziness about security and such. I just wanted to ask this question: How many readers here would know how to crack the time-limited demo of SCI? For me, with a comp sci degree and many years of programming, it was still pretty tricky. A good friend of mine who's also a strong programmer wasn't able to crack it. Pretty tough stuff. The solution that I proposed for protecting PBEM turns from being replayed would be much much harder to crack. I'm not kidding -- it would be a real nightmare. You would have very very few people cheating in this manner. Ok, before I shut up, I wanted to also suggest that all PBEM and TCI/IP turns send and check a CRC checksum of the actual application executable. If two players (with version numbers matching) had different CRCs a warning could be popped up. I mention this because for fun I made a hack to my SC such that I would always get my tech rolls. I could have just as easily written one where I was twice as likely, etc. Again, this is a few hours work. Would be a good idea, time permitting.

I actually love the idea of penalized movement in enemy territory. As with all game ideas it would have to be prototyped and tested to see it if it actually worked out, but I my guess is that this one would work out very well.