Myles Keogh

I'm having the same problem with Alt-T. It's not working. Everything else with the game appears to be working fine. And other menu commands appear to work. (I haven't checked out whether ALt-S works.) Alt-T not working is annoying because I wanted to remove the trees during the set-up phase of Battle in the Bocage to be able to properly position my units without having to duck under the trees to see where they were! Yet, the game wouldn't remove the trees no matter how many times I hit Alt-T. I too have a 64-bit Windows 7 w/ATI HD4850.

I guess someone had to acknowledge your wit: that's pretty darn funny. I wonder if the reason no one noticed is because that movie was an infamous box-office bomb in the U.S (and for the very good reason that it's fricking horrible!). However, it was a huge hit in Australia. (We Yanks like to imagine Australians as all super-macho he-men like Crocodile Dundee or Russell Crowe, but the mere fact that very "fey" disco-musical was a smash-hit in the "land-down-under" really makes you wonder.)

Careful, you're treading on dangerous ground. Questioning the research methodology of America's late great unofficial spokesperson for the "greatest generation" is often viewed as an attack upon the honor of our WWII veterans. (You see it can't be possible that recycling (or stealing from) secondary source material and unquestionally relying on a handful of veteran interviews performed four to five decades after the events described could result in shoddily researched military history books.) On a more serious note to the OP, I cast another vote for Glover S. Johns' "Clay Pigeons of St. Lo." It's a non-fiction memoir, but Johns was one heck of a writer. And as another poster noted, it would be tough to find a book more on target with the subject material of this upcoming game.

I played the occasional large or huge scenario, but it had to be an exceptionally well designed one. There was that one scenario designer who did some terrific work with large scale scenarios based on British and Canadian actions in Normandy. (Crown of Thorns was one of his.) Despite his scenarios being huge, I really liked his work based on his attention to historical detail and the fact that he used maps that fit the subject material. His maps were huge which actually fit the scale of the battles he was trying to recreate. On the otherhand, too many scenario designers would squeeze large numbers of troops onto maps that were too small. I never cared for the "more toys, the better" school of scenario design. If you're going to give me a large force then give me a map that allows me to deploy it properly. Yes, I'm aware that the FJ will make their appearance in a later module, but considering how they were such an important and tenacious opponent to U.S. troops throughout the Normandy campaign that it's still a disappointment that they didn't make muster for this game.

No one has mentioned Glover S. Johns' "The Clay Pigeons of St. Lo" which is a fantastic memoir of the Normandy campaign of a battalion commander in the U.S. 29th Infantry Division. It's right on target for this game: battalion level action in the bocage country. Although a professional soldier, Johns was a terrific writer. (He was later one the technical advisors for the movie "Patton.") Joseph Balkoski raves about this book and Stephen Ambrose plagiarized from it (although he may have taken the plagiarized passages about it from Balkoski's book "Beyond the Beachhead.")

Like others, I am really looking forward to the player made scenarios. I hope some of the oldtimer scenario makers make a return. Personally, I always preferred small to medium sized historical or semi-historical scenarios. As a history buff, I want to play battles based on a real events. As a gamer, I've always liked smallish scenarios because they emphasize making the most of your limited assets. Larger scenarios always made my soldiers feel like cannon fodder. My two biggest pet peeves of CMx1 scenario design were: 1) Slavish remakes of ASL scenarios: I was an ASL player well before CM so initially when I saw familiar titles on scenario download sites I jumped at a chance to play them. They were almost always disappointments due the designer simply "painting by the numbers" from the scenario card and map. They were often poorly balanced (ASL's rules and CM's engine are two very different beasts) and looked awful with their pool-table flat and featureless maps. However, I did play a few very good good ASL scenario remakes in which the designer used the ASL scenario as a template off of which he reworked its balancing and map. Thus, he kept the historical setting and some of the flavor of the original scenario, but designed it to work within CM's engine. Unfortunately, there were way too few of those. 2) That "more" automatically means "better:" The reality is that it often just means "more." Some CMx1 scenario designers believed that bigger meant better and that having lot's of "stuff" made for a more entertaining scenario. To avoid that kind of scenario design, which was way too common, I eventually became very picky about whose scenarios I would download. I've always felt that having "just enough" to get the job done made for the best scenarios. I know balancing is very difficult, but some designers really did have it down. As for the subject matter? It's a disappointment that the fallschirmjagers didn't make the cut for CMBN because battling against the Green Devils in bocage country always made for a great Normandy scenario. One of the best scenarios I ever played for CMBO was "The Clay Pigeons of St. Lo" which was based on such a battle.

Schrullenhaft: I just wanted to give you a belated thanks for passing this info along. I wanted to update my old ATI X300, but was clueless about what card to buy. However, a lot of research and your post helped seal my decision to buy an ATI X1650 Pro PCIE. Yes, it is an "older" card, but I don't have Vista so I did not need a DirectX 10 compatible card. Further, I also did not need a super powerful and ultra new graphics card to play the games on my system. The most graphics intensive games I own are CA's Total War series and Ubisoft's Il-2 1946, and they ran fine with my X300. However, I missed my fog in CMBB and CMAK which I lost when I installed those games on my my "new" PC with its X300. (Playing Bulge scenarios with the CMETO mod just didn't feel right without the fog!) Thus, I used your post about what cards would support the fog tables as a way of picking the right card. With my new card and the Catalyst 7.11 drivers (which also hit a "sweet spot" for Il-2), the fog is back in all its CM glory! So thanks for your assistance.

Hello: I'm trying to find a copy of the last version of NCrawler's sound mod for CMBB in wav. format. The one posted at CMMODS was reformated into MP3 format and uploaded to that site by a 3rd party. Normally, that wouldn't be an issue because I could just convert the MP3 files back to wav., but numerous tracks on the CMMODS version contain very audible clicks at the end of the track which pretty much ruins the mod. In doing a search on here, I found a post by NCrawler stating that these clicks resulted from the reformatting an older version of his mod into mp3s by another person, and are not a reflection on the quality of his original mod. Thus, NCrawler's old post leads me to believe that the last version of his mod, which he uploaded in wav. format, did not contain any clicks. I've listened to the other sound mods, but the one that I liked the most was NCrawler's but I can't use it due to those clicks at the end of numerous tracks. I have not been able to find any link to where he originally uploaded his CMBB sound mod. So I am asking if anyone knows where I can find it or if it is even still available or if those clicks were present in the version NCrawler uploaded? Thanks for any assistance.

I'm going to try to explain how my seemingly negative review for a "Battle of Minors" had a higher rating than a review that just gushed about it. I don't think there is anything wrong with "A Battle of Minors" from a design standpoint- it has a great map, a nice briefing, the force balance seems well tweaked, and it is playable against the AI. Thus, my high scores on all those categories. However, I decided not to truly factor in my opinion of the scenario's fun value into my score. Generally, I compute a scenario's "fun factor" (which to me is more important than "force balance" or "replayability" ratings) into my rating for "Playable against the AI," but here I thought my personal prejudice against large sized battles would give the scenario an unfair score. So I gave it a 7 because the AI can offer a challenge in this scenario. If "fun" was a rating then I would have given "A Battle of Minors" a 5 or 6 in that category. As for the other reviewer's lower score. That's easy to explain- his review is about a PBEM match yet for some reason he gave the scenario a very low rating as "playable against the AI," which brought down his entire score.

I've noticed this too. Wheatfields do not block LOS in CMBB, which is disconcerting considering that an extensive wheatfield would eventually block LOS in CMBO. If the LOS engine truly is broken then a fix for it should be PRIORITY for any future patch.