Myles Keogh

Apologies for necro-bumping.

I did a search to see if this issue was known. It's a bit frustrating to discover it has been for nearly a year and NOTHING was done about it. If it's a bug or flawed map design then it hasn't been fixed.

Of course, I didn't know about it until I was nearly 40 minutes into the scenario. Needless to say, it was irritating to discover that the famous Son Bailey bridge that took-up an overlong 10 minutes in a "Bridge Too Far" to be built doesn't support armor! It appears that despite Elliot Gould's best efforts XXX Corps' tanks ain't getting to Grave.

In terms of gameplay, this breaks the scenario and makes it unplayable. The Brit tanks are stuck on one side of the canal and the Germans on the other. It's absurd because there are victory locations on both sides!

The problem is that CMBN's "canal" bridges don't support armor. I don't know if once upon time they did prior to some patch or upgrade, but they certainly don't now. The description in the scenario editor is vague. The canal bridge is not described with "W" for "wide" which according to the 3.0 manual is the only type of bridge that can support all vehicles (ie tanks). It's just "canal bridge" with no descriptor. Are wooden canal bridges supposed to support armor?

Anyway, aesthetics be damned! I used the scenario editor to transform that admittedly neat looking canal bridge into a plain, ordinary, mundane stone bridge with a big old "W" next to its name! It took me a minute. I have to restart the scenario, but it, at least, now has a working bridge!

I thought "Generation War" was very well acted and decently directed, but that screenplay.....?  Whoa!  Talk about convoluted!  Wasn't the scriptwriter aware that the Ostfront was rather large encompassing hundreds of thousands of square miles and involving tens of millions of human beings?  Yet, he has his characters repeatedly bumping into each other and always at the most convenient of times such as to prevent a rape or death.  By Part 3, I was actually laughing as each more absurdly ludicrous scene unfolded with its truly unbelievable coincidences. 
 
The cast of young, talented, and extremely good-looking German actors/actresses deserved a better script.  (And throw in that young Ukrainian actress who played the escaped Polish slave-laborer as well.)   As did the set, costume, and production design teams.  I certainly don't think "Generation War" is terrible, but its script keeps it from being compared to either "The Pacific" or "Band of Brothers."  For a European production, it was just way too "Hollywood" in its desire to pile on "deus ex machina" plot devices to get its characters sharing screen time.

Was over at Half Price Books with brother Ed, and while there I saw Mountain Warriors (by Stackpole Publishers) which is specifically about the Goums in WW II. Since they very much figure in CMFI in general and GL especially, I thought you might like to know about this book. HPB had it for $5 or so.
 
Regards,
 
John Kettler