76mm

Next release as in Red Thunder, or in the one after?

Were there any Hungarians or Romanians in Bagration?

Partisans Luftwaffe troops SS troops Lend-lease equipment used by the Sovs Other? [ooops, Sergei beat me to it.]

Of course, but it wouldn't seem that difficult to "map" terrain objects in one game to those in another (ie, French farmer's hut=Russian peasant hut, or Italian stone bridge=Sov wooden bridge). Even if all incompatible terrain was simply replaced with open ground it would be better than starting from scratch.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

This thread has me rather confused...

Note to self: Prepare wish-list for other additions to pack...

Zactly, anything would be better than starting from scratch. But especially within the Russian titles, seems like even the buildings would be pretty straightfoward? But even swapping a Norman steeple for a Russian onion-dome doesn't seem like it would be that complicated?

Steve, thanks for the good news. Out of curiosity, do you think you'll add them in a pack, or in a module? I was concerned about modules since the next module will already pretty much take us beyond the Polish border? And do you think we'll get the long-awaited female partisans?!

Rather than a random map generator, I think it would be much more useful to be able to convert maps from one CMx2 game to work with other CMx2 games, or at least some of them. Sure, converting from Normandy to Russia might not work great, but within the Russia games it should work fine. And if there are terrain inconsistencies, it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to have missing terrain automatically replaced with something similar (ie, bocage with hedges); worst case if it doesn't work 100% it would be a good base for a human to fix the map with limited tweaks. We'll probably have a fair few maps with open fields, etc. but the work involved in creating good river/bridge maps, town/city maps, etc. mean that we might have relatively few of those. And coupled with the larger map size and battlefields on the East Front, we might have fewer maps than we would like. Therefore, BFC please consider some way to allow map re-use among CMx2 games!

No love for the partisans at all... Of course the bridge demolitions would be largely unopposed and out-of-scope for CMx2. But I played a fair number of partisan scenarios in CMBB as part of meta-campaign and generally found them enjoyable and a great break from the typical panzerfest--convoys, armored cars, rain, snow, night, forests, poor-quality German troops--all made for an interesting and different playing experience. Moreover, the addition of partisans, while not essential for any player-made meta-campaigns, certainly make them more interesting.

No, I don't think it was the same. From Wikipedia: *************** The start of Operation Bagration involved the many partisan formations in the Belorussian SSR, which were instructed to resume their attacks on railways and communications. From 19 June large numbers of explosive charges were placed on rail tracks and though many were cleared, they had a significant disruptive effect. The partisans were also used to mop up encircled German forces once the breakthrough and exploitation phases of the operation were completed. *************** Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration

Bump for partisans...don't tell me we have to wait for the 1943 title?!

Here are some maps: WWII-era Soviet maps (site in Russian): http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2259258 Lots of 50k scale maps here, but not free :-( http://www.geospatial.com/products/series/topographic-maps/soviet-military-1-50000-scale-topographic-maps-00000005/ Lots of topo maps here (mostly from 80s), looks like 50k scale maps of Russia deleted due to Russian legal requirements (site in Russian): http://maps.vlasenko.net/ Various maps, many situation maps rather than topo: http://www.wwii-photos-maps.com/

I think you might be reading too much into the "collectivism" theme. The Sovs seem to have had no problem celebrating individual feats of arms, including awarding more than 11k "Heroe of the Soviet Union" medals and giving succesful fighter aces, snipers, etc. plenty of media coverage. Maybe the reason we don't read about Sov "Wittmans" is that no Soviet tankers knocked out dozens of German tanks...

People keep referring to the manual--are they beta testers, or is it already availabe for download somewhere?!

Yes, there is a "screen loupe" available in Windows 7 (at least, maybe others) which zooms in on portions of the screen--as Destraex says, look in the Disability Tools part of the Windows start menu. I just started using it for when I play games on my TV sitting on the couch, so that I can read the counter info. But so far I haven't tried it with CM.

There are lots of Sov maps available online, I will try to post some later. Some of them are from the 70s-80s, some from WWII. I haven't looked for maps covering the Bagration sector....

heh, reading this thread really makes me respect the RL commanders; OK, while they couldn't select their own forces they had a couple of hours to make their deployment decisions, and probably had much less detailed info about the terrain than we have in CM. And if they got it wrong, lots of people died. I think this is a tough map to defend, we'll see how things go.

Lots of old timers on this thread, awesome!

Bill, do you know if the T34/85 has a cannister round, like the T34/76? At least in CMx1 the T34/76 cannister rounds were deadly against infantry in woods.

I"ve also got some Russian accounts which I haven't read yet, including memoirs of several generals (including Rokossovsky, Zhukov, Eremenko, Sandalov, and Batov) and other books such as "Platoon, prepare to attack!" and "Diary of an SU gunner". I have no idea when I'll have the time to read all of this...

There could be a few hold-outs. I usually never order physical copies of games anymore, but I had to make an exception with this one.

What I would like next (after all of the East Front games) would be tools that allow people to "unify" the games (ie, use vehicles, troops, maps, etc. from one game in another). Map-making will be a large burden for these new games, especially with the larger map sizes, and it would be great to be able to use maps from Red Thunder for the other East Front games, for instance. Not counting on seeing this, but it would be nice, and I'd certainly pay for it.

OK, so many of us have been waiting for this game for how long now? I won't even get the physical copy (sent to the US, I live in Moscow), but had to pre-order anyway. Who else is so excited about this?