Rokossovski

On the "Opponent Finder" board it presently (12:18am or so on the US Pacific Coast) is showing a posting for three hours into the future. Are all postings listed as of US Eastern Time? I suppose I will have my answer just by looking at the time attached to this post once I have sent it. The reason I ask is it lets me know if an offer to play is "fresh" or not.

The Italians performed a bit of a similar switch in the First World War as well. Before the war they were allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary, but chose not to enter in 1914. When they did join in the fighting the following year, they (of course) entered as one of the Entente powers - having been lavishly bribed with promises of Austro-Hungarian territory. Pragmatic indeed, but having held up their end of the bargain, Italy was not granted much of what they had been promised.

One of the pleasant and refreshing aspects of this forum is the sense of decorum rarely seen elsewhere. Please everyone, restrain the urge to swear. Thank you.

Bah Humbug. The European CDV version of the 1.02 patch is not out yet. I will have to find some other way to refresh my monkey.

ScouseJedi is onto something. The current command model gives the player much more information and control than a company or battalion commander would have had to play with. (This is not, by the way, meant as a criticism of CMBB - I have no adequate alternative command system to offer, and would likely prefer the current model even if a more purely "realistic" system could be devised.) Whether a battalion commander was at a command post or forward with the leading elements, he could only SEE what he could observe with his own eyes. Playing CMBB from view level 1 - as has been proposed - solves only part of this difficulty. In the game, regardless of what perspective you choose to view the map from, you are privy to instant communication from other elements of your force. They provide you not merely with a report (ie, "D Company reports they are encountering machine-gun fire from a clump of trees to their left") but you are actually shown what is happening, and can observe it and place it in the context of the map even if you are not "there." The problem is not so much that you get "too much" information, but rather that it is presented to you in a way that is too easy to quickly understand. It's rather like the problem with intelligence gathering - it's easy to collect information - the problem is making sense of it all, forming a picture, and finding out what is important. Imagine yourself as the commander of an infantry battalion. You have chosen to move forward near the lead company. There is a sudden chatter of fire to your left, and soon your radioman reports that B Company has run into trouble. Speaking by radio to the company commander, the two of you try to make yourself understood over the roar of gunfire. Meanwhile, a tank round smacks into the ground 15 meters away. You see a group of enemy tanks swing around the bend of a road ahead, and you take cover behind a fallen log. Into the radio net, various exited commanders scream out warings and reports of one sort or another, while you try to form a picture of what is happening. In the game, it is fairly easy to sort through the chaos of combat, to instantly form a visual picture of what is happening - and even to provide fairly detailed orders in response. Again THIS IS NOT A CRITICISM of CMBB. The AI that would be necessary to provide coherent and context-specific "reports" from the field is likely beyond the current state of the art. More importantly, such a game would be an exercise in confusion and frustration. I play the game with the understanding that I am not the battalion commander, but rather am an amalgam of all of the officers, junior and senior, and that we somehow can coordinate our actions with remarkable skill. The game does do an excellent job of maintaining the fog of war regarding enemy dispositions, and that is enough for me. I enjoy having just the amount of control the game gives me (which is a lot, somewhat modified by my troop's survival instincts) but I agree with ScouseJedi that "realism" would force me to surrender some of that control.

I have the opposite concern. I have CMBB, but not CMBO. Is it worth getting a copy of CMBO, or will the prior version just frustrate me for lacking some of the added features? I am interested in both fronts.

Thanks Biltong, the maps are superb. - Rokossovski

Okay, I (the same one who rashly started this thread) managed to figure it out once I read the posting "for newbies." Evidently one simply presses "Print Scrn" while in the game, and then later selects "paste" while in a suitable graphics progam.

Sorry for the possibly dumb question, but how does one take screenshots in CMBB? I have some glorious moments I would like to preserve for safekeeping. Thanks.