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On the subject of that and the SA80 I was at the National Army Museum last week and in an exhibit case there was a stripped SA80. Lots of small, fiddly-pieces just right for attracting and retaining dirt and gunk. I hope that the field strip required to keep the thing clean and working was not what was being shown. The old SLR was a beautiful weapon: very easy to keep operational, a dead easy IA in the rare case of a jam, deadly accurate out to 600 yards with iron sights, a 20 round magazine and plenty of stopping power. I never did understand why they got rid of them.

Depends how far back you go. Might well have been the Queen's Head. The landlord there in my time was ex-forces (finished in 22nd regiment at Hereford). Age wise he would have been right to have seved there but I never heard him mention Palestine. Had a beatutiful Alasation bitch. He went on to run the Dog & Bacon, retired and died a few years ago. Mind you I never met anyone interesting in the Stout House, back or front bar. It must have come up in the world since my day. Cheers

Cider from Kent. Not a concept I have come across before. Somerset, Devon, Herefordshire, yes but not Kent. Perhaps I need to go East for a change, perhaps there is really more to Kent than the route to the tunnel.

A.E.B., And in Britain rationing carried on even longer because of the food etc. that was going to support Germany. Strange times indeed. Your discussion on the economic side of the war and the views you advanced I found very interesting and thought provoking. Thank you.

In which case I take my hat off to him and hope we never meet in battle. Cheers

Actually I am afraid that you are mistaken. The word originally derives from the Early Indo-European süka´ss, which means "to throw a dishpan of cold water on one's spouse". </font>

Actually, I don't think it was sarcasm. It was certainly a good example, of the use of irony but it was missing scorn and contempt necessary to be truly sarcastic. One should remember that the word, “Sarcasm” comes to us from the Greek “Sarkasmos” which if I remember correctly, and I am going back more than thirty years here, means to tear flesh like dogs (one has to wonder what sort of society the Greeks had that they found it necessary to come up with a word for that concept, but that need not detain us). I am sorry if I appear pedantic, and to post somewhat off topic, but while we are all lolling around waiting for CMX2 discussions to be formally opened I thought we could practice precision in the use of language, if for no other reason that such exactitude will greatly aid that debate when it comes. Also I am a sad bastard. Cheers

Talking of checking the pics, can the two gentlemen who announced victories in this scenario please conform that they were playing with default setings for the AI? The reason I ask is that in one of Mr. Guderian's screen shots the mines are right at the back of the playing area which suggests he was playing with the AI free to place units. The actual challenge in this scenario is to win against Andreas's defensive set-up. Beating ther AI's attempt at a defense line is a much easier proposition. Cheers

There is much in what you say. However you should not forget that in the West in 1940 and in Russia in 1941 there were instances when the German army were fought to a standstill by their opponents who managed to get their act together. Therefore, I would be wary of claiming that the German soldier was that much superior to any other. What I would agree with is that, taken as a whole, the German Army had better Generals than the equivalent groups in the allied armies. Cheers

[snips] I was also trained on the 2inch mortar and agree it was a cracking bit of kit, and the smoke screen you could put down with it does seem undermodeled in CM. It was standard platoon issue in my time (came out in '76) any idea when they withdrew it and what replaced it? </font>

Never heard that about the Bren in NI. Any idea which regiment used it thus? I was also trained on the 2inch mortar and agree it was a cracking bit of kit, and the smoke screen you could put down with it does seem undermodeled in CM. It was standard platoon issue in my time (came out in '76) any idea when they withdrew it and what replaced it? Cheers

BF made a game attempt at getting the Brit sound files right, the example you quote being believable English idiomatic expression, but, I think, actually failed to capture the vernacular of the British squaddy. Cries of, "Medic" would, as has been noted elsewhere, have been totally alien to the British soldier and there are other examples. All in all the language is much too clean to be believable and almost toally lacking in the Hindi and Arabic words that did, and still do, make up so much of the squaddies vocabulary. On top of which there are the marked class differences in speech between the commissioned officers ('Ruperts') and the ORs which are also completely absent from the game. I am not complaining, you understand, and I can appreciate why the situation has come about, but as the subject came up I thought it worth a mention. Cheers

I think the British term for this role was, and probably still is, Forward Observation Officer (FOO). Cheers

Moon, Yankee Dog, et al have all above posted sensible tips and ideas about how to get round a problem. However I think that problem only exists because at some early stage in the design, probably when CM was still being thought of as a company scale game, nobody thought it was worth spending time on (how many vehicles could there be supporting a company and how often would games need to have them moving in column down a road). This problem of road movement, especially when one has a convoy to move, is complete pain in the bottom. All the tips in the world won't change the fact that trying to get a column moving smoothly down a road with a few bends in it and that runs through some woods is a fiddly, time-consuming and frustating business that adds nothing to the enjoyment of the game. Which game was it that had "road movement" where one could tell a unit to go from point A to point B and the "TacAI" worked out the detail and the unit stayed on the road? I can't remember the game, but it must have been a good few years ago because I haven't played anything but the CM triology since 2000. I am sure there was another old game that had convoy moves as well. (Could well be Steel Panthers or the Close Combat Series I am thinking of here). Please BF, what we have now is, in my view, a frustrating, enjoyment-detracting crock of sh*t. For CMX2 please fix or do sumfink

In my experience rough terrain gives more than adequate concelment and better protection against fire (small-ams or HE) than do foxholes. Whilst I dont have the figures to prove it, I owudl put my troops in rough rather than dug-in in brush etc. Cheers