Erik Springelkamp

Forum users are a tiny, and generally not representative, part of the total customer base.

For Shock Force I actually like the green silhouettes. I did try your full colour icons, but I reverted, because I found the original ones more in style with the rest of the game. After playing a lot and getting to know the weapons, I find I can recognise them quickly. (not being a gun freak, they all looked the same to me at first, but so did yours at that time).

Such a brother, you mean?

I guess it will be wise to travel by train, not by car.

With a thousand refreshes per user that is only 100 readers.

Count me in, will be available most dates.

In theory you can play without the icons, but you will miss a lot of sightings on the map during the replay - how will you notice that little figure in the bushes that was spotted by one of your soldiers. And selecting units becomes hard, especially when they are inside a vehicle. I have tried in Shock Force, but only for a very short time.

And in a polder, you usually have lots of these ditches, one after the other.

Edit: will discuss this in another thread

Polder itself doesn't say much about the firmness of the ground. There are polders with solid clay ground that are perfectly good for tanks, but then there can be water filled ditches that are just too wide for tanks to cross. The polders along the big rivers in the Netherlands are of this first kind, with the water ditches being the major obstacles, not the ground. There are other polders that consist of peat ground, those are the ones in the West, in Holland proper, and they will not support tanks. This can be simulated by wet grassland where tanks will bug down. They certainly have wide water ditches as well. The water ditches can easily be 8 metres wide, too wide for a tank to cross, just wide enough to represent as a water feature without using the ditch from CMSF. Already in the Middle Ages these polder lands were bad country for knights on horses. The horses got stuck in the mud, and couldn't cross the ditches. The warriors from Frisia, the Northern Netherlands, used long pikes, that doubled as a jumping pole to jump over these water ways. You can see the fork at the base of the spear, that prevents it from sinking into the bottom of the ditch while they are using the spear as a jumping pole:

Yes, but when Paper Tiger has redone them, they will be even better :-) And now that I have a few PBEM games going on, I have less time to play the AI. But I must say, the scenarios I played PBEM are very hard for the Red player. So far, they were all won by Blue.

OK. Don't let it interfere with CM:BN though. At the moment I am still having a very good time with The Road to Dinas. Makes me really feel I am on a journey, moving from place to place, and the road goes on and on.

But if there are civilians in the buildings, it becomes a two sided sword. My father had a front going over his house in 1945, with a platoon headquarters in the house for the afternoon. (a printing office, where stacks of paper formed good cover. That afternoon a 4 barrelled German AA gun dominated the crossing street just around the corner. It meant that the houses nearer to the AA gun were destroyed. One civilian in the street of my father died, because he looked out of the window while a fire fight was going on, but otherwise the street survived. After 4 days of fighting around 200 civilians in the city had died, as well as about 200 Canadian soldiers.

Sorry about that. (but I did say I didn't test it :-)

Often it at least prevents a total victory when you destroy the buildings. And you can feel bad about it if you want.

I like to explicitly see the state of C2 in Iron Mode. The disadvantage actually turns into an advantage. So the penalty is stronger for RT than for WEGO. The behaviour during the command phase is probably not a bug but a feature, I just fired up a quick battle in WEGO and indeed I saw this behaviour consistently. Must have been faulty memory, in cases where I examined my units still at the end of the replay phase. I will experiment with the waypoint-fire-dance procedure some more, maybe I will understand what works and what doesn't.

No, you are not yet getting it correct. The alternative to copying is to start installing the whole shebang again (without uninstalling your old installation) but at a new location - you must tell the installer to install at that different location. You don't have to bother licensing the new installation. Then you don't apply the 1.31 patch to the new installation and you have a new 1.30 installation. By copying your old installation and reinstalling only the NATO module, you downgrade the copied installation to 1.30.

I made a shooting range test scenario some time ago, in order to see the performance of the Gill's (but I think that was still at 1.30). 12 Gill's against 9 T90's at 1500 metres. About half of the test runs the whole salvo ran into the ground half way, while the other half of the runs, every Gill hit a T90 perfectly into the roof. Some strange systematic good or bad performance shared by the whole platoon.

Yes, that was another issue in the same game: I gave two Bradley's a move-and-fire-dance series of orders for the turn, pausing 10 seconds at each waypoint, in order to hit all the segments of a building for a short time (and not destroy it), but the Bradley's kept in place and pounded everything into their first room, that ceased to exist. The waypoints were close to each other, and apparently the Bradley couldn't be bothered to dance around. (forwards, backwards, a little sideways, it really got hard to select each waypoint so close to each other, and if you move back to your starting place, I saw no way to select the waypoint, as it disappeared under the vehicle itself)

But I did just that. I put all the waypoints exactly, so it wouldn't have to think for itself. The same route a previous Humvee had successfully taken. But still it got totally confused. Yes, but I was speaking about the situation when a unit is selected. It just showed all units, regardless of C2, and its own formation highlighted, like in elite mode. While during the replay, I see mostly dust clouds and question marks with a unit selected (they are Syrians).

A few bugs I noticed while playing the game last week: 1) Humvee's making strange pathing choices. The first one made it through a back road - which proves the road was no real problem, but the second got second thoughts and started to make a detour, where it drove through a couple of buildings, and later it moved as if it thought its position was shifted: ie. it's path through walls had the shape that would be correct if the whole path were shifted by some 50 metres. And in that game the Humvees now regularly refuse to go through some places. This is a PBEM game. 2) During the second scenario of a campaign (Road to Dinas) played in Iron Mode, my orders phase stopped being in Iron Mode: ie. all units became visible when selecting a unit. During replay however the display returned to Iron Mode with all the friendly question marks. This has been going on for several turns now. I have save games for both situations.

1.30 is the basic NATO version

My guess, but I didn't test it. - Copy the complete CMSF map to a second location. - Reinstall the NATO module, pointing the installer to the new location - Make a shortcut to the .exe in the new location and call it CMSF 1.30

Maybe you can have 4 installations :-) I think you only need one licence on one machine

You used to be able to make a second copy from your installation directory in order to keep an unpatched version around. I have done so in the past, but I am not sure this still works. Maybe a specialist can explain it here, so people really wanting to play Germans now have a convenient solution, without losing 1.31 for the others.