sburke

gawd I somehow came across the podcasts y'all used to do and thought, huh an interview with Steve from 2006, that could be interesting. http://pengchallenge.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html Um yeah right, instead I end up at a link from some Japanese pervert with a message so foul my wife blushed. I didn't bother asking her to translate even though it might very well have been the normal ramblings of someone from the cesspool...

Apparently he was the last of the original development group http://news.yahoo.com/last-navajo-code-talkers-dies-mexico-013220740.html ALBUQUERQUE N.M. (Reuters) - The last of 29 Navajo Americans who developed an unbreakable code that helped Allied forces win World War Two died in New Mexico on Wednesday of kidney failure at the age of 93. Chester Nez was the last survivor of an original group of 29 Navajos recruited by the U.S. Marine Corps to create a code based on their language that the Japanese could not crack. His son, Michael Nez, said his father died peacefully in his sleep at their home in Albuquerque. "He had been battling kidney disease and it seems like the disease won," Michael Nez told Reuters. "He's the last of a great era, a great part of history." About 400 code talkers would go on to use their unique battlefield cipher to encrypt messages sent from field telephones and radios throughout the Pacific theater during the war. It was regarded as secure from Japanese military code breakers because the language was spoken only in the U.S. Southwest, was known by fewer than 30 non-Navajo people, and had no written form. The Navajos' skill, speed and accuracy under fire in ferocious battles from the Marshall Islands to Iwo Jima are credited with saving thousands of U.S. servicemen's lives and helping shorten the war. Their work was celebrated in the 2002 movie "Windtalkers."

Not sure what you mean "interior" windows. Are you referring to a window between buildings? If so i think it has no more impact (and no less) than for a unit adjacent to a window normally. However that is pure speculation on my part. I have never noticed much delay on a unit spotting a unit in a building once adjacent to it, whether they were in an adjacent building or outside.

Yeah it would take a little bit more. What would be nice is if you could set a pause at a way point and issue a dismount there. I think part of the complexity is coordinating the actions of two different units. You'd have to somehow set an order on the passenger relative to a waypoint of the vehicle. I agree that stipulating a dismount based on movement of the vehicle is fraught with it's own issues. They are very likely to be dismounting when I don't want them to, then I have to stop the vehicle and wait for them to get back on. The current set up is not bad. The only time I really wish for something more is getting a vehicle back out of the area after the troops unload. The upside is that keeps me handling trucks etc closer to reality in that they don't go anywhere near the shooting.

pfft, this thread should have ended on page one, what the heck While it is true that a lot issues can be traced to borders being drawn at the end of the colonial era that just didn't/don't work, I can't say I really know what the hell the colonial powers were supposed to do. Most of the colonies were not nation states and had no fundamental borders to speak of to establish. So while it is easy to fault Britain and France for example of the creation of a good part of the middle east boundaries it is harder to say just what kind of a division would have made more sense. We certainly haven't gotten any better at it since. Hell look at Belgium, there is still talk there of splitting that country. Italy had discussions at one point about splitting North and south as the south was considered such a drag on the northern economy. Catalonia is still talking independence etc etc..

Not as hard as you made those pixeltruppen cry. LOL

you made your point clearly

as long as one building has a door it is considered to have a path. Door locations do not change even in eliminating a wall so if you take a couple buildings, butt them up to one another, delete all the walls and then tell your infantry to move through it, you will see some very interesting.."choices" Basically in the computer's terms as soon as you have the two buildings adjacent, their walls essentially intersect. If one of them says there is a valid path, it is valid in both directions. Ignore the visual and try to see how the computer perceives it. Walls, doors etc don't exist per se. It sees intersections of lines and breaks. adjacent buildings are a line and the door is a break in the line. Doesn't matter which building created the break, the break exists for both now. It really is worth spending some time in the editor. You begin to be able to visualize the design aspects of buildings. For example, I thought I had this really good idea to knock out opposite walls of a building and plant an AT gun to shoot through it. Set it all up, but the gun could never get LOS on a tank. I played around a little and realized the interior of a building always exists and blocks line of sight until the building completely collapses. The interior is abstracted and exists independently of the walls until the building is demolished at that level. You can do some funky things like have a building with elevation 10 on one side and 80 on the other. If you can put a balcony on the 80 side that is in close proximity to ground level and send your pixeltruppen to the 80 level facing the balcony, they will stand on the balcony and then pop to the ground level essentially allowing you to enter on the 1st floor and exist on say the 8th floor. I just ran across this about a week ago. You can not re enter from the 8th floor. The pixeltruppen stay fixed to the ground level and can not enter the door through the balcony. I personally prefer eliminating one of the walls, just more visually logical to me.

no idea, but company of heroes as noted in another thread is just another rts game that uses ww 2 figures. There is no tactical capability like you have in CM. If you are into that fine, but as a game it is not in the same genre as CM. That is part the yin and yang of CM. They are not as well known because they define their own genre. Sorta like the Grateful Dead - They weren't the best at what they did, they were the only ones that did what they did.

15 years in many cases. Folks won't even give up on the Cmx1 series, though I have long unloaded that from the hard drive. Been playing CMx2 since CMSF release and don't see that slowing down. I have nothing else in the game genre with that kind of longevity. If I die with a mouse in my hand (or whatever we have for an I/O interface) watching my pixeltruppen assault some enemy position.... I'll be smiling even if I am losing. Funny thing, this is the second thread on this. There is another in the CMSF forum. Honestly I had to go on utube to get an idea of what COH is. I now know if it is a free download I still wouldn't bother.

Yeah I thoroughly enjoyed that book. Even the Germans knew by that point that the "blitzkrieg" as they had gotten used to it - I.E. A relatively short campaign, was not in the cards this time. Whether they cared to admit it was another question however the number of casualties going home for longer hospital care was an unavoidable sign that all was not going well. As to the rest of it, not sure what the point is. It was a world war period. You can't take pieces in isolation and make statements about what might have happened given other specific changes and ignore those things that don't fit that narrative. If the Nazis weren't ass**les you wouldn't have had a world allied against them either. But they were and we did.

LOL yeah I have to chuckle with JonS on this one. Door issues between adjoining buildings is "fun" to say the least. Door alignments are not always even and you don't always want them and independents don't have the option.... What I "try" to do is if I have adjoining buildings and I want a pass through I will if possible completely delete one wall and put a door on the other. I then do not have to worry about alignment perspectives. In both Venafro and Frosty Welcome I tried to supply a fair amount as I would expect combatants would find some means to mousehole in urban fighting. This also assists the defender in that they don't give away access routes with a bunch of demo charges going off.... Still when you start assembling even a small urban map it gets very tedious.

Yeah I can't say there was a moment I was hooked other than simply starting the demo and knowing this was far too cool... Since then though the number of amazing moments is beyond count and there is simply no way anything else is going to fill this niche. The only bummer is knowing a pbem that you had and really enjoyed is beyond your reach unless you mark down what version it was played in if you ever want to see those turns again.

See this is why you guys should have lowered your standards and just married a crack ho. Then these kind of things wouldn't matter. Which reminds me. Was in Beijing for work once. The local pimp (female) would hang out at the underground entrance to the hotel. It was a little mini mall and a brand new Brandy Ho's was opening there...she would literally be standing under a sign that said "Ho's". It gave me something to chuckle about every day returning to the hotel from the office.

I play on Iron as well, not because of it being more "realistic" but because I get a better sense of my units than I do on other levels. I can tell what a unit is aware of and how isolated in Iron and you just don't get that same sense in Elite.

and you go into your backyard, dig a trench, fill it in and then go dig another trench. You do this for two weeks in between actual action. You rarely play the game.

Per the manual: SKILL LEVELS When you launch a new battle, you can set the skill level, which adjusts the overall difficulty of the game. Unlike other games, the skill level does not simply give an artificial bonus to the computer opponent, but instead has an influence on core game mechanics. The following section describes the differences between the different levels. Only the differences from the previous lower level are described. Basic Training This is the easiest setting. The following special rules apply: - Friendly units are always spotted - Spotting information is instantly shared among teams (aka “Borg Spotting”) - Troops suffer slightly fewer casualties and are less likely to panic - Treatment of wounded soldiers (“buddy aid”) is extremely fast - Artillery and air support arrives extremely fast - Enemy units, once spotted, are always fully identified - The life/death status of enemy vehicles is displayed immediately - Enemy weapons and suppression are displayed - You can hear the voices of unspotted enemies - Supplies from Ammo Dumps are automatically distributed among troops. Veteran Most people familiar with the Combat Mission game system will prefer this setting. It is a fair balance between realism and fun that does not burden the player with unnecessary details or long waiting times. The following special rules apply: - Friendly units are always spotted - Enemies, once spotted, are not always immediately identified and can appear as generic “Enemy contacts” (but less often than at Elite level) - Spotting information is distributed among teams using the standard Command & Control rules (See Command & Control chapter) - Treatment of wounded soldiers is faster than in real life Game Manual 29 - Artillery and air support arrives faster than in real life - The life/death status of enemy vehicles is hidden until the crew bails out or the vehicle starts to burn - Enemy weapons and suppression are not displayed - You cannot hear unspotted enemies - Supplies from Ammo Dumps are automatically distributed among troops. Warrior Warrior is similar to the Veteran setting but introduces more realistic time delays for a number of tasks and events. Hardcore players will favor this setting. The following special rules apply: - Enemies appear as generic “Enemy contacts” until they are positively identified by your forces on the battlefield - Treating wounded soldiers takes a realistic amount of time - Artillery and air support take a realistic amount of time to arrive - Supplies from Ammo Dumps are automatically distributed among troops. Elite Elite is identical to Warrior with only one difference: - Enemy infantry icons are always the plain “soldier” type, regardless of their armament or function Iron Iron is an optional setting that goes even one step further than Elite, and introduces special restrictions on what the player can do and when. While even more realistic than the other settings, this option introduces a number of interface limitations which might put off the casual player, so it is strictly an optional choice. - Friendly units need to be spotted just like enemy units. If you have a friendly unit not in line of sight or in contact with another friendly unit, then the only way to find this unit is by either re-establishing contact with another friendly unit or by clicking through the chain of command in the game interface, jumping from unit to unit. That last bit is not correct. You can simply not select any unit and you can see all your forces. Iron mode as others have noted simply allows you to tell just how isolated a unit is.

When someone starts telling you all your problems are some other groups fault you need to start wondering what they are really doing. We have no shortage of that in American politics be it the Utah Gov decrying gay marriage or folks blaming immigrants etc etc. It is no more right now than it was then. Oh boy I can see the wheels coming off this thread any second now.

Well the intent as I understand it was always to have CMFI extend to the end of the war and there is still a lot to do. I have a strong suspicion you will get your wish.

I don't think that is germane to this discussion...

LOL no I wasn't suggesting fighting the whole thing, more of a "no you can't cut this map up and use for individual portions of the 1st and 2nd battles for Cassino. As it is I think it will require some slicing to actually run but it is 3x3+. Basically the Rapido to just past the Monastery and from the hummock by the round house to the Barracks east of Cassino. edit - I think I may have mis understood. You have seen the map early on, I think you mean 3-4 divisions on this map alone. I defer to your knowledge on the subject but my impression is there were portions of the 4th Ind and 2nd NZ, but over a week's period.

I think it is no secret, though he even surprised me with the announcement As to what form it's release will come I don't believe it is yet known. The map is .. er big. really big. and really tall. Did I mention big. It will not be able to cover all the Cassino battles - even Thunder at Cassino from AH had to focus on the 3rd battle as anything more just threw their map issues out the window and that is with them using platoon scale maneuver elements. My personal hope is that we see the Indian divisions and it be part of that as they were crucial to the fight...and Gurkhas...with knives. Yeah really sharp knives. Further details will have to wait for Chris. There is already a scenario of the battle by the 34th ID to hook around and above the town included in GL. That battle incidentally resulted in 80% casualty rates to the Infantry battalions of 34th ID. As forewarning, the map did not begin as an attempt to really recreate the fight. It started mostly out of curiosity to see just what did it look like. 2D hex and area game maps just have never given me a feel for what it must have been like and why the allied troops cheered so much at the bombing of the monastery. Several of the books I have read talked about the "brooding" affect the monastery had on the troops. In 3d you really begin to understand. One drawback to this "creation process" is I did not re orient the map used as a layer. The result is it is off 90 degrees. Sorry, it probably won't matter to most but bugs the crap out of me every time I look at it.

Sergei should give me credit for making him famous. More famous maybe? Here you go http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=97288

You know you don't play enough CM when instead you spend months making a map followed by weeks destroying it. :eek:

Yeah really. Has anyone figured out how to "win" yet? I think the scenario designer made it one of those damned puzzle versions. I almost rage quit, then figured what else am I gonna do.