Glukx Ouglouk

You'll get a much quicker answer by actually contacting BFC's support (after all, it's their job to help you with those issues) rather than complaining here... AFAIK, BFC are usually quick to answer support requests. If your key doesn't work for some reason, they're the only ones who can issue you a new key, for instance... As for the DRMs... IMO, any kind of DRM is always a big pain in the ass at one point or another, and the ones used by BFC aren't much worse than many others on the market. I hate DRMs in general, but sadly, very few game publishers are willing to avoid them, so I wouldn't hold it against BFC specifically.

Not to mention that it's easy to figure out mnemonics that work better for you and change the keys used if you don't like the default. For instance, I use K for Smoke, because it somehow makes sense for me. I couldn't agree more. The relative shortcuts aren't just hard to remember (you need to remember the position of the buttons, instead of remembering pretty simple mnemonics) , they also mean that you have to know in which tab you are, and use another shortcut to change tab if needed, so they waste your time... Relative keyboard shortcuts just don't make any sense when you can avoid them.

Did you select "emergency" as the type of mission ? If so, the mission is fired without spotting rounds and can be wildly inaccurate.

The 88 mm Flak 36 isn't "near to an actual AA gun", it's an actual AA gun. And a quad barreled AA gun isn't any more "traditional looking" than any other AA gun - in fact, the German light/medium AA guns were all single barreled at the start of the war, and they only started to introduce a quad 20 mm gun in late 1940. Anyway, German light/medium AA guns (20 & 37 mm) aren't in the game - I hope that we'll get them in a later modules (the Market Garden one, or the final "odds & sods" one)...

Or more correctly, they should engage at a range comprised within the ]500 m, 503 m] interval. Your notation is incorrect, because you effectively say that a range of 500.0000000000000000000000000000000000009 m would be too short, which is wrong. We have to : - either assume that any distance strictly longer than 500 m is sufficient, in which case a distance of 500.0000000000000000000000000000000000009 m is sufficient; - or consider that there is some margin for error, but then, that margin is going to be higher than 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 m (we can expect at least a few millimeters) and the minimal safe distance would be something like 500.005 m (assuming a 5 mm error margin, which seems reasonable enough). Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to editing some awfully misguided Wikipedia articles about World War II, which don't mention the importance of the British 3 m range advantage in rifle fire and its impact on the tactics they used. edit: Funnily enough, I had to look up Wikipedia to write that.

Flakpanzer is still a panzer, but not a panzerkampfwagen. It is an AFV, but it is not a tank.

The ammo difference would depend on the exact version used for the ZB series, so it would be a bit of a mess to implement (unless there are good sources on which exact versions found their way to Afghanistan - I honestly have no idea). The relatively small difference in magazine capacity would probably make a very small difference on gameplay at CM's scale, which is why I said they would be "pretty much" the same thing - I do agree that it would add some different flavor to the game and would be nice to have, I just don't think the difference was big enough for the developers to bother...

According to Wikipedia, there were DDs at Juno, though not as many as planned : Of course, Wikipedia isn't exactly an authoritative source, and i guess that those who are more knowledgeable will chime in with some good sources to check... edit : The First Hussars' website mentions DD tanks used on D-Day on its history page.

I don't know which one was most commonly used by the Mujahideen, but I wanted to point out that the Bren and the ZB26 would be pretty much the same thing in game terms, since the Bren was a license-built ZB26 with some minor modifications to fit British requirements... There were some differences, but I don't see how they would change anything at CM:A's scale, except for the type of ammunition used. And even in terms of ammunition used, it would depend on which exact variants found their way into Afghanistan: the Bren was originally produced to use British .303 but was later converted to use Nato 7.62 ammo (as the Bren L4); the ZB26 used the German 7.92 ammo, but there were export variants using other calibers too. To make matters worse, there were other variants too: the ZB30 (a ZB26 with some improvements) and the ZB39 (based on the Bren, but offered for export by the Czech after WW2)... And of course, a Pakistani copy may not even fit any of the "official" versions anyway, if it was a local variant.

You're not "given a option" like a menu or something, you just have to click on the right part of the building (and then check that the target line from the unit goes to the right floor). I think it'll become pretty obvious once you start fiddling with it.

When your side is loosing the war, changing sides usually is the right thing to do.

Windows actually does have a Growl port. Have a look over there.

Especially if you consider that vampires should actually be more likely to have good teeth, considering that there should be a rather strong selective pressure on vampires with bad teeth, because of the important role played by vampires' teeth in their habit of feeding on live humans. Though maybe that's the reason why the Germans lost the war: their vampire corps was plagued by poor teeth conditions and, as a consequence, were at a disadvantage against US vampire GIs, benefiting from superior dental hygiene standards? Does anyone have good sources for evolutionary biology studies of vampires' teeth? Of course, that still leaves out the question of the contribution of nazi dinosaurs to the war - but this discussion is already a step in the right direction to understand the factors behind World War II.

Yep, Algeria was the exception (since, administratively speaking, it wasn't a mere colony or protectorate), and its independence was a sore point even for some who had come to reluctantly accept the rest of the decolonization (hence the SAO and all). That's also why conscripts served in the Algeria war (since it officially wasn't a colonial war, but basically a police operation on French soil...), and why there was a war to begin with (compared to Tunisia and the French part of Morocco, which got their independent in the mid-50's without such a bloodshed). Of course, there were also some more down-to-earth reasons for refusing Algeria's independence (namely, the discovery of important oil reserves in in the mid 50's). That being said, it didn't make any difference when it came to 'native' Algerians serving in the military - they could only serve in colonial units, got an lower pay than French soldiers, and so on. Basically, Algeria was considered an integral part of the French territory, but the majority of its population were subject to the same discriminations as in colonies or protectorates, so Algeria's particular status didn't actually matter much for discussions about the composition of the Free French Forces...

I don't know if we can say that the colonies were supposed to be part of the Republic - I believe the situation was more ambivalent than that. The colonies certainly belonged to the French Republic, but they had a different administrative organization (except Algeria, which was organized in departments) and weren't really fully part of the French territory (except, again, Algeria). That's why, for instance, conscripts couldn't be used during the Indochina war, because they couldn't be sent to serve abroad, even though Indochina was a French colony. Of course, there's also the matter of "indigenous people" not being French citizens (even in Algeria), so it could always be said that they weren't really French anyway, even if their territory had been considered fully French... As for today's overseas departments (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion and, since March of this year, Mayotte), they're a whole different kettle of fish, because they are part of the French territory in every way (administratively and politically speaking) and the people there get the French citizenship the same way as in mainland France (and they don't always take it too kindly if you somehow imply that you aren't "in France" when you're on their island... ). The 'real' modern equivalent to the status of the colonies back then would be the overseas communities (formerly known as overseas territories): French Polynesia, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and Wallis and Futuna. Those have a specific status and specific political systems compared to 'normal' parts of France.

About the pensions frozen in 1959: it actually took until 2002 (!) to finally raise them, after the French State had been condemned by an administrative court (which ruled that the 1959 law was discriminatory, based on the European Declaration of Human Rights), and even then, our 'wonderful' government thought that it could just make the pensions 'equivalent' based on the local standards of living, rather than actually making them equal... It's only in 2007 that the pensions were finally made equal (probably because the 2002 law would have been found illegal one day or another anyway - not to mention that the movie Indigènes had helped raise awareness on this issue). Of course, there would also be tons of things to say about how the harkis were treated after the Algerian war, but that may be even more depressing...

I know that rifle grenades are still in active use in the French army at least and are actually used in combat. I don't know about other armies - but basically, I think it boils down to either using rifle grenades or under-barrel grenade launchers, each with their pros and cons, with most armies going with the under-barrel launchers nowadays.

Errr... Most games have a gamma setting in their preference screen, so I don't really see why a gamer would be used to changing the brightness of his screen? Or maybe I just didn't get what you meant...

The RMT (Régiment de Marche du Tchad - the regiment from Chad you are referring to) wouldn't have included any black soldiers at the time. The other colonial troops in the division at the time were from North Africa, and included both Europeans and North Africans. So there were colonials in the 2e DB, but no black Africans. Indigènes (Days Of Glory for the US release) isn't the most historically accurate of movies, but it's still very much worth watching - and it's a good reminder of the sacrifices of French colonial troops, and of how little they got in return for their efforts... It also helped raise again the issues surrounding the pensions of former soldiers from the colonies which had become independent - that there was still a need for that in 2006 is frankly a shame.

Not to mention that the AP round fired by a Panther is an APHE round, and should detonate and fragment after punching through an armor plate... Unless the game models some failure rate for the fuses, of course.

The hardware, the software, the controllers and the games, actually...

Actually, there's one issue: you don't provide a classification level to distinguish the base game and its modules. I think it would make sense to simply add them as subspecies though, which would acknowledge the fact that they can freely interbreed (as in: play a game with content from various modules) while the different versions can't (as in: can't play a H2H game with one player on 1.00 and the other on 1.01), so it makes sense to have them be different species. Hence, I propose: Kingdom = CM Phylum = CMx2 Order = WWII Family = Western Front Genus = Normandy Species = v1.00 Subspecies = Base game That being said, it could also be argued that the subspecies level then wouldn't be needed until there are at least two different ones - in other words, until the first module is released - but since we already know roughly what the first module will contain (and can consider it to already exist as a work in progress, even if only in the planning stage), we might as well add it to the classification now.

Yep, when you set the game language to 'German', the vehicle status is in German. That's kind of the point of being able to choose the game language, in fact.

During setup, the interface shows the gun as having available all ammo carried by its own crew and by its ammo bearer team, even if the ammo bearers aren't near the gun. During the game, the interface should show as available ammo all rounds carried by the gun crew and by any units close enough to share ammo (including its own ammo bearer team, other guns' ammo bearer teams, and probably also other guns - as long as they are close enough). I think that's what you are seeing - ammo available to the gun, as opposed to ammo carried by the gun's crew only. About AP shells against soft targets: AFAIK, anything in the game bigger than a 37 mm gun (for the US) or a 20 mm gun (for the Germans) fires AP shells with a HE filler, but I'm pretty sure that the fuses used should very seriously limit their use against infantry in the open - those shells are likely to bury themselves in the ground before detonating...

Please do yourself a favor: try to calm down and explain your issues in a way that is actually understandable by a human being. The German armored cars armed with a 20 mm main gun have both HE and AP ammunition, though they carry a majority of AP. (For what it's worth, when playing the Panzer Marsh campaign, I had no problem getting some PSW 234s to fire their main gun on an area fire order. Actually, I got them to empty their HE loads in the recon scenario before realizing that they wouldn't get resupplied later... )