Childress

That and the development of the A Bomb can be seen in retrospect as the opening salvos in the ongoing Revenge of the Nerds.

The preferred side in war games tends to be the Germans. Because they had the sexiest machines, the smartest uniforms? Or merely a case of rooting for the underdog or re-writing history? Inquiring minds....

The two essential factors that doomed Germany: 1- The (unnecessary) decision by Hitler to declare war on the USA following Pearl Harbor insuring a two front war. 2- Ultra. Sometimes one detects a regretful tone in books discussing the what-ifs of WW2, namely Germany's missed opportunities and blunders. Is there a dark, unacknowledged recess in our souls that wanted the Nazis to win?

Since this post I've fired up the game a few times, including loading a large, rather graphically demanding scenario. In the interest of fairness I need to revise the 10% improvement to about 50%. The 3d quality enhancement isn't much in evidence but draw distance improved dramatically and the battles do load faster, say 45 seconds instead of two minutes. One assumes an SSD drive would cure that issue, an important factor for PBEM players who load the same battle 60-120 times.

It lists and schematics Platoon Column, Line of Squads, Two Squads Forward, One Squad back, and One Squad forward Two Squads back. You can do that right now in CM. I suspect WW2 units in small unit formations, like the Vee, broke down on contact with enemy fire and sought cover. Unless you're talking about mine sweeps or recon where the opps weren't anticipated or very disrupted. And most soldiers were draftees. Furnish an anecdote.

Childress, that is just not correct. There was a lengthy thread on the topic which I'm too lazy to look up. All the usual suspects chimed in, pro and con, including Steve and JasonC. Emrys had a good post. Check it out. Someone included this archival photo that showed British paras advancing line abreast in Operation Fustian. But it turned out to be posed.

These 'formations'- not on the parade ground but on the battlefield- were largely mythological and undocumented by accounts or photos. However, I recall that Steve did consider adding a 'line abreast' formation for Veteran+ troops at one point. But the battle evidence even for that is slim.

Fixed. Key, as Ian points out, is to go directly to the mega-sized 3.0 upgrade.

1-Installed BN base 2- Activated 3.0. 3- Activated modules, one by one. Success! (according to pop-up) Now the pixel soldiers are invisible. With curious left side screen info, showing spotting results. Also, weapons misidentified on mouse over. Opening screen not showing MG or CW module icons although a 'success!' when activating via module.

So... you're saying that once you install the base game all you need to bring it up to speed is the 3.0 patch? I initially installed BN on this new PC- and it worked, albeit with a lot of labor. Then I had to revert Windows to the factory state due to an unrelated issue. I'm at the point if I have to go through that again- re-installing BN- I'd rather do something else. Like sticking needles in my eye.

Had to reinstall CMBN on new computer after reset. Getting guys with no helmets and CW troops sporting black ninja outfits.. An error due to not following the intricacies of the multiple patches and upgrades?

I pressed install. Windows 10 downloaded- over a 7 installation- without a hitch. It has some quirks but on the whole I loved it. The upgraded PC ran beautifully for several days then crashed. A bit of google-fu beforehand would have revealed that this was inadvisable if not rash, as my tech guy commented ex post facto. Factory installed10 is perfectly stable. Beware.

I am sympathetic to the desire for better performance in-game with higher-end computers. But...I also see the NEED for adequate performance for low-end machines. To me, the oddity is comparing the performance delta with the computer delta. Double the computer does NOT get double the game performance.But, does it matter?I say, "No".Right, frame rates don't matter much in CM. It's not an FPS or a racing sim where that's a critical element. And no laptop, however thoroughbred, can rival in power a beastly, homemade desktop if one accepts the space invasion and the loss of portability (I don't). Question: SSD drives tend not to be very capacious. Is there enough room for the Windows install and the CM games with their significant footprints?

Right... $10 dollars down the evacuation pipe. Life goes on with us or without us.

I think I see the problem. One of the scenarios is indeed available. It seems the others require the Vehicle Pack, a $20 add-on that on release I found superfluous (YMMV) being a fan but not no longer a hardcore one. May be a case of age creep. The labor and organizational skills required to re-install BF products makes one think of the onerous procedures to acquire a taxi license in the former Soviet Union. But we live in the age of piracy so I hesitate to judge.

I thought I did. The BP icon shows up in game. But the battles are still grayed out.

Downloaded and installed the BP but the new scenarios are grayed out. ???

I was very happy with the performance on the old, very modestly powered machine. Even impressed. But, it's true, I expected more after trading in the Clydesdale for Secretariat. Still a great, engrossing game, however.

I estimate that my new PC is at least 8x more powerful than the old one which now sits around as a backup. Performance has improved by 10% at best. Surprising to say the least. It is what it is. But if it's just a matter of optimization BF would have done that long ago. They may be locked into an aging architecture.

After a lengthy hiatus with CM I fired up BN and loaded a scenario (reinstalling with the multiple patches was hellish). In the meantime I had replaced the medium power laptop with a rather powerful one: I7, 16g ram, a high end, if not state of the art, graphics card (NV GTX960M). I notice that load times and FPS have improved but not dramatically as expected. Still cannot enable maximum parameters without a noticeable drop in performance. Not much of a gamer so no comparisons with other games. Eventually an SSD drive will get installed. What's the general experience?

Well hey, don't post crazy conspiracy theory stuff, and I won't be in your base buzzkillin' your replies. Yeah! Cut it out, Capt, you're creeping us out. Stay in your cave and play with your Ouija board. Cool emoticon, LukeFF. Decision of the day: the Windows 10 upgrade is sitting on the laptop screen. Do I press Install?

Tomorrow belongs to me! A poster: The final few seconds sums up the feelings of Germans regarding ....oops, I almost turned into a Nazi for a moment there. Need to watch that. Won't do it again ..I promise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDuHXTG3uyY

The leadership elite in Nazidom, the marquee surnames listed above in my post, undeniably show an alphabetical clustering. The phenomenon was even starker under Napoleon, who was known on the continent as "Napoleon' not 'Bonaparte' after anointing himself emperor. Stalin didn't appear to implement such a public relations strategy- if indeed it was a strategy. And I'm not familiar with the alphabetic progression in Cyrillic. Who knows? Perhaps it was a ploy to make the leadership appear more cohesive, more unified. Hitler was a walking encyclopedia of historical details and certainly crafty and insightful enough to dream up such a thing. This is all pure speculation.

Hitler believed in proliferating and overlapping bureaucracies. He gave only verbal orders and let his ministers compete for resources. The Holocaust? Convicting him in a Nuremburg setting may have proved problematical for that very reason. There was not much of a paper trail. Both he and Stalin removed the intellectuals and theorists from the visible center of power perhaps under the theory that such a regime would alienate the people. Goebbels, a gifted orator, was an exception. Rosenberg became a non-entity over time. Hitler struck me, at first, as relatively trusting of his subordinates. He lopped power and praise upon other personalities of the Nazi Party, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler etc. One notices that the last names of many prominent Nazis show a curious alphabetical grouping. Napoleon's regime offered a similar phenomenon (Massena, Marmont, Murat, Ney and others). Was this deliberate? An insight into mass psychology? An odd theory, I know.

Meanwhile at Red Square, you can just barely see Stalin's face poking out through his heavy overcoat. He waves a little every now and then but mostly concerns himself with the various members of his team in small talk. It's clear he holds all the strings, and he doesn't seem to think he needs to impress anyone. Least of all anyone in the public. Stalin was the proto-typical apparatchik and the ultimate insider. Trotsky recalled Stalin in the years before he grasped power as a 'grey blur'. Hitler seduced the masses, Stalin rose from within the bureaucracy. He lacked Hitler's theatrical skills but that was not essential given that the Bolshevik seizure of the state was largely a top down operation.