Hetzer21

I have two brothers who play these kinds of games, and all three of us have played the CM WW2 stuff. I'm the eldest, the next one down is eighteen months younger than me and 'micromanage' doesn't do justice to the way he played. My oft heard question to him, after yet another 30-minute turn, was "what are you doing now, wiping all their arses?" My next brother is eleven years younger and while he's not so bad OCD still figures large in his style of management. I'm 50 years old and I can't be doing with it. The set-up malarkey exhausts most of my eye for the finer detail, after that it's find the guy in charge, double-click him so all units are selected and click a destination. That's what the AI is for, right? At a pinch I might deal with three separate leader chappies, I find it useful sometimes to treat inf, AT and armor discretely. What usually happens, after a few tortuous hours of sitting reading a book while my brothers wipe arses, blow noses and give hair-cuts to their lads, is I declare the turn-time limit will be activated. Hear the howls of protest when I try for five minutes and get beaten down (or up) to ten. Then I read a thread about some technique of using 'pause' and 'arc' to make pixel-truppen do clever stuff. Wut...? I think if I'd been a general I'd have been best suited to WW1 trench warfare. "Over the top, run, see you for dinner."

I'm trying to imagine catching a company of inf on bikes with a Panther.

Ranging the guns probably.

Well, I guess that nicely covers the old "Of course my men would have bloody well cut holes through that so they could see!"

But the PaK is already directly behind a huge Bocage hedge. That alone, unless the crew had hacked a big slot in it, would preclude seeing anything. I say hacked a slot in it, the crew are actually below the level of the hedge itself. I visited the Bocage shortly before the French destroyed most of it and the earth part was pretty high. It might have been a one-off, won't know until I've had more time with the game. Most of the rants and rages we used to have playing CMBB etc was "how could he NOT have seen him!?" The answer was abstraction, that while the player could see a target we were supposed to remember that the game supposed more foliage than the player could see. This case seems to be the opposite, the game is seeing LESS foliage than the player. Study the footage, I cannot see that as being right. But if it's a one-off, not a biggie. If it's indicative of general experience though, it'll be a problem. That PaK swung its barrel INTO the bocage, spotted the tank through multiple onstructions and whacked it. If I was a player in control of that tank I'd have been heaving my monitor through a window while screaming blue murder. Not really.

I filmed this, for clarity. I know the game, by necessity, abstracts some stuff. Crews cutting holes in bushes etc etc etc, but this seems a bit odd and I can see it causing ructions if it happened in an MP game where a player deliberately pathed a vehicle thinking it safe from the specific PaK. The PaK was originally firing down the road 45-degrees right, knocked out a Sherman down it earlier. Then it somehow spotted the Sherman it was firing on before I took the footage. I don't need to describe the conditions, they're clear in the footage. Something needs tweaking perhaps? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvc_DW5iG0M

Downloads only for me, burned onto a disk and job done.

Parcel Force are a criminal organization engaged in deliberate and calculated fraud, aided and abetted by HM Customs. Not a lot we can do about it unfortunately.

Just got through playing the demo's 'Closing the Gap' (Falaise)...wow. I'm quite exhausted (might be partially down to the vodka) but immensely satisfied. T'was an experience not encountered since CMBB and CMAK. No bugs, no suprises (bad ones), the units performed brilliantly. Just...wow. Graphically head & shoulders above its predecessors, the sounds equally so. Purchase ahoy and my brother to be brought aboard. Well done CM.

Thanks guys. I installed the latest NV drivers today, I'll re-install the demo and give it another go.

Tried the demo, have a question. I'm running a pretty powerful rig, actually upgraded to it for a flight sim that was known to be demanding (CoD)...2500k at 4.5ghz, GTX580 with 3GB of VRAM and 8GB of RAM at 1600mhz with W7-64 running from an SSD. I expected Normandy to run like silk maxed out but the two stock missions I tried, that don't have particularly large maps or many units, were very stuttery/sluggish. Playable but not playable, if you know what I mean. So was this a demo thing going on and the proper game is better?

Thanks for all the input chaps, it's put my mind at ease. The DRM is integral to the game's code, not a seperate 3rd-party component. That fact by itself is good enough for me, along with the assurance re coasters.

I came onboard when their first game was a free beta-demo, which iirc was upgraded a number of times. That's got to be nigh on a decade ago? Bloody nora. I think I'll waiver on this one and instead of pre-ordering (for the tin box ) I'll wait and see how the release goes. Not meaning to take liberties and use you chaps as guinea-pigs of course.

It's not the DRM per-se, it's having 3rd-party sofware on my system that might screw up the OS and/or hardware. Securom anyone? Four activations only, no problem, so long as I know I can contact somebody here, prove I'm a legit owner and get the game running again. Online activation, no problem. But snoop-ware in my system? Permanently? That might trash it? No way in hell. How anyone can be ambivilant about that is beyond me. What's the name of this software? Who makes it? What's the course of action re recompense if it does trash ones system? Same as Securom, flat-out lies and denials so people had to replace bricked CD-Drives from their own pockets? Don't denigrate the legitimate concerns of CM fans. I want the game, but even if only on principle I'm not going to tolerate unknown and possibly injurious software on my system.

Thanks Rocky. Are you saying the game will install software that will monitor my system and would know when I added/changed hardware components? That's a deal-breaker right there I'm afraid.

Hi chaps, lomg time no see. I've only just become aware of this game. I remember four years ago or so when Steve said about doing WW2 on the new engine..."We're sick of WW2." But, finally, here we are. My question concerns the DRM. Usually the x4 activations per year wouldn't have worried me, but it just so happens that I had to uninstall and reinstall a game four times in one day (it had been working ok) until I realised it needed to be outside of W7-64's x86 folder./ If, for whatever reason, I use up all my activations inside of one year will I be able to get it going again by contacting the staff here? I lost all my code-numbers/licence emails for CMBO, CMBB and CMAK, but as me and my bros could not get them working on W7 anyway that was a moot point. We're really looking forward to this one but just want assurances we'll never end up with coasters, temporariliy or otherwise. TIA.

If I remember correctly I've actually bought two copies of CMBO, two of CMBB and one of CMAK. Two hard-copies (CMBO & CMBB) were lost over the years, both replaced with digital DL from BF. CMAK was a DL too, just the other day. I'm going to assume the issue of the exact same freezes, seperated by many years and PC specs, are an absolute coincidence, given that the majority of players don't suffer from them. I've just ordered a grand's worth of new hardware, so I'll see how the game plays on the new rig once I have it up and running some time tomorrow. Current spec: XP-Pro MSI mobo P4-3.2Ghz 2Gb RAM 6800-Ultra Audigy I'll report back if all's well with new rig, in the interests of fairness.

I'd tend to agree with you if this wasn't the exact same bug that stopped us playing years ago, but it's one hell of a coincidence. There's also another thread that I found yesterday after a search, detailing the same issue. Back then it was thought to be caused in CMBO only, by surrendered crew, apparantly fixed. Would you like me to take a FRAPS of it, and send you that along with the save-file for the battle in question? Oh, and I do agree with you about it appearing not to be a problem with large numbers of players. That does mystify me. If this was happening to many people it would be all over the forums, here and elsewhere. The mystery is that it's the exact same issue that affected our PCs years back and now, despite our PCs being totally different. "Unhandled Exception" appears on the error-report in XP...mean anything? Flakey RAM possibly? [ May 01, 2008, 01:35 AM: Message edited by: Hetzer21 ]

This bug is still happening, and happens with CMBO, CMBB and CMAK. It's so frequent and consistent it's stopped me and my brother from playing any of them any more, just as it stopped me and a friend years ago with CMBO. It's inexscuseable that it hasn't been fixed. I've lost count of the number of battles we've had trashed by this bug, after considerable numbers of hours devoted to each. No game can be played, never mind enjoyed, under such circumstances. But there'll be absolutely no reply to this, or my other post, from the BF staff. They continue to enjoy the money from current sales, knowing full well they are selling a mal-functional piece of software. That, as far as I'm concerned, amounts to nothing less than deliberate fraud, and shows a remarkable level of contempt for their customers. When I think of the amount of support I gave this game when it was first released as a freebie, god only knows how many years ago, I'm doubly angered. Good money thrown down the toilet...both me and my brother have bought all three, myself having bought one of them twice. Put my stupidity down to a hazy memory, and badly mis-placed faith that the bug would have been sorted long ago by a company with some integrity.

How could that be so? :confused:

I'm a bit flumoxed by this, and feel sad my first post here has to be in regard to it. Many years ago me and a friend bought and played CMBO. It would regularly freeze and/or crash in MP (over a LAN). We gave up on it in the end. Sometime later CMBB came out and we figured it would be worth a go, especially as the old crashing bug would certainly have been fixed at last. It wasn't. Same old problem in MP, data would download to the client PC and freeze at the end of the loading-bar. We tried manual saves, auto-saves, sometimes they'd work, mostly they wouldn't. The amount of frustration and anger this caused was quite remarkable, but understandable considering the time and effort that went into a long game, only to be robbed of it half way through (usually when things were getting interesting). Many years later, new hardware (more power), me and my brother thought we'd get back into it. I still had my old copy of CMBO, patched it, persuaded him to buy a digital DL from Battlefront. Played it, had a couple of good short games, then the old BS started again. Got him to buy CMBB, same BS. Exactly the same as years earlier. Cue CMAK...surely the latest version in the series would be sweet...? Both of us bought a copy, same old routine, freezing at the end of the loading-bar, then a re-visit of another old issue, disappearing tanks in addition to the freezes. Auto-saves sometimes work, only to see the game freeze again a couple of turns later, sometimes re-rescuable, sometimes not. Always on the data loading-bar, right at the end...hear the "plunk", game frozen, Ctrl-Alt-del, host loads autosave, try again...ad-nausem. Un-playable waste of money. You people have to have known this bug remains in the code right back from CMBO, up until CMAK, yet you're done nothing to fix it. You make no mention or warning of it on your sales page. Exact same bug from years ago when we used to play CMBO, through CMBB and still present in CMAK. Years apart, different computers, super-fast hardware, exact same bug. Absolutely useless game, no trust in it, can't be played, hours wasted, back on the shelf, money wasted. You're not on. This kind of gig is inexcuseable. You know the bug is there, how could you not? But have you fixed it? No, you dump the game, but go on selling it to the un-suspecting while you move on to new projects. We used to think it was our old computers...low spec, under-powered for what was at the time quite a demanding piece of code. But now? You had a solid reputation thanks to the CM series, so long as you remained faithful to it, supported it (fixed the remaining bugs at least) and looked like you'd continually upgrade and improve it. Many of us figured you'd back-engineer CMBO and CMBB to the same level as CMAK, then bring new features, graphics, fidelity etc into all three. But you dumped them and got yourselves snarled up in what appears to be a disasterous affair with TOW and SF. We can't play a game that more often than not corrupts it's own files so totally that it can't be finished. That's what stopped me and my friend all those years back, and that's what's stopped me and my brother now. Again. For the exact same reason. MP loading-bar, "plunk", freeze. If you have any integrity at all you will fix this monumental years-old bug and give us the game for which we paid good money...one that can be relied upon to play a battle from start to finish, regularly, reliably and consistently. Anything less is a con. Thanks for reading.