user38

I don't think this is a fair comment. The Australian Government does not charge export duties and to do so would be a breach of the Australia – United States Free Trade Agreement. Indeed, exported goods are GST free so importers effectively get a 9% discount on the goods. I note that the Australian Trade & Shipping website states: However, this website is owned by Celestial Industries Pty Ltd (ACN 050405377). Celestial Industries Pty Ltd is a privately owned shipping company. It is not an instrument of government policy. If a private company chooses to levy a fee to cover the costs of doing business it is an issue between that company and its customers. As long as the fee is not in breach of any consumer protection laws it has nothing to do with the Australian Government or with Australia. To say Australia charges significant fees for shipments to America is inaccurate and, given our ideological commitment to the principles of the global economy, I find the statement to be insulting.

In Australia there are no import duties on items valued at less than $1,000 dollars. Given we have a 10% Goods and Services Tax (actually 1/11th of the sale price) Australians effectively get a discount on low value imported goods. There has been some discussion in the media recently (generated by a prominent local retail chain) on whether this policy has an adverse effect on local retailers and whether is would be advisable to extend the import duties to all goods. The response from the government was that such an extension of the duties would be too expensive to implement and would be unlikely to result in an increase in revenue. I don't think anyone here considered an administration fee to cover the additional expense of collecting the duty. Clearly, Great Britain is blessed with genius government administrators capable of outside of the box thinking. Seriously, I am sure the Australian Government did consider extending the GST to all imported goods and covering the additional costs with a flat administration fee. I am also sure the idea was rejected as being unduly harsh and oppressive.

Another issue I have with the movie is its portrayal of King Tiger tanks. I remember watching an apparently endless procession of these tanks and thinking "How could the producers make this kind of error? Don't they realise that the Germans only had about a hundred of these King Tigers tanks?"

I just finished watching that Battle of the Bulge movie with Henry Fonda. I can take a bit of artistic license in movies but only to a point. For example, when Sergeant Rock and Lieutenant Danno are misdirected by the Germans posing as MPs they are beneath a sign indicating Ambleve was 36 kms on the left road and Malmedy was 42 kms on the right road. Given the signs were supposed to have been switched Malmedy would have been on the right and Ambleve on the left. Given Malmedy is roughly 20 kms northeast of Ambleve that would put them approximately 40 kms northwest of Malmedy. That is, they would have been in Germany somewhere near Schleiden. Clearly the allies were nowhere near Schleiden in December 1944. This kind of lazy inattention to historical detail in war movies really annoys me. Am I the only one who watched this movie and said "Does no one in the Hollywood movie industry know how to read a map?"

Regarding my epub version of the manual, given the CMBfN manual is copyright material I doubt I could release it to the general public. Also it is not a perfect conversion so I doubt Battlefront would be happy having an unprofessional version of their product released into cyberspace.

Well, CMBfN has cost me several hundred dollars (new mouses, new monitor, etc).

I bought this game. Here are some screenshots from the website. And here is a link to a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U33EGUkzE8. It's like an updated version of Sid Meier's Gettysburg. It's graphically interesting because it uses sprites instead of 3D models. I think reason is because the number of troops in even a small battle would otherwise render the game unplayable. But it looks really nice. And the game has a huge community which, given the subject matter, is even more tragic than the Battlefront community. If you are interested in the ACW I would recommend it. One caveat. There is no wego or turn based play in this game. Also, you can't give orders while paused. (That killed the game for me.) And, like CMBfN, the game is stupidly hard and requires a huge commitment to learn how to play. There is a demo available on the Scourge of War website. And if you buy the physical game you get a very detailed 113 page manual. No steel box though.

I'm very new at this game. I got to the last mission in the tutorial and I found I had no idea how to solve the problem of a bunch of troops in one corner of the map and an empty battlefield full of terrain and an invisible enemy. I stared at the battlefield for hours and I had no clue. And then I remembered the words of Fred Thompson in Hunt for Red October: “Son, Ruskies don't take a dump without a plan”. So I did this: And then I calmed down and played.

This game is stupidly hard. If you don't have a background with Combat Mission games you have to really want to play the game to get into it. My background is as an ex tabletop wargamer, a Steel Panthers tragic and and and RT games disliker. I have spent dozens of hours to get to the point where I can now play the game really badly. I have persevered because I like the idea of playing this game, and I hope one day I will be good enough at it to enjoy playing it. The issue for casual gamers is not the camera controls. The problem is that this game gives you too many control options and models too many factors. It puts you in the shoes of a combat commander and attempts to give you some of the problems and challenges faced by a combat commander. Given it probably takes hundreds or thousands of hours for a military commander to learn is trade it is hardly surprising that this is a difficult game to learn. I doubt the limiting factor in attracting casual gamers is the camera controls.

I have mentioned this before in another thread, but the left click right click camera control methods works very well for me. The problem with the other methods is that you can't control the speed of the camera movement. With the right click left click movement you can control the speed by the distance you move the mouse. An extract of my post and of Battlefront's reply is below: From my point of view an extra command to select the last unit without changing the camera viewpoint would perfect the camera movement controls. However, I Battlefront's point that an additional command makes the game incrementally more difficult to master.

This doesn't work very well as it won't copy the pictures. A better option is to use a program like calibre to convert the pdf to epub format. The conversion isn't perfect so you may have to edit the epub with an epub editor (I use Sigil). It takes few hours of work to do a good job, but I now have an epub manual that I can read on my iTouch or my iPad.

Also Bernard Montgomery lived in Tasmania for a while (as a child).

When I am using my computer I prefer to play with myself.

I bought two of the SteelBooks. I must admit I did not know what a SteelBook was when I ordered them. A quick google search lead me to to following information on this webpage: It is pretty obvious by the TM symbol that SteelBook is registered trademark and refers to a specific product. (At least it is pretty obvious to someone who is a lawyer.) I don't think Battlefront can be held responsible if customers thought that SteelBook was a descriptive term rather than a registered trademark. To represent their conduct as being fraudulent (which is a deliberate deception for the the purpose of achieving a wrongful gain and is also a crime) is worse than hyperbole: it is maliciously ignorant. Regarding rants against LeadMeister because he was upset about the broken box, if you read this post and try to exercise that uniquely human quality that social scientists call "empathy" I think you may come to realise why LeadMeister may have felt a little peeved that he had received a less that mint box to put into his collection. Collectors have different priorities to non collectors. To a collector an item's value is not measured by its utility as a product but from its physical characteristics (it's perfection, uniqueness, etc). LeadMeister's priorities are not wrong because they are not shared by the majority of posters to this forum. Given his status as a collector it is entirely understandable that he was upset at receiving a broken box. I don't consider he is correct in blaming Battlefront for the state of the box or because it wasn't what he expected, but as a collector myself I understand why he felt the need to vent on this forum. And I sympathise with him.

Nice collection: I notice you have a copy of Doom in your collection (which I imagine is the original DOS version). I also note you are a collector: I am a collector myself (although not of video games) and I understand that to you the box just as or perhaps more important than the game itself. I feel your pain - I hope Battlefront can do something to replace your damaged box.

All sarcasm aside, I have to agree with this point about the F12 key (but not for the stated reason). I find the camera works fine if I use the mouse left click right click controls. I love the fact that you can control the speed of the camera by moving the pointer closer or further away from the screen edges. It's extremely intuitive. In fact, if there were some way of panning while zooming I would say this is a genius camera control method. (The mouse pointer at the edge of the screen method doesn't work for me because I can't control the speed of the camera that way.) A problem arises when plotting waypoints. If you have to move the camera during the plotting process you have to deselect the unit to free up the left click camera move function, and when you reselect the unit with F12 the camera viewpoint changes. I can see the logic of F12 moving the camera to view the selected unit. However, given the only time I deselect a unit that I want to come back to is when I am plotting waypoints or issuing target commands away from my unit, my preference would be that F12 didn't disturb the camera viewpoint.

sburke, you forgot one: 15.) Oh well, another sale lost.

I ordered two a few days after pre-orders opened. I got one on Tuesday and the other on Wednesday. (That would be Monday and Tuesday to you folks on the wrong side of the international date line.)

Hiding behind one of those magic trees.

Someone has posted a youtube playthrough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD3WbnxKquU

You can save the replays if you save after the game turn ends and before you start a new turn (that is, when the game is in replay mode). What you have then is a save game file that replays that 60 second turn. Unfortunately, to play the next replay turn you have to load that replay save game - this gets a bit tedious. I guess it is theoretically possible to make a movie like this (using fraps and a video editing program to edit out the load screens). But I imagine it would take several hours to make a movie this way. Thinking about this further, it should be possible to make a high quality movie this way if you were committed to putting in the time and the effort. I imagine you would start with with a rough movie giving an overview of the entire battle. You would then have to find a narrative thread, or several narrative threads and record the relevant time, map positions and replay file locations. Then you could story board the movie and replay and record the action from several different camera locations including overhead establishing shots, close ups, reaction shots, pans, zooms, etc. You could overdub a music track and redub the troop voices (so that the German's say "Mein Leben" when they die, etc). Or not.

As I understand it the suggestion is for a kind of borg light method of spotting. If one or several spotter (in communication with the artillery) can see a target it can be fired upon. But if this method were implemented it would, to a certain extent, abstract the target spotting. As I understand it the quality of the spotter (their training, line of sight, level of suppression, etc) are factored in to the accuracy of the targeting. As is whether or not the spotter is still alive when the rounds start falling. This method might be fine for RT players who are looking for Command and Conquer in a WW2 setting, but it seems lie a step backwards to me.

I think you might find your answer in the following post:

Sorry about the above post. I hadn't t read to the end of the thread and hence didn't realise that we had moved on from discussing the merits of the criticisms in the original post to bashing Panzer Command: Ostfront. I am sorry but I have to take a contrary position. I haven't played the game but I have watched a few youtube videos and Battlefront can learn a lot from this game. What impressed me most about the game is the fidelity of the simulation of German and Russian zombie soldiers. Now I am a bit rusty on my WW2 history and I am not sure if zombie soldiers were used in Western Europe, but one would think there would be clear tactical advantages to attacking with waves of shambling, shuffling zombies. Maybe Battlefront could put it on their to do list?

I have had this problem. In the third tutorial mission Battle Drill I set up my machine gun team at the base of fire objective (as instructed in the manual). The loader and the other guy had perfect line of sight to the enemy position but the gunner set up his gun directly behind a tree. The only fix was to move the gunner to a position outside the stated objective.