A Canadian Cat

Indeed - which is cool. I look forward to trying it out in Italy. But those were used by recon formations. I want to get the bigger ones and try it out with armoured infantry formations. The ones based on the priests and rams were used to replace HTs in some armoured infantry formations. Recon forces are cool but I want to field the real deal:)

Man ninja'd again. Nice summary @Calgar. My next post was going to be a suggestion that you to put some action screen shots along with your sit map images. Apparently you read minds:) The trees do look a bit odd but there is also not very much detail in your terrain either. Could it be your display settings are turned way down? Or are you saying your screen capture is not matching what you see in game.

I came across Millsketch a while ago but never put any time into playing with it. I tried a different font based system but it really did not work well for graphics. For my current AAR I hand drew the symbols because I wanted to use period German symbols for on the map - as far as I know MilSketch does not do that. Millsketch lets you do everything using the modern system (2500 built in symbols - talk about overwhelming) http://www.historicalsoftware.com/HSC/HSCmilsketch.htm Same symbols are used inside the frames. The frames themselves represent hostile vs friendly forces. The blue rectangles are for friendly forces and red diamonds are for hostile forces. The Wikipedia entry is pretty good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Military_Symbols_for_Land_Based_Systems The full information comes from these official, as far as I can tell, docs (warning these are pretty big documents - OK really big over 1100 pages between them and 12Mb in size): Operational Terms and Graphics Common Warfighting Symboloby

Oh I would love that. I hope they add support for that some day soon. I started learning to play CMBN before it was even being sold reading your (and The_Captain's) AAR. They have all been very interesting and a learning experience.

Amazing, looks great. I am curious how did you decide to start with the Lloyd carrier? Nothing more than curiosity on my part.

Apparently Kelvin's dad was right all along: nija'ed by @poesel71

Since we are back on a serious track. The one I really want to play with is the Kangaroo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_%28armoured_personnel_carrier%29 There are a few variants but it sounds like the ones based on the older Ram tank and the priests were the most common.

Good example - cause I would probably want the arc to stay. Make them mind reading arcs and all would be well. Or not - I suspect that reading some of our minds would *not* be a good idea The problem is in this case what GAJ really wanted to say was hold your fire until someone gets in range and then "weapons free" but the command system will not let hims say that. Frankly it is what I would want for an ambush - even in the case above (if you fire your weapon you should not be assuming that you remain hidden). However you are quite right there are circumstances where I would want the arc to be respected - period. Very true. However we should think about enriching the commands or behaviour. In this case I would propose an ambush arc. The current cover and covered armour arcs would remain as is - absolute. The ambush arc would mean once and enemy enters the arc open fire and forget the arc. Of course then we would want an ambush armour arc and ... oh crap there are to many commands for expedience users to deal with let along new comers.

First let me say that I do 180 and 360 covered arcs a lot to mitigate this. It helps but it does *not* solve the problem. In this, case the escaping crew causing problems would have been inside a 180 or 360 arch but if they ran at a slightly different angle they would have ended up outside even a 360 and still been a problem for the ambushing team.

That sure looks like a bug. I am away from my CM computer too - do other people see this as well? I'll be honest I do not think I will have time to test this any time soon - too much work and I have PBEM games stacking up to boot.

I had not thought of this until @sburke went to the extreme. As he said if the game blocked the view after 3m we would be really unhappy. It seems like one could make the argument that the fog visuals should be stronger so that we have more of an impression of lower visibility. I think that @sburke's demo shows that it would not really be practical for the fog visual to actually equal the LOS conditions and still allow us to play the game. Having said that, some of the screen shots with LOS of 150m where the fog visual only slightly impedes the camera's view seem to indicate that the fog visual is too weak. There is a balance that needs to be struck: show us that the fog is there and having an effect but do not make it impossible to navigate and play the game.

Yep, it was nice to see. I am not 100% sure when this was fixed, I think it was a while ago. This was the first time since version 1.0 ish that I lost a FO team between calling and spotting rounds. Yikes!

Now that I have tried it once - a draw but it felt more like a loss :-) I'll chime in now - WEGO. It is a tough one because the guys in the rail station are hard to get at without exposing your self but if you head up the hill they will get you in the back. I decided that the rail station had to go first but I needed to keep the farm guys out of it. So I dropped the 81mm mortar rounds on the farm and put up a smoke screen in front of it. Then with the rounds falling and the smoke screen up: I tried to have the third section crawl out over the tracks so they could put some covering fire on the rail station. And once the cover fire was established the plan was to run two sections and the HQ across the open ground to my end of the rail station. The rail yard covering force was cut down without firing a shot - I should have stopped right there:-). The fire came from the middle structure so I figured the one at the end was unoccupied. So I let one section and the HQ race across. Just brutal. The made the crossing of the open ground OK but there was a nasty firefight at the door. In the end the Germans lost quite a few guys but my platoon was pretty much messed up. One section gone another severely depleted and the remaining one was broken even though they only suffered a couple of casualties - I guess they could not take witnessing their comrades go down. I managed to press the attack and took the rail station with the HQ, the remnants of a section and mortar HQ with some suppression fire from the broken section in the rail yard. But there was no way they were going any further. Time to try again. I was thinking to ignore the farm and take the rail station first but after the smoke screen lifted the fire coming from the farm into the rail station was pretty nasty. Not sure where to go next but I will think of something.

Looks good. So just for clarification. If I remove the faces and just keep the uniform and helmets then I will get the helmets for all CW forces and new uniforms for the Kiwis and still keep the regular faces for the other forces. I strongly suspect that you thought of this already but I will ask the question anyway. I was looking at the files and the uniforms have the [newzealand] tag (looks like the mud, whitewash, etc. format used for the vehicles). Does the same tag work for helmets and skin too?

OK I can confirm that artillery batteries will not keep firing spotting rounds when the FO is not there at the end of the radio. Things proceeded just as I hoped. I watched (using the denied FO team) the time tick down as the battery prepared and then a spotting round came down near the beginning of a turn. I think it was slightly before I expected based on the timing I was watching. Since the caller did not respond (again one survivor and no radio any more) the mission was canceled. During the orders phase the battery was available again. This was in a PBEM game that was started in 2.01. That will teach me not to make a call without first putting a short cover arch on the calling team. I hope.

Hopefully Mad Mike will be updating his tool. We could ask him. Please, Ian

Well, yes, sort of. What they really said was - "Stop saving stuff in your install directories. We are going to lock those directories down so you cannot do that." It is up to software engineers to make decisions about how their product will handle this kind of change. Hard coding a directory it probably not a choice high on the engineering list but it could easily be seen as the quick solution. Lest, people think that I am defending MS - don't. What this change has really done is left many people, my self included, not installing software into the "Program Files" directory any more. This has negative consequences and totally ruins what they were trying to accomplish which was prevent malware and viruses have free reign in each program's install directory.

And the clock goes red and negative? That is different that is extra time. Some scenarios (and at least one QB map) have variable time limits.

The new FOW (no info on select) is in Warrior as well.

It came with the original CMFI if I recall correctly.

Yes, this is awesome! Thank you thank you. I am playing my first battle on my usual Warrior and it is soo much better. Next I will try Elite again. Not a fan of iron (and I always have on PBEM game going on Iron because that opponent really likes it).

I have not cracked the editor yet (it took me two days to get my computer to cooperate and install GL). Are you saying that that bridge is available in the editor? Is it a generic bridge type that was common in Italy or did you give us a unique special bridge as a prelude to things to come?

OK I have both CMFI and CMFI-GL installed side by each - my first try installing GL failed for some unknown reason. Uninstall / reinstall fixed things after a detour updating my graphics card drivers and the usual sad stories that you guys don't need to hear. What happens is: When I run CMFI it sees its PBEM files and saved game but not new saved games - OK. When I run CMFI - GL it sees its saved games but also all the CMFI saved games and PBEM files. Note I do not mean PBEM turns that have been saved during the command phase, it shows me the PBEM files that came from my opponent - NOT OK (but not the end of the world). What this means is the software makes it easy for me to make a mistake (I do not need help making mistakes). The time while I am winding down my four CMFI 1.01 games I am at risk in making a mistake and converting them the CMFI GL 1.1 in an unsupported manner. Yuck. I would definitely categorize this as a bug. Please put it on your list to fix. What I want is to be able to have multiple versions of CMFI each with their own folder for game files and mods in My Documents. That way during transitions from one version to another the software will help me to load the right turns with the right game. Note: I have three versions of CMBN on the go right now supporting various PBEM games. So, this is a real issue for some of us. My suggestions are (even though you hate it when we tell you what to do instead of what we want;-): automatically have the installer create a unique name'ed folder in the my documents folder (problem is you cannot intentionally upgrade and existing install) have the choosing of the folder be a step in the installer have the folder determined by an hand editable config file have the choosing of the folder be controlled by a user editable option in the GUI

+1 to that. Single best artillery advice. You do not want your spotters exposed any more than necessary.

The CM module added a bunch of 2xx numbered maps and they very good. I do not want to do QB's in CM with the 1xx numbered maps any more. Sounds like the 2.00 upgrade also added the 2xx numbered QB maps. Good call. Agreed. So far the only reason I have been unhappy with a FI map is because my tanks got caught in a maze of rocky terrain My own damn fault.