A Canadian Cat

Thank you @poesel71. Unfortunately that did not work for me. I renamed one of the files "Meet Med Village QB-203I.btt" and used that but the game still crashed the same way when trying to open turn 002. We are trying to play red on red if that makes a difference. Right now it seems like I am unable to play any Quick Battles via PBEM.

Indeed. In Huzzar I had a long duel between a 76 Sherman and a Panther. The only reason I was able to keep my 76 Sherman alive long enough to have that duel was that it was higher and behind high bocage. I backed it away out of fire and then back again a minute or two later. Round after found bounced off the front of the Panther and round after round was absorbed by the bocage. In the end it was a flanking 75 Sherman that finally ended the kitty. I 100% agree about the Royal Tigers. I played a very large battle (12 000) points and it turned out to be Royal Tigers and Panthers vs Churchills and Achilles. My Royal Tigers mopped the floor with my opponent. I had something like 12 Royal Tigers and they killed all opposition. I lost one tank the whole game. I did not really enjoy that game much frankly. Just diving around with impunity gets boring pretty quickly. The shells from the Chuchills (75s and 95s) bounced off the front, the turret and the sides.

Near the river the orders are more of the same – move up a little at a time. One of the supporting Stugs has been tasked with shifting position to take out the Stuart that was spotted last turn. I have ordered the Stug on the right flank to move up to deal with the intruding armoured car and the pull back to safety. The town assault is a little in disarray. That Stuart in my rear is causing the infantry of 2 company to scramble for cover. They are also repositioning their AT assets to attack it. I also pulled a Stug back to deal with it in case the infantry cannot. At the front of the infantry column the plan continues as normal. One platoon will follow the Panther outside of town to scout for and protect from the Churchill tanks that are in the woods. While the other two platoons of 1 Company start going building to building into town.

Near the river an MG team in over watch spots a Stuart tank and take aim at the tank commander. They make the shot and the Stuart is dazed while more of my men cross some open ground in front of it. All is quiet in the orchard.

Over at the other entrance to town and armoured car blunders into my position and is greeted with grenades. Which miss. More grenades… This time they go off underneath. Then the Shrek team hit it – on the wheels. At the end of the turn the armoured car is still operational but the crew must be freaking out.

Members of 1 Platoon 1 Company enter the town proper. The rest of their platoon mates and a couple of Panthers are right behind them. Two of the three Panthers duel with the Achilles on the ridge as the enter town. One of them loses – big. This is, at least in part, a fault of my orders. I knew there were possibly keyhole slots of visibility across the road into town. I ordered the two Panthers to fast move into the cover of town. The problem is I did not give the second Panther a long enough pause so that it could turn and rush across the open distance. The first Panther made if fine – nice and smooth and fast. But the second one turned and then did the stutter dance while the first one cleared out of its way. That gave the Achilles a critical few seconds to shoot at the stationary Panther. Meanwhile a Stuart tanks appears in the area behind the lead platoons and the supporting armour. Oh man I have made a huge mistake. There is only a disabled Stug back there. The Stuart starts firing on my surprised men. They run for cover and one of the Shrek teams takes aim and misses.

Excellent, thanks. Is there anything we can do to get past it? Or is it random and the next one I start will be OK?

One bug I have run into several times also in CMFI. Quick battles are showing up with the incorrect weather and time in the saved game screen. When I create new PBEM games this has happened twice for medium sized 45 minute battles. The intro screen shows the battles are 10min long and the weather is not correct. This game was set to 45min and light fog: The second bug I just ran into trying to start a CMBN 2.0 game. The game is Axis vs Axis Medium sized 45 minutes. I sent turn 001 and my opponent sent me 002 back but the game crashed. The load screen got to 5% and then paused for a moment and crashed. The two turn files and the crash dump for the last two times I tried to load turn 002 can be found here: http://www.lesliesoftware.com/forsupport/NewQBCrash.zip

After being away from my main computer for most of the holidays I found myself behind on picking up new mods. The BFC repository is not easy to deal with and I was getting frustrated. Then I got smart and went to the Combat Mission Mods Warehouse. Quick sort by date for each game and I quickly picked up the new mods I was missing. http://cmmods.greenasjade.net/mods?game_type=5&show_all=true Thanks!

Excellent post @JasonC. That is my favorite line - it sums all your points up nicely.

Well that sounds promising. I will have to try this out then.

You are mostly correct. For spotting you are correct - all the way. For artillery times both you and the AI get better artillery turn around times for those settings that effect them.

Interesting, the new FOW icons do give hints. I have given up on Elite so have not tried it in v2. My question would be this: when playing Elite and your guys think they have spotted an AT gun do you see the gun? icon? Then when the get a positive ID on the gun do you see the full AT gun icon? In v1 you would see the ? icon and then, once fully spotted, you would see the infantry icon. Only clicking or zooming in with the camera would revel that it was really an AT gun.

The armchair general channel has all five tutorials: http://www.youtube.com/user/acgmagazine?feature=watch Episode I to get you started: It is a challenging game especially once you start playing Human opponents. Don't get discouraged (or at least don't stay discouraged:-). I remember back in the CMBB days when I finally started figuring things out it was an amazing feeling coordinating my platoon and their supporting tanks to suppress the enemy positions and close the distance to eliminate them.

Spot on. I have one PBEM partner that really likes iron so we play on that setting. I do not find it adds anything for me - except more clicking I like the idea of Elite showing only generic infantry icons but it is just not handled correctly, IMHO. The two problems I have with Elite are that serious threats that are not just some guys in the woods, such as AT guns, still only get the generic infantry icons. Bad, AT guns are not soldiers and if my guys have spotted a gun it should be reported as such. Which brings me to the second problem with Elite, if you click on the enemy unit you still get the detail information. What this means is that you have to click on any enemy unit that is spotted because you cannot afford to miss a spotted AT gun and since you are clicking on it you still get too much information and can tell the HQ units from the FO units. If these two things were fixed I would play on Elite: 1) Spotted AT and infantry guns and mortar tubes should show the gun and mortar icons. If my guy have only seen crew then just infantry icons please. 2) Clicking on enemy icons does not say what unit / type they are just the specific type of tank or gun - if known by the spotter.

There is no need for fragmentation. You can have multiple instances of the game installed and play various PBEM games on each. For instance right now I have CMBNwCW 2.0, CMBNwCW 1.11, CMBN 1.01 and CMFI all installed and have at least one game going in each of them. The older first patch version was setup specifically to play with an opponent that could not update to 1.11 at the time. So as long as we are willing to be flexible we do not need to be fragmented.

Agreed. I think people are considering what a real 80s war would have been like. I remember some estimates were that if the Warsaw pack attacked the would have a 9:1 advantage at the strike point. Who wants to fight outnumbered 9:1? It might be interesting once. With this game we can create force match ups that would be interesting. Sure the Soviet equipment / communication / leader ship was not quite at the same level as the NATO forces. But hey any one of those T64s or T72 are still a dangerous threat. Indeed.

I am glad you are enjoying the DAR. I was just joshing - this 20K battle is taking a really long time to play out. My PBEM partner and I usually have two games on the go at any given time and we have started and finished another one since the 20K battle started. I think 7200 points should make a reasonable size battle that will not take years to complete.

The advance along the river continues. The trailing platoon that took casualties earlier is tending to their fallen before resuming the advance. I am sure the enemy wants us to follow them into the orchard and come under the guns of those Achilles on the ridge but I am not taking the bait. One Panther will move forward to the tree line and cover the advance into town and the other two will move quickly into town before those tank destroyers get a shot. The shrek team has arrived to help protect the flank.

Near the river my men slowly advance and meet no new resistance – yet. The Panther’s cover my troops entrance into the town. All the Churchill tanks blocking the entrance to the town have been chased away. The orchard also remains quiet save for my Strummell firing one more round at the last known position of those.

Also see theblitz.org they too have ladders, forums and tournaments. I have met several really good and dun opponents there.

Excellent AAR. Thanks for posting. I recently played this against a human opponent. I sent my main force in the centre with a company on the left. It was a very hard fight and I had artillery dropped on my advancing troops twice to good effect. And those fireflys are nasty. In the end I had no fully operational Panthers. Two immobilized and two with out main gun. I prevailed but we fought to nearly the last man.

Sounds awesome. Count me in! But 7200 points that's not huge. This, this is huge 20 000 point Epic Battle (Axis side). Still I think this sounds like loads of fun. For you to participate all you really need is a 2IC to setup any battles you are involved in. Then you are good to go. I started reading your rules and at first glance my thought was - wow way to complex before morning coffee. I will read them in more detail later. What I got from a fast read through was that the spirit is to select a battalion tweak it a little but not too much and then go crazy with it. If it will help I wrote a set of instructions for selecting and recording forces here: Force Selection Instructions pdf. Someone also mentioned that you can setup your force selection in a scenario file that can then be imported into other scenarios. This would make the umpire's job easier even if only one side can be imported for a given battle. I have not tired it yet but I believe it is the mechanism for getting a core force in a campaign into each following battle. That way each participant would be responsible for creating their own core force file that the umpires can use to setup the battles. That would also be a nice way for people to look at each player's force after the tournament was over. So, bottom line count me in! And if you agree that all you need to participate is someone to setup any battle you are in the I volunteer to do that for you. I don't want to get into too much admin work but I will happily do enough to let you play too. Actually I guess at some point you and I would face off so you would need one other person to assist as well.

Oh don't worry Panthers from the front with 75mm Sherman's are not easy. I have lost lots of Shermans to Panthers that way. And had lots of Panthers just happily shrug off round after round. Sometimes the Sherman tank will get lucky but most of the time it will just get brewed up.

This is mystifying to me. I played CMBN from day one (about an hour and a half per day for most days of the week). The game was / is entirely playable. I can count the number of times the game crashed on me with the fingers on one hand and still have fingers left over. Microsoft Word isn't that good. I have run into several bugs - and reported them here. But none that would make me not want to play. I have even reported a few modeling issues but again no where near being unplayable. Some things I hit even got fixed but I did not stop playing while I waited for patches. I am sorry to say that statements like "...Normandy was unplayable and full of bugs..." *do* seem like they come from the moon.