A Canadian Cat

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.

Yes, it is a diagonal road. And the first turn it did refuse to go down the road. Some how a reploting of the path caused this.

Interesting idea, have you actually done that before?

And there is the glee. It looks even freaking when the tank just diapers. Nice

Excellent thanks. That is all I can ask. But I want my tank back :-(

For everyone else there's Master Card and a variety of other payment options. Man, I am glad you still have a sense of humor about this. For me the complaints and being called names is getting old.

I have not seen this problem for a while: This happened after maneuvering through a narrow street. At first this tank refused to go down the street but I tweaked the orders and then it drove through the front of the building on the left and ended up in the next building along the street. Now it seems to be stuck there. Saved turns available upon request.

LOL the spell checker did not help me on this one did it.

Yep, once I am back at the computer I will upload them

No, it is a new 2.0 game. That is why I posted this report.

I Recently started a new game of Monty's Butchers using CMBN 2.0 and I now have a wondering mortar gunner. The screen shot is from the command phase of turn 8 (I have the turns saved BTW if anyone wants them). I noticed something was off last turn so I cancelled the mortar team's move order. The gunner just kept running away. The platoon was advancing in the open field towards to woods. None of my men have any contact with the enemy yet. My new orders are as shown - hopefully he will rejoin his team. For those that cannot read tiny print this is the Mortar detachment from 2 Platoon A Company.