altipueri

Come on guys - I'm trying to re-install it on my Win8 laptop - which I de-installed it from because of invisible soldiers. Why can't your clever software tell it's the same PC?

Ah yes the Hellcat. Now that was my favourite, but much harder to make because I think you had to take the drive and tracks from the Walker Bulldog model and then build the rest of the superstructure from card. Definitely my favourite, and great name. There's a book called Panther Soup which follows the career of a Hellcat commander from the landings in South of France until the end of the war. Author is John Gimlette who wrote the excellent "At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig".

@ john Kettler. The M10 has always been a disappointment in my (war gaming) life because it looks as if it should be really powerful yet it is under armoured and the gun is still not a match for the Germans. I spent many hours making models of them, converting the Airfix Sherman as a base, but they still got knocked out in no time in the table top wargames of my youth. Now, my conversion of a PzIV to a Brummbaer, complete with damaged anti-bazooka plates, was much more successful. Audie Murphy was brave and lucky, it is hard to believe he survived. There is a CMBO scenario based on a true story of a soldier manning a 50 cal until overrun, playing "dead" then starting up firing again, and then the trick is repeated. There's just so much luck good and bad that doesn't seem possible from a considered logical analysis.

The M10 has been a disappointment all my life.

Not enough tanks. Just nuke 'em and get it over and done with. Can you imagine trying to do a CM2x invasion of Japan on 1:1?

I think it should depend on the type of grape.

In a way it is a problem/benefit of the CMx2 1:1 modelling. You, sitting in your central heated house, with a nice glass of pre-Christmas mulled wine and a tasty looking warm mince pie next to you, want some poor battered bastard in Bastogne or wherever to climb out on the back of some ****ty little under armoured tank destroyer to ........................... whatever.

I wish I had stayed away too, but got seduced by the idea that with 6gb I could run several games that were unusable on my existing laptop. Mistake, so it's back to win 7 on the old machine. So to others, stay away from win 8 if you have the choice.

I need one to fix the invisible soldiers bug on Windows 8

Are quick battles vs the AI worthwhile? No. But in CMx1,they are.

D'accord. Again.

Actually of course it has been heaven for wargames the last fifteen years or so. Matrix, Paradox, AGEOD, Battlefront. Almost too much to choose from. I'm keeping a couple of old XP machines just so I don't lose the ability to play some of these games.

Not playing a human being is the primal thing for me. I can't stand humans who play wargames. I gave up playing wargames forty years ago because all I saw was old men arguing about what was or was not fair or realistic. Of course to a teenager the old men were probably all of thirty. So PC wars gaming when I discovered it in the time of Sid Meier's Gettysburg was great. Good enough AI for an hour or two of history games and no bitching because my favourite tank hit a mine. Reload, replay have fun.

Yes, I'm doomed. If I'm found dead in zipped up holdall you can have my WW2 PC game collection. Ancients and Napoleonics go elsewhere.

Agreed. The Operational Art of War did an update with Matrix that brought in wide screen. BFC could do a Combined CMx1 pack. I am sure there must have been lots of stuff that didn't quite make it to earlier releases. But I think it is partly political to the extent they've publicly said it is the end of the road for CMx1, yet still want to milk it.

I live in Cheltenham, home of GCHQ. The GCHQ car park is empty from Friday afternoon to Monday morning so if any of you are plotting then that's the time to act because there is nobody minding the machines. On the other hand as most of our likely enemies take Fridays off the whole thing is really just a tax payer subsidised four day week lark. As for the pigeon code - if one time pads are so good why are we wasting so much money on things that don't work?

I agree with Streety. More than ten years on and The AI is not significantly better than CMx1 and the QBs are miles worse. CMx1 had a pretty good random selector and terrain generator. Once you know that the CMx1 AI tends to do a rush at the end you make your own judgement on whether you really won. So I'm playing more CMx1, but that's also because my great new PC is suffering from the invisible soldier bug and I'm forced to wait for some BF bug fix.

I still prefer CMx1 games Plays ok on laptop and netbook, less micro management

I'll mull it over.

Another reason I play more CMx1 than 2. Realism is too tedious.

Did any of those tricks make the game cat proof?

It's just tiresome. The game has moved from "game" to "simulation" which the enthusiasts may regard as better, but frankly, if I have to put my glass of champagne down to press a hotkey I ain't having fun anymore. So that's a lost sale for the next game or expansion. I'm having a similar bleat on another game forum (AGEOD) where their latest game has a campaign of some 1600 turns, and even on high powered computers takes 5 minutes just to process a turn. I don't think more than a handful of people have actually finished the campaign yet. Anyway, as long as BFC can sell enough to pay their way I guess it's up to them.

If you are playing against a human, anything goes - it's war. If you are playing against the AI - it's more what would I do in real life? You "know" if you've overdone it. Curiously, the amount I've overdone it is usually linked to the amount of alcohol I've consumed. Dutch courage works against the AI, and if it doesn't, who cares anyway?

Having just finished reading Antony Beevor's Stalingrad in a marathon exhausting and depressing late night early morning late morning session the idea of Russians singing "A long way to Tipperary" seems sacrilegiously wickedly funny. Must do.

No, but I suffer the same and have given up. I think they may be different logins.