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Kenzie

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  1. Oh my god, it's out?! I only pre-ordered this game yesterday! It seems it was released just a few hours later. I pre-ordered this, went to bed, then woke up to see that it's released. Holy hell that's lucky. I still managed to get the discount for the mail + download thingy. That was a close one.
  2. That's the one where you have to get through Polish lines in the middle of the night during a rainstorm, right? My approach to that one was to form the entire kampfgruppe into one big, really really long column and try to hug the right side of the map as closely as possible while the engineers blasted the way through. I bypassed most of their troops and I didn't even bother attacking any of their strongpoints. They sent a few tanks at my column but they all got blowed up real good. It was kinda neat seeing such a ridiculously long column snaking it's way across the map like that. I don't remember what type of victory I got but I did get a victory on the first try (probably just a minor one). I took very few casualties. There was that tank battle and a couple of small firefights with Polish infantry but that was it. It's weird that you didn't win. Maybe you just need to destroy more of their troops? I didn't destroy that many of them when I played it though so I dunno.
  3. I've read this book as well, and it's pretty good. According to the wiki article for it, it seems mostly accurate. One of the author's harshest critics, a veteran of the Großdeutschland division, later recanted everything he said about him. Other veterans have said the book was accurate as well. I would expect some things to be wrong or dates mixed up as he was only 16 years old when he joined the war, and wrote the book decades later. He later became a comic book artist, and drew comics/graphic novels about the war. Too bad they are only in French though. Recently I've been reading Russia at War by Alexander Werth. The author was a British journalist, but he was born in Russia, spoke native Russian and lived there throughout the entire war, except at the beginning of 1942. He visited the front lines, interviewed Russian generals and things like that. It's a huge book, over a thousand pages long and it covers the whole war in general. It's an interesting read.
  4. Yeah that image is what I'm talking about. Walk through a park on a clear summer day and you'll see that the game should be really bright, if not brighter. The game tries to be realistic in every possible category, why not colors as well? My theory was that filmmakers like the desaturated colors so they could have a more muted, depressing look to their film, to manipulate their audience's mood and to have a more "anti-war" feel to it or something. Video games usually try to imitate Hollywood when they can, so video games quickly followed. That approach doesn't really interest me though. I find it a lot more interesting seeing the contrast between human beings slaughtering each other en masse in horrific ways in the midst of beautiful, vast, colorful landscapes. Look at the movie The Thin Red Line, about the battle for Guadalcanal. I was fascinated at how the movie puts a lot of emphasis on beautiful, wide, vivid scenery shots along with the local wildlife caught in the middle of the fighting. The island itself has such a strong, imposing presence, and seems like just as much of a character in the film as the actual humans themselves. Seeing human beings recklessly destroying these colorful, beautiful environments had more of an emotional impact on me than just another drab war film. In my opinion, if you really want a "you are there" feeling then bright colors are the way to go. Also, Jackson Pollock is great, you shut up! I like Pollock but maybe that's just because I'm an art student at the moment
  5. I kinda like the default colors more than the movie mode. I'm not sure why there is so much attraction to desaturated colors, in both film and in games. The real world is very bright and vibrant. Some of the desaturated terrain mods for example look good in scenarios with overcast skies and wet or muddy ground conditions, but I don't think they look realistic most of the time. I'm not saying don't use movie mode in the screenshots though.
  6. A Vietnam game would be neat. There were some really interesting battles in that one. My uncle was at the Battle of Dak To with the 173rd Airborne. I've always wanted to see a CM style game set in WWI though. The late war especially was not all that different from WWII so I don't even think the game would change that much. Imagine leading teams of stormtroopers during the big 1918 offensives. The game would need deeper trenches though. Or how about one of the lesser known theaters, like in Africa or the Middle East? You could have German-led native African askaris fighting British-led Indian troops in east Africa. There were lots of small, pretty evenly-matched engagements that would be perfect for a CM scenario in my opinion. You could have extreme long-distance artillery duels over wide open African savanna, with a few companies of askaris skirmishing in between. Any WWI game probably wouldn't sell though. *sigh* A Spanish Civil War game would be cool too.
  7. Hm, I don't think they're excessively large images. They are all less than 250KB each. There are much larger images in this thread. It's the hosting site I put them on (Imgur) that's doing it. It's been really overloaded just now. This forum won't let me edit posts after a certain amount of time anyway. Yeah, Stug commanders can unbutton. I forced the commander of that particular one to button up from an artillery strike on that area. As for my own tank, I didn't want the commander sticking his head out in such a dense urban area. The buildings around that intersection were crawling with German troops. Besides, I didn't think it would matter anyway because of the extreme close range and the fact that the Stug was also buttoned up and facing a different direction. I might have to try that target command thing though. I wonder if it would make him waste his first shot on the ground around the target before he actually spots it though.
  8. Nice. What sound mod is that? And what did you use to remove the UI in the video like that? Here are some pictures of something very weird that happened to me in the Nijmegen campaign. The spotting mechanics in this game can get so strange sometimes. I was having a problem with a German assault gun blocking the main road into a town, so I decided to flank it by blasting down some of the big walls around it, like so: This would have given me a good shot at its side. Not perfect, but good enough I thought. I gave one of the Shermans a target arc to make sure its turret was facing the right way and then I sent it around the corner. I then watched the Sherman just sit there, failing to spot the enemy tank right in front of it for quite some time, even with its turret pointed right at it. I thought the smoke and dust from the blasted down wall may have been blocking its view, but the German tank saw through the smoke and spotted my tank almost instantly, even though it wasn't even facing the right direction. It began slowly turning toward my tank the moment it rounded the corner. A few seconds later, the Sherman managed to spot German infantry inside the building behind the enemy tank and started shooting at them, while still completely unaware of the German tank right in front of it! The Germans were spotted in the left window circled here: Here is the view from the tank itself. You can see it firing at the window while still oblivious to the tank sitting there a few feet away from it. It fired an HE shell and a few MG bursts into the window, killing a group of Germans inside. The Sherman finally managed to spot the enemy tank several seconds later, but by then it was too late. It had already turned around. The Sherman managed to fire one round that harmlessly bounced off its frontal armor, and then it was immediately blown to bits. That was one of the only times I had ever actually said a curse word out loud at my monitor. It was probably one of the most WTF moments I had seen in this game so far. It makes me laugh looking back at it.
  9. Well it IS Market Garden after all. I would want it to be hard. That last mission was no cakewalk even with the huge amount of artillery that you get at your disposal. Because they were all dug in deep in that park, it was difficult to get the artillery zeroed in on one particular spot. I had to do area fire over a huge area most of the time, which made it less effective except for suppression. I thought the campaign was great. It was very challenging but not impossible. And I did love all those toys to play with. Too many missions don't give me enough artillery to play with.
  10. Well I finally did it... I finished it! My result: That last mission, the Hunner Park one, was a blast. I loved all that artillery. By using a preplanned barrage and the 'harass' mode, I was able to keep the heavy guns firing nonstop for the entire 40 minute long battle. The park was a moonscape of craters when it was over. I moved the artillery spotter forward to adjust fires as needed, creating a 'creeping barrage' kind of effect. I put down a big smoke screen as well and then ordered a massive charge into the park. If this game had bayonets I would have called it a bayonet charge. Since it was the last mission, I just thought "What would Patton do?" and I tried to be as aggressive as possible. My tanks led the charge and overran their positions, engaging their tanks at point blank range, sometimes from the side. Some of their foxhole positions were still occupied as my tanks drove right over them and kept going into the rear. To my surprise, it was actually very successful, and most of their positions in the park were overrun and destroyed within minutes. I took heavy losses, but they ended up taking a lot more in the end. That sounds awesome. I can't wait until those revised campaigns are released. I will have to try replaying the Nijmegen campaign at some point.
  11. I'm almost finished with the campaign now. I just got to mission 15. That "Here We Fight!" scenario was insane. I got major or total victories in all the previous missions except for one draw (I ran out of time), so when I got to the Here We Fight one... well I guess I let my guard down a bit. I just got hopelessly slaughtered. My platoon commander was the very first casualty of the engagement, and then the rest of the platoon just got shot to pieces shortly afterward. It was a bit disconcerting. I tried it a second time and did a lot better. I hit three of their tanks with bazooka shots but only knocked one of them out, and I killed the commander of another with small arms, forcing the tank to retreat. Those bazookas don't seem very effective. I caused over 200 casualties, wiping out over half of their infantry, and held onto both objectives yet still only managed a tactical victory. I guess because they still had most of their tanks. I like it when the AI can pose a really serious threat like that. The fields outside the objectives were choked with so many corpses. My 81mm mortar alone caused 37 enemy casualties. I think my favorite scenario was the Bloody Aalst one though. It had a good mix of open fields on one side of the map, and the brutal, up-close urban fighting on the other side. And I liked all the artillery and tanks and vehicles and those Crusader AA tanks. I wish there were more Guards missions because they were usually my favorite.
  12. Some of the screens in this thread make me want to learn photoshop.
  13. Did I hear something about Chinese war movies? http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=t00seTQN7yI#t=1068 City of Life and Death, another movie about the Nanking massacres. Talk about depressing movies. Like the Chinese Schindler's List. Edit: dammit I was beaten by two minutes
  14. I just tried that lock bridge scenario for the first time, and I only took two casualties in the entire thing: I had a few minutes to spare at the end when the Germans surrendered as well. I'm reading this thread now and I'm amazed at all the difficulty some people are having with it. I think I got really lucky. I didn't think I was all that good at this game. At the start, I ordered a preplanned linear barrage all along that treeline across the river with the off-map 81mm mortars. Since it would take 8 minutes to call them in later, I didn't want to wait that long. I ordered them to use maximum ammo in "harass" mode, so the rounds kept falling for quite some time and it seemed to be pretty effective. Enough time would pass in between shells for the Germans to feel safe and pop their heads up again, only to take a face full of shrapnel when more shells came down. I split up all my squads and made the LMG teams stay behind and set up behind the hedgerows and in the top floors of those buildings at the start, and kept them there for the whole game. The MMG was set up behind a hedgerow. I got really lucky and managed to catch their bunker on fire in the first few minutes. My MMG team got the kill, and their bunker never caused a single casualty. The German HMG in the trench was taken out pretty quickly by one of my 60mm mortar teams, and my other 60mm focused on the AT gun. They didn't take it out, but their crew was shot up pretty badly and they never fired a shot in the whole game. My MG teams in the back kept them pinned until I was able get across the bridge to assault it. I sent one platoon across the open ground on the left side of the map, and the other into the woods on the right. The platoon on the right, along with the MGs in the back, provided covering fire for the other platoon to get across the bridge. From that point on it was just mopping up. I took both of my casualties in the last few minutes during the final assault. One of my assault teams found a second German HMG deployed on the first floor of one of their buildings and dispatched them easily. I think the 81mm barrage at the start may have forced them to retreat down to the first floor because they were in a terrible firing position. My men waltzed through the door and shot them all in the back. The rest of the Germans abandoned their positions and surrendered a couple of minutes later. This has been a really fun campaign so far. I still haven't lost a battle, but I did get a draw once from running out of time. Thank you Paper Tiger for making it. I like the balance between these small paratrooper missions and those huge Irish Guards missions with all the vehicles to play with.
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