Rob2020

A trip to the island of Tristan da Cuhna must be the trip of a lifetime, located as it is in the middle of the South Atlantic, roughly equidistant from Africa and South America, and even more remote than the better known St. Helena. Here are two beautiful videos of the island. Tristan da Cunha - No Place Like Home is a 1989, hour-long episode of the Public Broadcasting Service's old Travels series, presented by John Heminway. The vid includes a stopover at St. Helena, with a visit to Longwood House. Time flies, and all of the younger people seen in this video are now old men and women in their 60s and 70s. I love the accompanying music, which I think is entitled The Water Is Wide, but after many different searches haven't been able to find this particular recording anywhere - it's one of those decades-long musical quests, of which I've had a couple over the years. I've even contacted Mr. Heminway himself a few years ago, but didn't get much of a useful response. A more recent vid is Tristan da Cunha 2016, and there are a good number of additional vids about the island on YT.

Okay, so in case anyone is interested, here we are, more than three-and-a-half years later, and I only recently (about two months ago) upgraded from Win7 to Win10. I always hesitate with OS upgrades because there always seem to be some of my games that don't like to cooperate. I've had no particular problems over the past 3.5 years since the Win7 support came to an end in early 2020. My AVG anti-virus stayed up to date, and as I rarely download anything and visit mostly sites I'm familiar with, virus threats were not an issue. Similarly, until recently Chrome continued to support Win7 users, and when that came to an end it did factor into my finally getting Win10. I still got Win10 for free, btw, although I had to get a disk off a guy on Ebay for $10 because the Microsoft website kept on throwing errors at me when I tried to upgrade through them. The one thing I despise about Win10, as do many people I think, is that it now forces you to get a Microsoft account. That company should have been broken up years ago. As some other people have said in another thread around here, the Windows OS is increasingly just being used to collect personal data. The autistic psychopath that owns much of the company should also have been jailed years ago, and definitely should be now, considering his actions during the past 3+ years.

Also, GoG has the old Great Battles Collector's Edition, for a few bucks. They don't list it specifically for working on Win10, but I would guess it probably does. The graphics are not as nice as Field of Glory, mentioned above, so that game might be the better way to go nowadays. I did play the Great Battles series years ago and they were good.

Still yet another irritating thing about these forums: When I'm looking at the list of threads, the right-hand side of the page shows the name of the last person that replied to a thread, along with the date of that last reply. Clicking on that date will of course take me to that last comment in the thread, as expected and as it should. However, clicking on a thread header along the left-hand side of the page does the same thing, when instead it should be taking me to the first comment in the thread. This is especially annoying if a person wants to read a multi-page thread from the beginning, because no matter what you click on, it will take you to the last comment, from where you have to make your way back to the first page. Addendum: In fact, as I'm currently browsing my way through this particular forum, it's becoming increasingly irritating always having to scroll up to the top of a page to get to the first post in a thread. Am I missing something?

Resurrecting an old thread here. As I mentioned in another thread recently, I'm addicted to making houses for Sims 2, and have been for many years. I don't actually play the game much, I just love making houses for it. Many players - certainly not all, but many - consider Sims 2 to still be the best iteration of the series and it remains popular. I originally got the game when it was first released, back in 2004, and then bought a couple of expansions. But at that time, I was frustrated by the limited building options and sold the stuff on Ebay a year or so later. Electronic Arts stopped development and support for the game in 2009, and a couple of years later I decided to acquire the entire set, especially since many desirable building options had been added by the several expansions over the years. I got all the discs cheaply, for about $150 total, and have been making Lots (houses) ever since. Nowadays, I play using a downloadable, no CD version of the game, since Win10 won't recognize some of my old DVD's because of the Securom copy protection that was put on them for a number of years during the mid 2000's. All of my Lot uploads going back several years can be found here. I have quite a few more besides these, but they are in various stages of completion. Unlike many prolific Lot builders for this game, I do not build primarily for aesthetics, but for functionality first. Everything on a Lot has to actually work, or there's no point in making it for the game, imo. Some Lot builders can't resist the temptation to create fancy looking designs that unfortunately often include things that aren't playable, and I don't do that. I strive to achieve functionality, realism, and aesthetics in all my builds. I feel compelled to add one final thing in regard to the Sims franchise. The online so-called "Community" for these games are easily the nastiest, most moronic bunch of cretans I've encountered in 40 years of computer gaming. Specifically and among other things, they seem to think that they actually have ownership rights to the custom material they create and upload. I do think that the Sims games, in particular Sims 2, is being used by certain small segments of the game-playing public to promote their depraved social and political agendas. And that's all I'll say about that here. I also sometimes still play the old Railroad Tycoon II Platinum edition game, which was the best iteration of that series. Great game. I also still play the old Civilization III game (GoG Complete version). I never progressed past Civ3 because starting with Civ4 they made mountains impassable - I mean, impassable for the duration of the game. Considering the map scales of these games, that is ridiculous and in no way even remotely realistic - and thus a complete game breaker for me. I tried Civ4 a couple of years ago for a couple of months, and liked everything about it - except the impassable mountains, which killed it for me. I guess the Civ series might be considered wargames, or at least 4X games. Since finally switching from Win7 to Win10 recently, those two or three are the only non-wargames currently on my harddrive (although the old, original CMx1 trio of games are also the only wargames I have currently installed - but I haven't actually played those in years. I also have the CMA and CMBS demos installed, which I should try playing one of these days). Some years ago, used to love playing online pool at the old Pogo site. Pogo still exists, but they gradually got rid of all their good games over the years, and I never go there anymore. I spent hours playing pool there, it was great. Hey, markshot, it occurs to me that we have similar tastes - railroad games and pool, specifically. I also need to reinstall SimCity 4. Haven't tried that newer city building game you mentioned, although I've heard good things about it and it's made by the same guy that made the SimCity series.

Special Forces Berlin I read it a couple of years ago and it was okay. There are, of course, a good number of YouTube videos about the Cold War, including this guy's channel, who has some intreresting ones based on his own experiences.

My wargaming history is probably like many others, having started with board games. I was very lucky in that Avalon Hill's The Russian Campaign happened to be my first real wargame, back in '77, bought at a Brentano's bookstore in Queens, NY, when I didn't even know such things existed. To date, it is still considered one of the best ever made, and considering the many dogs I could've picked that might have turned me off the hobby, I was lucky. Dabbled in a few other classic AH titles in those early years, but never too seriously. In '85 I bought a C-64 and spent many hours playing many SSI wargame titles, along with a few others (eg, Silent Service, Dungeon Master). Same for the Amiga a few years later. It was on the Amiga, in 1994 that I first played-by-email extensively, although only one game - Gary Grigsby's Second Front (forerunner of his War in the East). PBEM'd that for the better part of the year against a guy. The game actually didn't have a PBEM system built in, we just exchanged save-game files. We got half-way through when I had to quit because I was moving to another state, albeit only temporarily. Played a lot of Empire Deluxe (newer version available here) in those days too, along with the original Civilization and Railroad Tycoon. Also in the early 1990's, I had a subscription to Computer Gaming World, hands down the best computer gaming magazine ever published. Nowadays, all issues are available for free here. If you're a younger player and have never heard of this magazine, check it out, especially the early 1990's issues, and you will be amazed at the quality of the production. It's probably still a good resource for people contemplating playing older games, perhaps on DOSbox. Due to my move, I was out of the computer gaming picture for several years, between 1994 and about 1998, when I got my first MS compatible computer. However, the damage was done, and I was never again to be as avid a gamer as I was in the earlier years. One of the titles I've always regretted missing out on during those "missing years" were Grigsby's Steel Panthers series. Still, in the later 90's I played some Civ2, followed by Civ3, probably some more Empire Deluxe and a few lesser titles. By that time, I hadn't boardgamed for 20 years, but kept track of the goings on through the 'net. Got into the original Combat Mission in 2000. The hype for it in the online wargaming circles was daunting, mostly through word-of-mouth, and the game did not disappoint in the least. It was an epiphany. It simply blew away all other tactical computer wargames. Barbarossa and Afrika Korps followed and I played them, although again, not with the fervor of my earlier gaming years. Also around that time I acquired the games I had missed out on, but never got into any of them. I still have them all, including the updated Shrapnel Games version of Steel Panthers Main Battle Tank, but have only tinkered with it. The old graphics are kind of a turn off. It was the later 2000's when I found a steady PBEM opponent and we played the original trio of CM games for about two years. We would only play scenarios blind - that is, only scenarios that neither of us had played, and only by reading the general briefing and our own respective briefing. This is really the only way CM scenarios should be played, in my opinion - and only once. Although I've never created a scenario myself, this method gave me some insight into how I think scenarios should be constructed, and maybe one of these days I'll share those opinions. Most of the scenarios we ended up playing were reasonably good, some were very good, and a small number were not so good. Even though we played for about two years, we only ever played one scenario at a time, so we ended up playing maybe 40-50 total - not really that many. Although I had an almost-top-of-the-line computer built in 2008 (the one I'm still using), I never took the plunge into CMx2 - I mean the ones starting with Shock Force. I just had other stuff going on in real life and computer gaming didn't appeal as much to me as it did years earlier. I did visit the BFC website and glanced over the forums from time to time, but never bought any of the newer games. One game I did get into, starting about 2012, was making houses for Sims 2. To this day, I'm addicted to house building for that game, and the game remains considerably popular, with many people saying it is still the best in the series. I've never actually played the game too much, I just like making houses for it and uploading them for others to play. I'm also still occasionally playing Civ3. Never progressed beyond that because in my opinion the games starting with Civ4 are fatally flawed (can't move over mountains for the duration of the game? Really? Sorry, that breaks it for me). Still also play Railroad Tycoon II Platimun from time to time, a great game and the best in that series, imo. I only recently upgraded from Win7 to Win10 and decided to look into CM again. I've only downloaded a couple of the demos so far, and have only fired up one of them. I dunno, I'll probably buy a title or two eventually, although wargaming just doesn't appeal to me as much as it once did. I dunno, but between real life, surfing the 'net, and watching videos at various sites, there's just not much time left for actual gaming. Especially not if a game has a steep learning curve. It's not the games' fault, but my own apathy and laziness. This got played to death, back in '85-'88: The map graphics were stunning. The green dot is Midway Island. The blue thingies are task forces. The red thingie is just the cursor. Regardless, this game was tense!:

Here's another free image hosting site I've used for several years: https://imgbb.com/ No need to register, although you can if you want to keep your pics organized. Just upload a pic and grab the url. I've never had them delete a pic on me. Imgur recently said that they would delete any pics that hadn't been accessed for a period of time, I forget how long. Plus, it's obviously a Commie site... I do use it somewhat, because it's the only image hosting site accepted by a certain website I frequent. Okay by me, since they don't seem to be aware, or care, that I'm using them to host decidedly un-Communist pics, haha. Also, what tank is that?

Here's another thing I find odd about these forum pages. There's no hotlink back to the store front page. It's like these forum pages and the store pages are two totally unrelated websites. There's a banner across the top of every page of these forums, but clicking on it just takes a person back to the top forum menu. There's already the "Home" button near the top that does that, so I think the banner at the very top of the page should take a person to the front of the store page, especially since that banner contains the BFC logo. The way it is now, in order to go from these forum pages to the store front page, a person has to utilize their own browser bookmarks, assuming they have the store front page bookmarked. Am I missing something here? It would seem to me that a company would want smooth transitions between it's various web pages, not require potential customers to access their browser bookmarks to navigate from one part of a company's website to another.

Having played the original trio of games, some 20 years ago, I vaguely remember something about BFC having given ownership/copyrights/distribution rights of scenarios to players who designed them. Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this, or elaborate - and, is this still true for the newer games? Typically, of course, publishers/developers reserve all rights to anything made for their games, so I'm wondering what BFC's policy is in regard to user-made scenarios, maps, and so on.

In this case - and I never thought I'd ever say this - God might actually be a woman.

The Swedish Stridsvagn would be intriguing, but other than that...I dunno.

Never mind, I didn't realize the first six threads in this forum were pinned. Duh.

Something I don't understand about this forum software. For the lower level menus, such as the one this thread is in, there doesn't seem to be a way to list threads according to "Latest Replied To", which is the standard way forums work. While the "General Discussion" section of this subforum seems to work like that, the "CM2 General Tech Support" subforum doesn't, nor apparently do several other subforums. The "Sort By" option near the top left doesn't seem to allow a descending list of "Latest Replied To", and my profile page doesn't give me any options either. I've been to other forums where the software didn't allow members to "Unsubscribe" from threads, once they've responded to them, because they were using a "No frills" (cheap or free) version, but I've never seem a forum that didn't have descending lists of threads according to the dates they were last replied to. What's the deal with this?

Ah, cool, thanks, although I live alone, so I have little use for it.

And I can confirm that the above "trick" still works even after you've turned off your computer. I turn mine off at night, and the first thing I did this morning after opening my browser was press Ctrl+Shift+t and it took me right back to the MILF page on Pornhub where I left off last night before I went to bed.

Here's another useful little Windows tip many people don't know about: You know how you occasionally close a window or tab, only to change your mind a moment later and wish you hadn't closed it for some reason and want/need to go back to it? All you have to do it press Ctrl+Shift+t and the window or tab will reappear. And yes, you can do this repeatedly to bring back many previously closed windows and tabs. Try it.

Good point! I haven't mentioned this because I didn't want the discussion to get too complicated. I had this happen to me the other day when I posted a reply in this thread, wherein I unintentionally included a quote from member IanL in one of my replies to someone else. It's the post right below the one that has the Pat Benetar YouTube video. So yeah, it seems that if you start to make a post, then change your mind and navigate away from it, then come back to the thread at some later time to write a newer post, whatever was there from the previous time will still be there. Not sure if this happens every time, but it certainly happened to me in the example above. And, of course, by the time I noticed it, it was too late to edit. Another good reason to perhaps include a "Cancel" button, which would/should simply erase/delete a post-in-the-making.

Yes, I know that. Either just navigate to a different thread or click your browser's "Back" button to get back to the previous menu. Neither option is ideal, in my opinion. Firstly, navigating to another thread would first require scrolling to the top of the page to access the menu. Yeah, I know, "The Horror!", but if you happen to be at the bottom of a page, it's a small hassle. Secondly, while a person might want to cancel their comment, maybe they don't want to necessarily leave the thread. Maybe they are just not happy with the formatting of their comment and want to start all over again. I've actually already experienced this in the short time I've been here. I was merely observing that many, if not most other forum sites I visit, have a "Cancel" button to cancel a post being made without leaving the thread. It just seems to me that if there is a button for "Submit Reply", there should also be a button for "Cancel", or "Cancel Reply". Like I said, it's a minor thing, and I'm starting to feel sorry for having mentioned it. Edit: I'm also aware that certain forum functionalities might simply not be available, depending on the type of monthly subscription plan purchased by BFC from Invision Community.

I didn't mean "delete" after having made a post. I meant changing one's mind and deciding not to post after you've started. With most forum software, all you have to do is click a "Cancel" button, but here there is no such button and your only option is to use your browser's back button to revert to the previous menu level. Like I said, not a big deal, just meh. I can understand not allowing deletions after an hour, since that would disrupt threads. I also know the reason for not allowing edits after the first hour of posting, namely, so that a person involved in a discussion can't change something they wrote earlier and make false claims. All that said, I do greatly like the simplicity of these forums. So many others go overboard with their endless customizations and personalizations, which confuse more than anything else. Meh, well, whatever, just play the damn games, right?

I played Second Front to death, 30 years ago.

Does this forum software not have a "Cancel" option when replying to a thread? I only see a "Submit Reply" button. It seems that if I change my mind about replying to a thread, my only option is my browser's "Back" button, which throws me out of the thread and back into the previous menu. Also, no "Preview" option, which I miss more. Not a big deal in the overall scheme of things, but...meh. Additionally, there was something else I wanted to ask, but now I forgot. Damn old age. Edit: OK, I just remembered - edits are allowed for only an hour after posting? And no spell checker? Triple whammy: No spell checker, no preview and no edits after an hour. Ugh. Nowadays, I'm surprised you're getting anyone to post anything legible at all.

And, once again, I screwed up by putting this thread in CM2 Tech Support, when it really probably belongs in General Discussion Forum. Sorry, I'll get used top this place.

I'm using Chrome on Win10, and for me the menu disappears at 150%. However, these percentages are greatly affected by the setting of text size that a person uses on their browser (as I just tested this). On my Win10, a slider for the adjustment of text size is found in: Settings > Ease Of Access. Using that slider, I have my text size set to 125%, which happens to be the same percentage as the setting I adjusted to here at the site by pressing Ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel. At other sites, those two settings might not necessarily be the same, depending on the website layout. When I increased the slider setting to a huge 200%, the Battleground Front Page menu went away at about 100%, adjusted with Ctrl and mouse wheel. So, yeah, might be something the admins should consider. As I said previously, yesterday I was only one notch away from being able to see/not see the menu. I mean, it works fine for me now, since I know what the problem was, but some other potential customers might run into this issue as well. And, frankly, my vision isn't that bad, as I only use reading glasses. I don't need glasses for anything else.