Grey_Fox

What do commercial users do with the CM games that affects other commercial users?

So if a series of bugfixes have been ready to release for a few months now, why haven't they been? Is there a cost to releasing a patch?

@The_Capt Ngl I'm kind of annoyed that bugfixes which were completed months ago haven't been made available to customers. @BFCElvis not long ago you said PBEM++ was the only thing being worked on for the next patch.

Steam has been doing a lot of micro-updates recently to a lot of games, so I'm guessing it's more that Valve are doing some housekeeping on their end rather than actual updates to the games themselves.

Considering there are a number of bugfixes waiting on the CMCW patch (e.g. M113 .50 cals being able to see through smoke), is there any chance of releasing the patch without PBEM++?

That's all well and good post-hoc* rationalization, but from a gameplay point of view you're still forcing the player to use save scum in order to do recon, which is not good game design. If you actually want the player to have to rush into the fight, don't give them a pretend recon phase, or at least give them an indication of where they can anticipate enemy strongpoints to simulate pre-battle intel. *post-hoc because according to a previous post @domfluff linked you did actually give the player a 30 minute recon phase when you initially designed the scenario but then shortened it because "boring"

So I've been playing the first mission of the Soviet campaign a bit. A lot. A heck of a lot. It's almost a great mission, almost the best I've played in any CM campaign. But there's one thing at the start that turns it into a mediocre mission, which forces save scumming, and I hate it. When you start the mission, you have your CRP with an FO, and you have 10 minutes before the FSE shows up. 10 minutes in which to do recon, find the enemy, and call in suppressive arty. Bear in mind that call-in times for the 122mm guns without a TRP is 12 minutes (8 minutes with a TRP). You start with your CRP in the middle of a forest and it takes about 4-5 minutes to get your FO into a position from where he can start getting spots and calling in fire missions. When the FSE arrives, they start in a position overwatched by four M60s with TTS and one M901. That's five vehicles with thermal sights with line of sight on a 4-tank platoon of T62 (1975) and a company mounted in BTRs as soon as they spawn on the map. Why in the name of all that is good and holy would somebody do that to the player? I just don't understand. The lack of time to perform a genuine reconnaissance and location of the spawn point of the FSE are absolute killers - it forces the player to basically save scum and pretend that they have done the recon phase in order to have timely artillery support suppressing the tanks and M901s for the arrival of the FSE. The fact the player has a CRP and artillery support available at the start of the mission indicates that the player is supposed to do recon and use the FO to hit enemy positions prior to the arrival of the FSE. But the position of the CRP makes that impossible to do. The lack of time and spawn point of the FSE indicates that the player should already know the position of the enemy at the start of the mission and be suppressing the enemies overwatching the spawn point with artillery, but the player doesn't - at best they have tentative spots of 2 random vehicles across the entire map, and that's it. If you can survive the 11th minute in the mission, then it becomes an amazing mission. But that requires loading the mission, making a save, and hitting cease fire in order to know where to have your artillery coming in. And it's so frustrating as a player. By rights the player should have 20-30 minutes before the FSE arrives in order to allow them to conduct a proper reconnaissance at the start of the mission. If we had that, then it would be perfect.

Windows Defender/Security is probably the best antivirus software to use, since the third party software just interferes with the OS in potentially undesirable fashions and increase the threat surface area. Additionally it is frequently updated and plugs holes which third party producers may not even be aware of. 15-20 years ago it might have been advisable to use third-party antivirus software for your home PC, but not today, and not for at least the last decade.

Take a minute and read OP's first post in the thread. Think about it. Then re-read the post. Then think about it some more. Then ask yourself: "did my posts in this thread actually help OP?"

Per Elvis in the above link: "the original CMBN Game Engine 1 will not run on Windows 10. You need at least one of the Upgrades." That was my issue a few years ago. I guess I was mistaken in thinking that it applied to the other GE1 games.

This wouldn't be relevant for CW since it's on GE4. that I ran across that when I moved off windows 7 as GE1/2 won't run on I think Windows 8+.

Some people were having trouble with the Black Sea executable being quarantined by Windows Defender. Check to make sure that the executable still exists in the folder. Also check windows Event Viewer and look at timestamps for when you tried to launch the game for potential clues.

Tbf I don't mind PBEM. In my current Black Sea match, a huge QB, it took me about 2-3 hours to do terrain analysis and set up my defense. Some turns take me several minutes just to view the replay due to how much is going on. Additionally it allows me to play against people on different timezones, which would rarely be feasible in a direct-connect game.

The Midway example could be a good example as it was a tabletop staff/command exercise. However, and this is a big however, it could have been entirely valid to do what Yamamoto did if the exercise was done on a per-phase basis. Per Jon Parshall in a recent interview (as well as Ian Toll in Pacific Crucible), if the tabletop exercise goes badly in one phase, it'd be valid to say "ok, let's learn from that, work on a plan to mitigate after the exercise, and then move onto the next phase of the plan". Would you seriously expect people to throw away an operation involving hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of sailors and airmen just because there was a hiccup in one phase of a single tabletop exercise? Back to MC: it wasn't just the lower-levels, it also was designed to give commanders experience at implementing the doctrine, which adds value in itself.

MC is overblown - the guy running the opfor decided to powergame by placing anti-ship missiles (silkworms) on infinitely respawning small fishing boats which teleported into existence beside the carriers and using faster-than-light motorcycle riders to communicate with all his forces. Basically Van Riper took the existing training program and abused it to the limit. Once the referees realised what was happening they placed limitations to prevent further abuse, at which point Van Riper threw a public hissy fit. Also, you have to remember that this exercise was actually a training exercise involving thousands of troops and millions of dollars in expenses. What were they supposed to do, have the troops and dozens of ships go home when they were knocked out a few minutes into a multi-day training exercise? What value would that have brought them? Most exercises of this nature are done in discrete increments because you actually want troops to get experience doing these things. Who cares if the amphibious landing force was wiped out on the ships during the map exercise, better to have them actually go ahead with an actual landing and get experience doing that. Better the destroyers get to go and fire cruise missiles at targets even if they were nominally "sunk". Better the aircrew get the flight hours and experience dropping ordnance on targets than sit in the ready room because their carrier was "sunk". Which was the whole point of these real life exercises. MC wasn't meant to validate the doctrine, it was to teach the troops how to use it.

This is an invite link to the server: https://discord.gg/wf9Put6m Should work for a couple of days.

The chat logs are permanent, or at least I haven't found any cutoff points where chats become deleted. I don't know about other people but I tend to try to catch up with discussions that happen on the discord server. Additionally there is a search function that allows you to search by keyword, files, users, etc. As for chats becoming lost in the mist of time, this happens on forums as well unless you become adept at search functions or the forum is so lifeless that new topics are rarely created. At the end of the day it's neither better nor worse, it's just a different way of communicating.

edit: accidental double post.

Just that "real CM players use forums" is a fairly bizarre form of gatekeeping.

???

The only people who benefit in this additional taxation are the handful who can't compete with foreign goods. Everyone else suffers by having to pay higher prices. That's why free trade is good and I can't understand why people think that limiting cheaper imports is a good thing. Cheap imports increases peoples' spending power, which makes people better of. I don't get why people think international free trade agreements were causing some sort of tax fraud. This new tax is an example of double taxation - taxes were already being paid at the point of sale, and now people in the UK are having to pay VAT on imports on arrival. People in the EU now also have to pay local VAT on British exports too.

Well it's the latter since the UK no longer has the same trade agreement they had with the US as they had when they were in the EU. Purchases under a certain value from the US don't have additional tax applied for me, whereas it does in the UK.

I may have gotten my wording muddled. This is a high-level FAQ (parts 4 and 5 seem most relevant): https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/2021-brexit-top-50-faq.pdf This goes into more depth: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/brexit_files/vat-goods_en.pdf UK/US trade is also impacted (you can see from the screenshots in my first post as well as Elvis' comment) byt changes to taxation.

British consumers were getting tax-free purchases on imports up to a certain value, at which point tax was applied. The part you've left out is that British **exports** received the same benefits, so now customers of British companies face this new tax on all goods they purchase. So British consumers are paying more, and customers of British companies are paying more. It's a double whammy to both imports (people are now having to spend more for the same goods, which means they are poorer) and exports (which means companies have to find ways to cut back, and the easiest way to do that is to shed jobs).

Northern Ireland is still kinda sorta in the EU. The border is in the Irish Sea. But they're in a funny spot because a lot of companies in both Britain and the rest of the world ha e never been able to figure out if NI is a part of the UK or part of Ireland. There's many screenshots going back for years of people in NI trying to order stuff from British retailers and being told that they don't ship outside of the UK. This also goes for companies such as Amazon.