Canuck21

Should have mentioned I am on the Mac, so we don't have that first folder you mention . Either way, yes, everything is in the Z folder, and within their own folders within the Z folder. I just played a full default scenario with those mods (minus that one Quiet Sounds mod) with no trouble. I have a suspicion that I corrupted the scenario I was making somehow. I'm just going to kill it and start over with that one. I have another that I had started earlier and I don't know if I had that mod I suspected of being the issue installed or not. I doubt it so I may be ok with that one. I'll find out later today I guess. If that one goes ok, then I'm pretty convinced it's to do with this one scenario that I've been working on. I hope so. Thanks Erwin, appreciate your input. That helps.

Ok, I've started running into a problem with CMBN, and possibly other games. I don't know about the others as I've not tried them in a bit. I'll be going along fine in a scenario when all of a sudden the rifle sounds will become quite muted. I'll go to save the game, which appears to save ok, and then go to quit the game. However, the quit display screen comes up with the only option being "NO" and that button extends the full way across the quit menu window. When I show the DT and select the CMBN Menu, the option at the bottom is "Quit CMSF", which I don't even have. The only way out at that point is to force quit it. Additionally, the save that appeared to go ok, actually didn't. When I restart the game, that saved game file is not there. The previous one to that is (before the issue started). Now, I kind of suspect that it's a mod I have in that may be doing this but I really don't know. It's a working theory as the game worked fine until I started experimenting with mods a week ago. When the rifle sounds diminish in volume, it sounds like I have the original game file rifle sounds back. I say that because one of the mods I have in are the HQS Sounds, which gives you all new rifle sounds. The other mods I have in are the RH Animation Mod, Special Effects Mod (flames v3, hit decals, muzzle fire, muzzle flash, rocket flame, etc.), a Floating Icons mod set, Invisible Icons set, a Terrain Mod set (I believe there are several different mods in that), and a Tweaked UI Mod. So, my main question here is, has anyone experienced strange behaviour from any of those mods? If not, my next step will be to remove them all then add them back in one at a time. It will be a time consuming project because this doesn't happen every time I play it, although it is happening with increased frequency. It's not impossible that this isn't related to the scenario I'm making as well. When I first made it and saved it, I had another sounds mod installed that made soldiers quieter at night when moving and that too seemed to affect the rifle sounds (as well as other things) and it was right after that the issues started. I removed the mod, but perhaps something got saved in with the file from that mod? I don't know if that can happen. Anyway, if anyone has a clue on this here, please let me know. In the mean time I'm going to work on another scenario and I'll see if I get it in that as well. If not I may just scrap this scenario and move on. Thanks in advance .

Well, fast ain't necessarily better . I was blitzing the training on how to at least get something up and running, and decided to share those results. I'm not sure they're all that good though. Got more coming but these will be a little slower as I refine things a bit. Glad you're able to make use of them however .

The spreadsheet is ready for your inspection/use. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to post here or PM me. As always, it's use is entirely at your discretion and there is no implied warranty of any kind . The system requirements are that you have Excel and know a couple of basic functions like entering numbers and be able to do a Copy and a Paste Special > Value (there is an explanation on the sheet of how to do the latter). The zip file contains the spreadsheet and a PDF of instructions, although it's pretty easy to use once you've done it a couple of times. If you find you can only select certain boxes, those are the boxes that require your input. Otherwise, all the other cells have been locked and the sheet protected. That is done for ease of use, and to keep grandma, the kids, the wife and/or the dog from making "unwarranted" changes . I hope it helps and you find it useful. You can get it at the link below but also I'll have a link up on my website either later today or sometime over the weekend. Enjoy . Forces Quality Calculator for QB's and Self-Designed Scenarios

Nuts! I never even thought to try that for some reason (I just gotta start getting some sleep at night instead of playing these games ) . Thanks for clueing me in on this. Sheesh

So I'm doing some play testing now and for the most part, things seem to be working pretty well. However, this looks like (at this point) it's only going to work for QB's that are played player vs. the AI. This is because there is no Save Game option after picking the first force. This means you can't get your force selected and then hand it off to your PBEM opponent to choose his force. I've asked for a change to this in the Engine 5 Wishlist, but who knows. Anyway, I also noticed there is no Head Count option in QB's. As this spreadsheet is for those who wish to build their own scenarios to play as well as QB's, I may need to add a "switch" that turns on/off the Head Count modifier as it does affect the overall max points. So I'll work on that today, but this may not take too long. So far though, the play testing went really well. I've made a number of changes to it that have enhanced it nicely so we're really close. OH, and I need to finish writing up the Instructions for it (that could take weeks... <-- J/K ) Back in a bit .

Here's a suggestion/wish that I'll bet hasn't been seen yet. When selecting a QB battle, after selecting one side's force, have an option to save the game at that point. This would allow PBEM users to do QB's but still select their own forces (each). That could open up a whole new avenue of battles for people. Anyway, just a thought.

Sounds good. I'll be testing it thoroughly tomorrow and it should go up Friday. I'll let you know. Thanks for this.

Actually, I have yet to play a QB where I do all this . I'll let you know how I figure this out by the end of this week though. So far I've built the scenarios, thus the AI, and the AI fits the units (but then I'm selecting the units, so it's a Catch 22 thing). I'll have more info tomorrow though, if all goes well .

For those of you who are into doing a fair number of Quick Battle scenarios, I have built an Excel Spreadsheet to calculate force parameter values. What this spreadsheet does is build in some random values by using modifiers calculated from a random number generator, which are applied to the parameters: Experience, Motivation, Fitness, Leadership and Head Count. What you can do from this is build a force (human selected - both sides) meeting certain criteria according to what you want out of your forces. It will restrict you from building a "king-kong" type force so you'll have to make selections based on the modifiers that were generated. You may have some tough decisions to make about some of the parameters, depending on the latest "dice roll". Where this has come from is I like to build quick battles which are tiny (by my definition - Coy size for an attacking force is pretty much my maximum), which means that BF's definition of tiny is too large for me. As such, I select the forces myself (if I just select my size and let the AI do it's thing for the other side, they will vastly outnumber me in most cases). So to give me some structure and randomness with the quality of my forces, I will use this spreadsheet to set my parameters with, at the size of force that I want. If I want a very experienced force (let's say, "Crack"), then I may have to give up something somewhere else, such as Leadership values, head count, etc. Also, at the bottom, there is a force ratio calculator for the various types of battles. So if you want an Attack battle, and you want your forces to be between 2 and 3 to 1 in size (points), then you plug the number of points you chose for your forces, plus the multipliers you want to have as an advantage (2 and 3), and the number of points for the other side will be calculated for you. Once you've filled out your force, you can then go in and fill out your opponent's forces using the guide. The requirements will be you'll have to have MS Excel and the most advanced function you'll have to do in it is know how to copy & paste special - values (it tells you how to do that in the sheet). Other than that there are only a few fields to fill in and the rest is done for you. This sheet is really mainly for people who play QB's against the AI, but if you're doing a PBEM or H2H of any kind and want to generate original battles for that, this will enable you to add some randomness to your forces. I will be testing the sheet over the next day or two, so if anyone is interested, I'd be happy to make it available. If anyone would like to play test it, I'd be most appreciative of any feedback. There are no macros in this so viruses will not be an issue. Ok, I hope that makes some semblance of sense. I've been at this since early this morning and my brain is a little as I write this, so if you have questions, fire away below. Thanks for your time .

I know that some have had issues with unzipping my T Junction Scenario for CMFI + GL, found here and at The Few Good Men. This has now been resolved and the new file is up both at The Few Good Men and my site. Please see this post here for a bit more info, but if you've had problems decompressing it, re download the file and you should be good to go. Thanks and sorry for the problems.

G'Day. I know a few people have had issues unzipping my scenario called "The T Junction" for CMFI + GL. It's been quite sporadic but nevertheless I've been trying to figure out what the problem is. I think now I found an issue in the filename that could have caused the problem. I've modified the filename slightly and re-zipped it. It's now up on both my site as well as at The Few Good Men's site. Hopefully that will be the end of the issues with this file. I strongly suspect it will. Thanks to those who let me know when there were problems as well as when not. That helped me in finding the problem quite a lot. Have a good one and enjoy .

@Combatintman- Thanks hugely for this!! I'll definitely be having a good look at this tomorrow. I think this project just got moved to the head of the line .

Outstanding! Thank you for this !

@Pete Wenman - I see what you're saying, and it's probably reiterating most others' thoughts as well. You're absolutely right - the map making part is becoming a fair challenge for me. Certainly for historical areas (such as the Arnhem bridge, town centres where major battles were fought, etc.) yeah, I'll be looking long and hard for reasonably accurate data for those. Interestingly, I'm researching (very lightly at this point - this is **maybe** a scenario for later) the area around Buchholz and I used historical imagery from GE Pro. It was unreadable as I suspected, however I noticed that their was a separate image for Hamburg at the same time, for the same period. It was extremely clear for 1943 and totally useable. So it seems that some areas are fine (and that article I quoted did point out that some places in North Africa are also not affected by this, as @kohlenklau noted above). The focus of a lot of my scenarios is more in outlying countryside and small villages due to the fact I prefer tiny to small battles and interesting terrain to go with it. I've always found city/large town fighting more of a slog-fest (at least I did in ASL - probably the same here), especially when you get into using a larger force. That's where the coverage starts to fall apart, but your suggestion that things haven't changed a lot since WWII in outlying regions is encouraging. I went back and zoomed well out again after reading that and compared the 1943 data with the current data around Buchholz again and it sure looks similar to me. That's interesting. I come from a location where nothing is the same even from 20 years ago. Anyway, that helps a lot and encourages me that maybe I can still use overlays from GE Pro, with some referencing to historical imagery where appropriate. I'm maybe a bit fortunate in that with my work, it's primarily just the terrain I need be concerned about and that makes it a lot easier. It's a big difference between a tree dying and being replaced by another tree, and half the city of Caen being replaced and doubling in size with an expanding population . Thanks for this. I feel a lot more positive about this today than I did yesterday, I must admit.

Now, is that using historical imagery from Google Earth? I have a friend, who is a long time user of GE Pro, look at the same areas I was looking at for my GE maps (NW Europe and W Russia) and check out the historical imagery there. He got the same results I did. For 1985 imagery, it was a blurry mess and unreadable at 20 km altitude and below. For 1940 data he had to zoom well out, as did I. He found this as an explanation of what is happening, which for me anyway, is very disappointing. Perhaps there is a way around this, or others are not seeing this issue, but until I can figure ways around this, I'll stick with my "eyeballing" method, with using modern map overlays from which I'll cherry-pick elements that I think may have been there in the 1940's. Those will be based on historical photos, links for which were sent to me by a good friend recently. Anyway, it's not my intention to hijack this thread for yet another training session for me, but I just wanted to mention this in the context of this discussion. Good luck with the project @kohlenklau. Looks like a very worthwhile one!

There isn't one area at the moment that I'm looking at, although a couple of the small towns (which I'm not sure exist now as separate towns) north of Caen and just east of the Orne River are one place I'm considering. My main point though, is if others are using GE for this, and using the historical imagery, then I should be able to do so as well. There must be a setting that I don't have correct somewhere if that's the case. Thanks, I'll have a look for that. Someone emailed me some links this morning that should help and I think that site is among those. Right now I'm using your equation except for the old aerial recon photos. I had been using Google Maps, but again, it only shows modern imagery. That's where the imagination part came in. That part I have plenty of and what I was going on .

This is what I see when I zoom in a bit, and I'm still at 17 km altitude. This area is Caen and north to the coast. GE Pro Caen 1940 at 17km

@Combatintman - well, my slider only went back to 1985 unless I zoomed out to 20 km in height, then it went to 1940, but it's too low a resolution to use for the scale I need. I've not been able to find other settings that suggest I can go back further with a lower altitude or greater resolution, thus my question here. Now, I am looking away from key places such as major towns and cities, so maybe that's the reason. Not sure. I'll play with it a bit and see what I can find/figure out. Yes, I do know about searching out imagery for some key places, but for the small towns and countryside, the pickings are pretty slim. Those are the areas I'm most interested in, but also, they are references but wouldn't be that useful for an actual overlay I wouldn't think (scale, angle, positioning of the photo, etc.). Anyway, I'll play around with things and see what I can find and sort out.

Ok, I have GE Pro installed and working. I looked for an area near the mouth of the Orne River, which of course was easy to find, and clicked on the Historical Imagery button. It would only take me back to 1985, and even that wasn't of any use as I was trying to see the detail near a village there but the image was so blurry that nothing came into focus until I was about 20 km up. So, I did some searching on the web to see how to view historical data going back to 1945 or thereabouts (give or take 10 years), but drew a blank. Just to get me going initially, can you advise me as to how to go back to that time period (roughly)? I did pull up the drop down menu where you could manually input the date but it only went back to 1985 as well. Insofar as making overlays, yes, I have that part figured out and have done it for most of my current scenarios, so I'm good there. Thanks.

Ok, looks pretty cool. After reading this I've been trying to find out more about Google Earth/Pro. I'm seeing conflicting information in my search. First is, do you need GE Pro or can you do this in GE only? I'm simply going to the web based GE and I'm not seeing any of the features that are described in various videos so I assume you have to have the app installed. If it's GE Pro, one search result said that as of 2015 GE Pro was free, and another thread said in 2016 that there is a cost associated with it. Unfortunately for me, I'm a senior on a very fixed income so paying for another subscription isn't in the cards. Last question (for now) is can you get the topo map info (particularly contour lines) from GE/Pro itself or is that another source I need to locate? I'm definitely interested, but need a bit of info to make it happen . PS - I should also add that I've used overlays of maps in CM several times, but given we are constrained to 45 degree increments for things like roads and whatnot, I found it near impossible to get a decent representation for the actual layout of the land at times. I don't know how to fix that, unless you start bending roads every few metres or so, and that creates other problems (such as for transports). Is that just something we have to live with or can that be adjusted somehow as well? ADDENDUM - Actually, I found the info I need for Google Earth. My question still remains though, on getting the topo map info, particularly contour data. If you could clue me in on that, it would help. Thanks.

Oh yeah, I use that. To be honest, I prefer winging it. GE is great for current geography, but things have changed a great deal since WWII as you know. I do use Street View to get an idea of elevations though.

Sounds good. I'll be in touch soon re this. Whatever I sent you, please feel free to use if you can. Right now I'm not in a position to take this project any further. As I say, I'll be in touch shortly .

Wait a minute! You can't cheat in PBEM ??? Uhhh ohhh....

Well, I've made a fair number of maps, so that part I'm ok with. It was more with respect to the type of battles a map is designed for that prompted my question. However, I think the message about working on scenarios and not worrying about QB's at this time makes a lot of sense to me, so that's the direction I'll go in. Maybe down the road a ways I'll do some QB maps, but for now, no .