Thinking about getting Black Sea or Red Thunder

[Zemke]

Been out of Combat Mission for a long time, bought Shock Force and then lost interest, mostly because I was living the real thing in Afghanistan.  I have down loaded both demos and like some of each.  I like the east front setting of RT, but I also liked all the modern toys, and complexity of modern combat.  One issue I had with the demo, I could never get my M1A2s to attack in the demo scenario, they keep popping smoke and backing up when they got lased, which was/is a turn off.  I was like, "Hey I know you are getting lazed, now go kill it or kill something and stop hiding!"  Anyway, is there a way to turn this off in the real game?  Any suggestions on which game is better?

 

Old School CM Player

[A co]

There was a fairly complete discussion of the laser warning/popping smoke/ backing up issue on this forum a while ago. Some other people didn't like it either, but it can't be turned off. If you're moving 'fast' the vehicle will not back up when it gets lased, I think. 

RT probably has an easier learning curve because it depicts older more familiar tech. I doubt you'd regret purchasing either game. I haven't got BS yet only because I'm busy having too much fun with the WWII titles.

[JoMac]

Go WWII, and don't look back...err, I mean forward :-)

 

Joe

[John Kettler]

Zemke,

 

It comes down, I think, to personal preference. CMRT lets you fight in Ukraine, and so does CMBS. So if it's the East you want... To me, CMRT covers a less interesting period of the GPW in that the Germans are by then heavily infantry centric, facing a Red Army with tanks galore. I'd rather fight earlier. By contrast, CMBS gives both sides a most impressive range of capabilities simply not in any WW II title. Things unfold far more rapidly and decisively, too. One minute of combat in CMBS can inflict losses so severe as to be almost incomprehensible. Something no doubt to do with near unity hit probabilities (WW II average was 17 rounds to hit a standing tank at 1500 meters) for the best MBTs of all sides--while moving at a good clip. Combat Mission has always punished the player's mistakes, but the costs of mistakes have gone up dramatically. BLUFOR and REDFOR have nasty high tech weapons now, and that makes a huge difference in tactics. I almost bought CMFI because of the rich tactical and visual experiences it offered ( two modules, with a third coming, not to mention escaping the claustrophobic confines of the bocage and getting to have and see cool Allied vehicular camouflage). But my interest in modern warfare,  which I was board and miniature wargaming before I ever became a military analyst and worked on many tactical and and a few strategic weapon programs, ultimately led to my selecting CMBS. I found the game, with only minor CMx2 experience via CMBN, to be easy to get into, immersive and positively thrilling--as opposed to my CMBN slog. I suggest you play the demos and see what you respond to viscerally. Buy that one!

 

Just so we're clear, I've barely dabbled,  had health crises and cyber crises simultaneously around then,  in the CMRT demo,never mind the game. What I'm talking about are the tactical realities depicted in that game, realities which are driven by the operational-strategic situation in which the Germans are on the defensive and trying to hold onto key terrain, transport hubs, population centers, manufacturing facilities, food production, mining regions and more. The shoe is on the other foot, and it's the Red Army now with oodles of tanks, infantry, fire support and tacair. It's the Red Army dashing forward for huge distances, not the Germans. CMBS lets you play down two separate operational-strategic event tracks: one in which the Allies win, the other in which Russia wins. In CMRT, there is no way the Germans can reverse the strategic realities, so there is only one track.

 

Regards,

 

John Kettler 

Edited August 25, 2015 by John Kettler

[gnarly]

Zemke,

 

..... But my interest in modern warfare, which I was board and miniature wargaming before I ever became a military analyst, ultimately led to my selecting CMBS. I found the game, with only minor CMx2 experience via CMBN, to be easy to get into, immersive and positively thrilling--as opposed to my CMBN slog.

 

.....

Regards,

 

John Kettler 

 

 

 

Hi John, I am just curious what you mean by 'slog' here? Is it primarily the Bocage and its claustrophobia/maze-like effects/etc?

 

I'll be awhile settling on a purchase (working my way very slowly through all the demos), but very interested in others quite differing outlooks on the various CM titles. Interestingly Shockforce is currently where I feel most comfortable (probably from playing an awful lot of ARMA2 with a lot of middle east/insurgent scenarios), but its age and lack of some of the newer CM capabilities (not to mention I see it being impossible to eventually find a PBEM opponent when playing US vs insurgents) is a detractor.

Edited August 25, 2015 by gnarly

[MikeyD]

In the game eventually your armor will run out of smoke then you can see why they were backing away. Modern war is murderously lethal. Which for some people is vexing, for others its FUN FUN FUN!   

 

Don't forget you have Sicily and Italy to choose from too. For a lot of players the question isn't so much which game to purchase as which game to purchase first! 

[George MC]

Been out of Combat Mission for a long time, bought Shock Force and then lost interest, mostly because I was living the real thing in Afghanistan.  I have down loaded both demos and like some of each.  I like the east front setting of RT, but I also liked all the modern toys, and complexity of modern combat.  One issue I had with the demo, I could never get my M1A2s to attack in the demo scenario, they keep popping smoke and backing up when they got lased, which was/is a turn off.  I was like, "Hey I know you are getting lazed, now go kill it or kill something and stop hiding!"  Anyway, is there a way to turn this off in the real game?  Any suggestions on which game is better?

 

Old School CM Player

Hi Zemke

I added some notes in the scenario designer bit of Rolling Thunder that'll help you manage your M1s. It's worth noting that anything that can lase the M1 in this scenario stands a good chance of killing it

[John Kettler]

gnarly,

 

I started playing CMx1 back with the Beta Demo, and was at it until I belatedly (ordered late January of 2012) got into full CMBN (delayed by major resource constraint) just before CMFI debuted. While the facts that I was recovering a serious head injury and in a chaotic environment didn't help, the real issue was that CMx2 was for me an alien and even alienating experience. Overwhelming and utterly unfamiliar pretty much across the board. The workload was through the roof, dealing with infantry was like herding cats, nothing worked the way it did before, as in no command lines, no Cover Armor Arcs and no Ambush command. Morale worked completely differently, troops didn't rally as before. Nor was there any kind of global force morale meter. 

 

Terrain, whose military effects were known in CMx1, was no longer deterministic but very fuzzy. Dealing with spotting the new way (not the familiar Borg spotting) like to drove me nuts, as I wrestled with the whole business of something being there, then disappearing when I tried to shoot at it. No longer could I tell the tank to fire HE. Instead, I had to hope the AI, operating under Target Heavy, would do the right thing. And if you didn't pay close attention, you could easily run out of ammo, too. Infantry could and did run out of ammo. Bazookas would fire while well out of effective range. Men would wreck dawn attacks by shooting at some dimly seen target way across the map (didn't know about short radius cover arcs which everyone needed to have). Troops wouldn't fight from behind a wall but positioned themselves on the incoming fire side. If a tank bumped a bridge wall or abutment it would stick as though glued and would take a lot of effort to extricate. Not good in the presence of antitank weapons! The AI seemed to be able to find me at will and shoot me, while I stood on my head and wound up with so little targeting info I ran a Sherman completely out of HE and nearly did that for a second. Naturally, it killed the one remaining tank with a nearly full ammo load while leaving me with "Nearly Winchester."

 

We lost all flame weapons. Trenches, formerly invisible before until quite close and providing great protection to things like ATGs, were now visible from the get, and targeted accordingly. We lost practically every antiaircraft gun. To keep ATGs alive, you had to put them in tall grass. Talk about counterintuitive! Rather than slit trenches, we wound up with huge ones easy to drop projectiles into and sitting at only half depth into the ground, hugely increasing occupant exposure to fire.  I was quite unnerved by taking deadly tank fire through considerable dense woods, something flatly impossible in CMx1. The AI could thread the needle with shots I couldn't begin to expect, because there was too much info to process and, unlike me, the AI never blinked, never wavered in its focus and attention to detail. In truth, the one thing I was really good at was handling artillery. There, I was murderous.

 

I did the training scenario okay, but when I thought I'd be getting a fairly simple, small force size one next. Because the scenarios weren't organized starting with the smallest but alphabetically (?) I found myself in "Can't recall the title" with loads of infantry I didn't know how to handle and kept forgetting to move some, Sherman tanks practically nose to tail on a narrow road with Germans seemingly everywhere, yet unseen. A massacre ensued, and it was only by dint of good coaching that I learned to find battles of a size I could handle. Where I got repeatedly slaughtered! There were whole categories of capabilities missing from CMx2 which were in CMx1 and, yes, the very real claustrophobic effects of the bocage, which were so bad that simply looking at one of those scenic CMFI maps made me feel better--and CMRT's lovely steppe better still--got to me.

 

Weapon siting was outright insanity inducing for me. To the point where I raged, cursed, nearly punched the screen in total frustration. What was trivial in CMx1 became a Sisyphean ordeal in CMx2. The Pak-40 I carefully keyholed at a wall corner mysteriously repositioned away from the corner, rendering the position useless. The gun would wind up protruding through a stone wall or simply into and uselessly, the the wall of a house. If I carefully sited it in a small gully with the barrel close to the ground, the gun would either move to the bottom of the gully with no LOS or put itself at the top in plain sight. Fortunately, by the time I got the full game, it was much more capable than the still to be updated from (gasp) 1.03 demo. Infantry would leave the gully and parade about in front of the gully and get gunned down. And the only way to avoid that was to micro manage the movement of every single idiot of a soldier I had. 

 

And while dealing with all these things, I was having all sorts of maddening computer problems and intermittent health stuff, sometimes simultaneously. Consequently, every time I started to have some small grasp of the game, I'd wind up being unable to play, at times, for months. I'd then, because my memory was having injury related and medication side effect issues, keep having to pretty much start over. I play intuitively, and bocage warfare is meticulous business in which a single lapse can result in devastating losses.  I eventually got to the point where I finally beat the AI, but that was with armor, "Cats Chasing Dogs", not infantry, something true for quite some time. I got my infantry chewed up, butchered and turned to hamburger, "18 Platoon," "Attack at Dawn," before finally winning outright with the paras in Bridge at Varreville. A glorious day!  The below OP and thread should give you some idea of how vertical my many times restarted learning curve was. I got to the point where I felt flat out stupid and wondered why I was torturing myself trying to play a game I characterized as user hostile at times. The manual definitely met that criterion. coming from such crisp, clear efforts as the CMBO Manual, I found CMBN's to be the utter triumph of style over functionality. Low contrast, blurry and only available online, not shipped with the game. Even the best version in my copy of the game (sepia on white BG) still has major issues, notably the various screenshot inserts.

 

http://community.battlefront.com/topic/104277-john-kettler-vs-cmbn-the-learning-curve/

 

It took me essentially three years of sadly very intermittent play to get to the point where I had my first PBEM in CMBN. Three years! Granted, that's not remotely typical, but if you read the thread, it took one guy 20 games to get to the point where he could really PBEM. And that PBEM for me, "Bridge Number Seven" vs SLIM, had to be called because of some unfixable problem with getting into a turn--with 18 minutes left on the clock. Gah!

 

You now probably wish you hadn't asked, but you should have a very good understanding of why I used the word "slog." I can't recall ever, and I've been wargaming since age 12, going through anything to rival the exceedingly protracted, practically across the board maceration and pulverization I've undergone to play CMBN. Amazingly, though, I've found CMBS, which does stuff at lightning speed compared to CMBN and is vastly more complex, to be quite approachable. But it helped I had at least a basic understanding of how to do things in CMx2, transferable readily to V 3, as well as a lifelong interest in modern warfare and 11+ years of total immersion during my days as a professional military analyst. that said, I'm in a long game of catchup ball, since many Russian weapons in CMBS didn't exist or were own in the most rudimentary, and even wrong, of ways. and let's not get started on learning to think of these weapons in terms of GRAU designators!

 

Regards,

 

John Kettler

Edited August 25, 2015 by John Kettler

[Jammersix]

My suggestion is that if you run a Mac, wait until they fix it.

 

Although you could be waiting a long time, they never did fix the 81% bug in Shock Force.

[George MC]

gnarly,

 

I started playing CMx1 back with the Beta Demo, and was at it until I belatedly (ordered late January of 2012) got into full CMBN (delayed by major resource constraint) just before CMFI debuted. While the facts that I was recovering a serious head injury and in a chaotic environment didn't help, the real issue was that CMx2 was for me an alien and even alienating experience. Overwhelming and utterly unfamiliar pretty much across the board. The workload was through the roof, dealing with infantry was like herding cats, nothing worked the way it did before, as in no command lines, no Cover Armor Arcs and no Ambush command. Morale worked completely differently, troops didn't rally as before. Nor was there any kind of global force morale meter. 

 

Terrain, whose military effects were known in CMx1, was no longer deterministic but very fuzzy. Dealing with spotting the new way (not the familiar Borg spotting) like to drove me nuts, as I wrestled with the whole business of something being there, then disappearing when I tried to shoot at it. No longer could I tell the tank to fire HE. Instead, I had to hope the AI, operating under Target Heavy, would do the right thing. And if you didn't pay close attention, you could easily run out of ammo, too. Infantry could and did run out of ammo. Bazookas would fire while well out of effective range. Men would wreck dawn attacks by shooting at some dimly seen target way across the map (didn't know about short radius cover arcs which everyone needed to have). Troops wouldn't fight from behind a wall but positioned themselves on the incoming fire side. If a tank bumped a bridge wall or abutment it would stick as though glued and would take a lot of effort to extricate. Not good in the presence of antitank weapons! The AI seemed to be able to find me at will and shoot me, while I stood on my head and wound up with so little targeting info I ran a Sherman completely out of HE and nearly did that for a second. Naturally, it killed the one remaining tank with a nearly full ammo load while leaving me with "Nearly Winchester."

 

We lost all flame weapons. Trenches, formerly invisible before until quite close and providing great protection to things like ATGs, were now visible from the get, and targeted accordingly. We lost practically every antiaircraft gun. To keep ATGs alive, you had to put them in tall grass. Talk about counterintuitive! Rather than slit trenches, we wound up with huge ones easy to drop projectiles into and sitting at only half depth into the ground, hugely increasing occupant exposure to fire.  I was quite unnerved by taking deadly tank fire through considerable dense woods, something flatly impossible in CMx1. The AI could thread the needle with shots I couldn't begin to expect, because there was too much info to process and, unlike me, the AI never blinked, never wavered in its focus and attention to detail. In truth, the one thing I was really good at was handling artillery. There, I was murderous.

 

I did the training scenario okay, but when I thought I'd be getting a fairly simple, small force size one next. Because the scenarios weren't organized starting with the smallest but alphabetically (?) I found myself in "Can't recall the title" with loads of infantry I didn't know how to handle and kept forgetting to move some, Sherman tanks practically nose to tail on a narrow road with Germans seemingly everywhere, yet unseen. A massacre ensued, and it was only by dint of good coaching that I learned to find battles of a size I could handle. Where I got repeatedly slaughtered! There were whole categories of capabilities missing from CMx2 which were in CMx1 and, yes, the very real claustrophobic effects of the bocage, which were so bad that simply looking at one of those scenic CMFI maps made me feel better--and CMRT's lovely steppe better still--got to me.

 

Weapon siting was outright insanity inducing for me. To the point where I raged, cursed, nearly punched the screen in total frustration. What was trivial in CMx1 became a Sisyphean ordeal in CMx2. The Pak-40 I carefully keyholed at a wall corner mysteriously repositioned away from the corner, rendering the position useless. The gun would wind up protruding through a stone wall or simply into and uselessly, the the wall of a house. If I carefully sited it in a small gully with the barrel close to the ground, the gun would either move to the bottom of the gully with no LOS or put itself at the top in plain sight. Fortunately, by the time I got the full game, it was much more capable than the still to be updated from (gasp) 1.03 demo. Infantry would leave the gully and parade about in front of the gully and get gunned down. And the only way to avoid that was to micro manage the movement of every single idiot of a soldier I had. 

 

And while dealing with all these things, I was having all sorts of maddening computer problems and intermittent health stuff, sometimes simultaneously. Consequently, every time I started to have some small grasp of the game, I'd wind up being unable to play, at times, for months. I'd then, because my memory was having injury related and medication side effect issues, keep having to pretty much start over. I play intuitively, and bocage warfare is meticulous business in which a single lapse can result in devastating losses.  I eventually got to the point where I finally beat the AI, but that was with armor, "Cats Chasing Dogs", not infantry, something true for quite some time. I got my infantry chewed up, butchered and turned to hamburger, "18 Platoon," "Attack at Dawn," before finally winning outright with the paras in Bridge at Varreville. A glorious day!  The below OP and thread should give you some idea of how vertical my many times restarted learning curve was. I got to the point where I felt flat out stupid and wondered why I was torturing myself trying to play a game I characterized as user hostile at times. The manual definitely met that criterion. coming from such crisp, clear efforts as the CMBO Manual, I found CMBN's to be the utter triumph of style over functionality. Low contrast, blurry and only available online, not shipped with the game. Even the best version in my copy of the game (sepia on white BG) still has major issues, notably the various screenshot inserts.

 

http://community.battlefront.com/topic/104277-john-kettler-vs-cmbn-the-learning-curve/

 

It took me essentially three years of sadly very intermittent play to get to the point where I had my first PBEM in CMBN. Three years! Granted, that's not remotely typical, but if you read the thread, it took one guy 20 games to get to the point where he could really PBEM. And that PBEM for me, "Bridge Number Seven" vs SLIM, had to be called because of some unfixable problem with getting into a turn--with 18 minutes left on the clock. Gah!

 

You now probably wish you hadn't asked, but you should have a very good understanding of why I used the word "slog." I can't recall ever, and I've been wargaming since age 12, going through anything to rival the exceedingly protracted, practically across the board maceration and pulverization I've undergone to play CMBN. Amazingly, though, I've found CMBS, which does stuff at lightning speed compared to CMBN and is vastly more complex, to be quite approachable. But it helped I had at least a basic understanding of how to do things in CMx2, transferable readily to V 3, as well as a lifelong interest in modern warfare and 11+ years of total immersion during my days as a professional military analyst. that said, I'm in a long game of catchup ball, since many Russian weapons in CMBS didn't exist or were own in the most rudimentary, and even wrong, of ways. and let's not get started on learning to think of these weapons in terms of GRAU designators!

 

Regards,

 

John Kettler

Jings mate - you do spout some tosh...

Edited August 25, 2015 by George MC

[John Kettler]

gnarly,

 

...I'm in a long game of catchup ball, since many Russian weapons in CMBS didn't exist or were known in the most rudimentary, and even wrong, of ways... Regret any confusion I may've caused.

 

George MC,

 

It may seem like nonsense to you, but it was my experience. And the contemporaneous record is there in the referenced thread, though doubtless my memory's off in a number of places.

 

Regards,

 

John Kettler

Edited August 25, 2015 by John Kettler

[Baneman]

...

It may seem like nonsense to you, but it was my experience. And the contemporaneous record is there in the referenced thread, though doubtless my memory's off in a number of places.

...

 

You do, though, give the impression that the game is ludicrously difficult to play, which is not the experience of the bulk of customers.

[John Kettler]

Baneman,

 

My legitimate experience was that I had a terrible time getting going on the game. That doesn't make the game bad, but I'm hardly the only person who had a tough time of it coming in from CMx1. In fact, there were people who tried CMx2, hated it and went back to CMx1. Also, from what I can tell, we have a fair number of Forumites who still play CMx1 and play CMx2. I further indicated all the issues on my end which made things extra rough in my particularly grueling  journey of coming to grips with CMx2, as first expressed in my own encounter with the CMBN Demo and, later, the full game. Understand, too, there was no Mac version of CMSF, thus, no CMSF Demo on which I could've first "teethed," so to speak. Reading about a new game engine simply isn't enough to prepare someone for the fundamental upending of reality as it was known before. Making such an extreme transition, judging by a lot of posts I read, was hard on many members, but I was trying to do the same thing while in far worse shape--by just about any way you wish to measure such things. I put qualifiers and caveats galore in what I wrote; went to great and explicit lengths to practically scream "This was my personal experience, but YMMV, yet you insist on portraying my post as portraying my level of difficulty as being typical, but that's your interpretation of what I wrote, not what I actually said. I'm glad the typical buyer didn't go through what I had to. As I said, it got so bad I nearly attacked my computer; I cursed; I cried out in anguish and frustration, and though I didn't say it, there were times I felt like banging my head into the wall--despite being badly disrupted by an unplanned prior encounter with a wall corner! You have no real understanding of what it was like on my end. How broken and befogged, with memory badly compromised by both the injury and side effects of meds; of being exhausted much of the time, not to mention in a lot of pain I was while coming to grips with CMBN. For months on end, months in which I could've had a leg up in terms of learning the basics, I had no computer, for it was in storage because my medical sojourn was sufficiently protracted that I had to move out. Consequently, once out, I wound up for an ugly chaotic time in a group home until I was again well enough to be able to fend for myself. And this is but a partial list. Tell you what, if you pay for it, I'll hire a skywriter to be sure entire cities know that my CMBN experience was anything but the norm. How's that?!

 

Regards,

 

John Kettler

Edited August 25, 2015 by John Kettler

[Zemke]

Oh I am very familiar with the lethality of the modern battle field, just would like the option of telling those tanks to "Disregard" and attack!  But if one laser designator can stop an entire attack, I can see how that could possibly be exploited.  In real life if you knew that, you would try and locate the laser designator, and not sure if these tanks have this, but the laser warning system should give you a back azimuth to make that easier.  Anyway, I still could see the need to "order" those tanks forward, if the situation required it.  Granted taking the high chance of losing a 12 million dollar M1A2 SEP tank and crew would not be good, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

[A Canadian Cat]

Here is the best thread where this was discussed: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/120272-auto-smoke-dispenser-should-players-have-more-control/ See post #8 from a US tanker (pretty much the definitive answer) and post #9 where I outline how the behaviour works and the one thing you can do to influence it.

[gnarly]

@John Kettler.

 

Many thanks for the feedback, I certainly now have a much better understanding of your definition of slog! I do apologize though; I feel like I've inadvertently picked the scab of an old wound of yours. 

 

But I do appreciate your detailed commentary, and I can understand the impacts the changed engine architecture between CMx1 and CMx2 would have had on your experience (not that I've played CMx1).

 

Much appreciated!

[Jammersix]

Jings mate - you do spout some tosh...

 

Uhm...

 

Is that good or bad?

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Uhm...

 

Is that good or bad?

 

Yes

[gnarly]

@George MC, I have to ask seeing your avatar, are you (or were you) a mountaineer, lobotomized ice climber, or rock climber??       Based on your location, I am guessing one of the first two?

 

I have that book on my coffee table...

Edited August 26, 2015 by gnarly

[John Kettler]

gnarly,

 

You are most welcome. I'm glad you found my (unintentionally somewhat cathartic for me) lengthy discourse of value. 

 

Regards,

 

John Kettler

[c3k]

Zemke,

 

Both games (RT and BS) have pros and cons. The biggest issue is whether you want to play with modern weapons or WWII. WWII is more "honest". Modern is brutally lethal. If your fundamentals aren't there, CMBS will expose them via KIA/WIA and pyres. CMRT allows a bit more forgiveness. 

 

As mentioned, that "laser warning" tells your tankers that they're about to die. There are tactics that can ameliorate the disruption that a laser warning causes: FAST move, higher motivation crews, overwatch units, etc.

 

(As for John Kettler's cathartic prose, I think he'd be the first to admit (in fact, he has, and on multiple occasions) that he has some coping issues with complex situations such as those presented by these games. Take the good from his posts, but filter them based on his own admissions of how easily he can become overwhelmed.)

 

Regards,

Ken

[MikeyD]

If I may re-repeat something I've said before (perhaps too often), learning to play CM is like learning to drive stick. No, its certainly not impossible. No, there's nothing mechanically wrong with your car. Yes, people have great fun drive stick every day without giving it a moment's thought. And initial attempts to parallel park do not show the whole concept of the manual transmission to be 'fatally flawed'. 

[Jammersix]

No, there's nothing mechanically wrong with your car.

 

Either your comparison breaks down here or you're not aware of my "car".

 

I've submitted three tickets about what is wrong with my installation of CMBS without an answer from the Mac programmer, let alone a resolution.

 

I can't play a PBEM game with my machine, and no one here has been able to convince it to work. I'm not the only one, but I may be the only one who doesn't think it has something to do with the sun, or who thinks it can be resolved here on earth.

 

I'm hoping you can suggest something that works with my "car". Because there is absolutely something wrong with it.

[LukeFF]

doubtless my memory's off in a number of places.

 

Yes

[sburke]

Either your comparison breaks down here or you're not aware of my "car".

 

I've submitted three tickets about what is wrong with my installation of CMBS without an answer from the Mac programmer, let alone a resolution.

 

I can't play a PBEM game with my machine, and no one here has been able to convince it to work. I'm not the only one, but I may be the only one who doesn't think it has something to do with the sun, or who thinks it can be resolved here on earth.

 

I'm hoping you can suggest something that works with my "car". Because there is absolutely something wrong with it.

Windows.  Yeah I know, it is probably just about the very last thing you want to hear.  Other folks are doing PBEMS with Macs, but generally the issues you hear about that seem to take a lot longer to resolve are on Macs.  Steve is a Mac user so it isn't like there is no interest at BF in fixing Mac issues, they just seem to be particularly difficult/sensitive.