Bug or strange design choice in German Unit Portraits ?

[Philippe]

I was playing around with trying to convert my CMBB German Unit Portrait mod to CMAK.

I'm still not entirely sure I understand how it works, but I'm starting to see some broad parameters.

So it didn't take me too long to figure out that I needed to convert all the period one figures to desert garb, and then fiddle around with the later period figures that I wasn't happy with and that I had replacements for.

So far, so good.

So I do a quick replacement job on the Period One Fallschirmjaegers, and slip them into something they'd be comfortable with in North Africa and Sicily (even though the game engine doesn't work that way). I figured I worry about what to do about the majors and hauptmans after I got everything else sorted out.

So I go to test it.

I load up a Quick Battle, and everything looks as it should. Need soft hats for the seniors, but otherwise no serious problems. The result looks like this:

Then I notice that there are a lot of scenarios that take place in Crete.

Since I spent a lot of time there before Club Med moved in (and used to be camped out in the caves at Matala), I couldn't resist firing up a few scenarios from what used to be my favorite island.

So I clicked on a German paratrooper and, to my horror, this is what I saw:

At first I thought it was a silly designer's mistake. But I dug a little deeper and found that, sure enough, German Paratroopers from the invasion of Crete use German Regular Infantry portraits.

I'll be charitable and suggest that this is an artefact of a rushed development process.

But the problem remains: what to do about the Cretan Paratroopers?

I'm pretty sure I have enough early war non-desert style paratrooper images to fill five slots.

The problem is, where to put them?

I also have several options for options for the German regular army infantry: one is essentially bareheaded but in greenish uniforms (and easily identified as non-Luftwaffe), the other is desert garb but equally non-Luftwaffe for different reasons.

The ideal solution would be for BTS to fix or do sumfink.

But they won't.

(Not unless the Easter Bunny shows up with my Vichy French, which will never happen -- but I'd still love to re-enact an American assault force from Operation Torch surrendering to a French counter-attack with Renaults, or Moshe Dayan and the Jewish Brigade liberating Syria).

Which brings us to the point of this post. (There really is one, honest).

I'm assuming that German forces in the Libyan/Egyptian phase of the North African campaign will be DAK panzergrenadiers. This is a big assumption, and if I'm wrong I need to be corrected on this.

I'm also assuming that any Period One Regular German infantry that show up will only appear in the Tunisian phase.

So my question is, are there really any Period One Regular German infantry that get used in Tunisian battles apart from Quick Battles ?

Because if there aren't, I'm sorely tempted to turn the period one Wehrmacht infantry into period zero Luftwaffe paratroops.

The problem, of course, is that if there are any scenarios involving Tunisian German Infantry, those grey paratroopers are going to look horribly out of place.

I don't consider providing an extra set of figures so you can switch to be a very good option, but if necessary I'll go that route.

But in the meantime I would really like to hear from someone who knows the game that there are or are not regualar infantry in use in Tunisian scenarios.

[Philippe]

I just noticed a mainstream scenario for Tunisia that includes Period One Wehrmacht Heer.

So it looks like I'll have to make at least two different sets of images for that slot (greenish paratroopers for Crete and regular infantry for Tunisia).

[Sequoia]

Hello Philippe. I'm looking forward to your Wehrmacht portrait mod. Is there anything that can be done about the British tank crews having Canadian flags in the background by the way?

[Sequoia]

Originally posted by Sequoia:

Hello Philippe. I'm looking forward to your Wehrmacht portrait mod. Is there anything that can be done about the British tank crews having Canadian flags in the background by the way?

You know, I got the British tank crew fixed. Would anyone like to volunteer for additional testing before I put it up at CMMODS? I didn't find one already there like it

[Philippe]

I'm not that familiar with how the images for the British and Canadian tank crews work, so anything I say should be taken with a grain of salt.

QB's seem to assign British images when you would expect British tankers in North Africa and Italy. And they seem to assign Canadians when you would expect Canadian tankers. I have no idea what happens when you use regions other than Italy or North Africa.

That doesn't mean that this holds true regular scenarios, so that would have to be tested. I have a sneaking suspicion that the two (?) editors behave slightly differently.

So just make sure that you haven't turned Brits into Canadians from overzealousness. I don't know what the system for assigning images to bmp's actually is for the portraits, but I suspect that it may not be safe to make any assumptions about it (cf. hobgoblin of little minds and analogy to failure in the life of the emotions).

[Philippe]

This is the current state of the CMAK German Unit Portraits.

The crossed out sections are portraits that only appear in CMBB.

So far I've apparently uncovered two oddities that will require extra work.

Luftwaffe Fallschirmjaegers from Crete share images with Period One Wehrmacht Heer regular infantry.

Luftwaffe Infantry from Period Three share images with Luftwaffe Fallschirmjaegers from Period One (i.e. Luftwaffe Feld divisionen types from the end of the war in Northern Italy are wearing desert khaki and bleached uniforms instead of dark blue and camo).

This is far from finished yet, but will require extra sets of images to correct these two bugs (and I'm pretty sure at this point that that's what they are). The work-around extra images will be a pain to use, but fortunately they won't need to get used very often.

I'm still fiddling with the gebirgsjaegers, after which I'll have to try to rework the regular infantry and the SS tankers.

I'm also keeping an eye out for changes that can get used in a new version of the CMBB images.

I'm a bit dissapointed that with so many unused image slots BTS had two sets of images do double duty. I'm assuming that this is the result of rushing through this part of the development process, and then forgetting to go back and fix it later.

[junk2drive]

In general the CW uses three sets of TC portraits. One HQ and one subordinate. The early set is khaki with a black beret. The late 2 sets are black jumpsuits with black berets.

The Brits however, have the early set and the other two are the Canadian sets. There is no black/black with Union Jack sets.

For my own use I copied the early set and renumbered them to the other two.

[Philippe]

Yikes, what a mess. I just pulled up a British QB with a different set of vehicles and got black jump suits and a mixture of British and Canadian flags. This is most certainly going on the list of things to look into if Sequoia hasn't fixed it.

[Philippe]

As a final observation about the German Unit Portraits, there don't seem to be any portraits for Gebirgsjaegers in North Africa.

In fact, there don't seem to be any Gebirgsjaegers either.

This is not the same thing as complaing that xyz favorite vehicle got left out.

The Gebirgsjaegers are included in the program, and it should be possible to make them show up in North Africa.

There's even a Mike Duplessis scenario that features them: it has to use panzergrenadiers instead.

Again, the fix for this might create yet another set of images that do double duty (period one Crete and Tunisia shouldn't be quite the same color uniforms).

I hope this gets added to the list of things to fix after CMC is such a rousing success that BTS decides to do one for CMAK (with the inevitable patch).

[Sequoia]

I posted my British tanker portrait fix at CMMODS.

Thanks to Junk2drive for testing it.

[Philippe]

Well done!

Another glitch bites the dust.