alanschu

Motors that run on water?

That was a laser beam. Top corner if IIRC. And then the nice play in OT to Horcoff for the win!

Mikhnov seems pretty agile for a big guy.

I thought you had a Radeon x700?

Yeah, I disabled the airstrikes as it made things insanely hard.

I saw this when IGN was talking about the big upcoming PC games. I hadn't heard of it, but I think WW2 naval combat is cool, so I looked into it a bit more. It's a neat looking game with the US versus Japan in the Pacific. There was a demo at Fileplanet, and gave it a try. It was actually quite fun. The game has 3 layers to it, there's a strategic map, where you expand your empire, build bases, build infrastructure, new ships, do research, refits, and all that jazz. There's also the tactical map, which is essentially a naval RTS. You direct forces (or you can let the AI do it. In the smaller scale battles it seemed okay, if perhaps a bit too aggressive with one of my destroyers who went rampaging in to combat, despite the Yamato BB punching holes in things from afar! And there's also the "in the action" part of the game. In the tactical combat area, if you want to jump into a plane, you can! It's actually pretty straight forward, and a lot of fun. Running a torpedo bomber as a destroyer was spraying 20 mm AA guns in my direction was good times. It had some quirks with my dual analog controller (wasn't up for digging out my joystick), but the keyboard commands worked fine. Stick work with the arrow keys, rudders, bomb doors, flaps, etc done with the lower left letters of the keyboard. Need to see how it works with my joystick though. You can also jump into a ship, but only AA guns (though you could still be better than a rookie crew!). Here's some pics from the first couple of training missions: An unlucky destroyer meets a battleship Shooting on the now escortless Transport! A lucky shot hits an ammo hold. Boom! Instadeath The Yamato unleashes a salvo (with the sinking psycho destroyer beside me. ) The grand campaign actually looks pretty deep. An interesting thing is that you have to take care of logistics. You need to build that transport fleet so you can stock Pearl Harbour with goods and operate out of Hawaii. You'll also need them to ferry goods back to the mainland (though America has a strong economy...this is probably more important for Japan). R&D looks pretty cool as well. Lots of useful stuff like SONAR and RADAR developments. You can also alter history a bit by bringing in Jet Fighters. Looks like there's a bit of "fantasy" in there as well, with you being able to have the opportunity to build some early cruise missile that get fired from heavy bombers. Though the tech requirements are pretty insane. Need high tech radars and gyroscopes and whatnot. As you get new technologies, you can modify current designs (alas, it does not seem like you can design a whole new ship, just variants of existing types. Though the level of customization is pretty in depth, the Iowa class Battleship will still always look like an Iowa Class Battleship, even if you have tweaked it out like crazy. Probably done for modelling sakes and whatnot). So you can have a variety of builds for your ships, opting for choices in cost versus effectiveness. Since the Hull types are static, it does allow you to refit any ship with a design for that particular hull. You can also tweak out ammo configurations so that your bombers are using ship busting AP bombs and whatnot. Or some of the later rockets and cruise missiles I even saw an option to refit the Essex class Carrier with a SAM Site (though, again, my tech was way, way, way far away). It just went Gold in Germany, and apparently it's slated to go soon in America. If you're a naval warfare buff, I suggest giving the demo a try. It's remarkably in depth. If I had to pick a game, it's style seems to remind me of Total War, but on water with thousands of tons of steel.

I think I may have played this, because my last encounter had guys jumping up and down off of rooftops.

Pushing forward into France A few days later I'm in an Alliance with Hungary and Slovakia. Pushing to have an alliance with Yugoslavia, and with the fall of France, Italy should be all chumy with me. Denmark is also mine, and am currently making my way through Norway. As far as I know I have taken all the troops, it's just that it's slow going with all the mountains. In the future I'll have to have a squad of Mountain divisions sent up there, rather than the standard infantry. Holland will likely be next on the chopping block, as well as Spain. They defeated Franco and the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, so I don't trust them to the south.

They outnumber us immensely. I almost wonder if an elastic defense is what we'll need. Let them take some territory, so that we can encircle them and eradicate them. If your army has no territories to retreat to, if they lose the battle they effectively surrender and every unit in the stack is elimated. Historically France didn't have a Spain sending allies either, so that could be what we need to slow down the advance. As long as we can stop them from taking Paris, you should be in decent shape. If we can stall the advance, we can put reinforcements right near the front line. Germany won't have that luxury, as units have to be placed in owned provinces, not occupied provinces (though I think there's an event that switches Belgium and the Netherlands to German owned territories, mostly because they are impossible to annex and it became really annoying). Also, if we can get some of that Infiltration doctrine stuff, we'll become more effective at night, which essentially lets us fight more effectively around the clock. If we can get to the second one, we'll actually defend more efficiently at night than during the day!

Maginot is pretty secure with it's high fortress ranking. Most units (except for generals with Fortress Buster traits) typically fight at 1% effectiveness (They get a 9% penalty per level of the fort). Even with a Fortress Buster (which Manstein, their whoop-ass General, is) they still only fight at around 20% effectiveness. Plus, if we can hold onto Saarbruken, they also get the extra penalties of fighting across a river. Mulhouse, with it's single border into Germany, is pretty secure. Though with the new system, both bombers and fights slowly wear down forts. The fact that their level 10 lets them rebuild at a decent rate though, and they'll probably lose most of their organization before they can sufficiently wear down the forts. As in history, Maginot seems pretty secure (at least until it's cut off). The forts you built along the Belgian Border will help. We need to hold Reins because it's so pivotal to encircling the Maginot line, and it provides a great way to provide supporting attacks, since it's adjacent to so many provinces.

Absolutely! If anyone turns me into a vampire, they should be careful!

Yeah. Much like how for a while old SIMM modules were 2x the price of the old school PC-100 DIMMs, AGPs seem to be doing that as well. They dipped a bit in price, but given that they aren't being made any more, they are becoming rare yet still in demand.

It is just a game. My first playthrough is more often what I would probably do if I actually was in the situation. But given that I'm not, I have no problems doing the crazier stuff. Even if I know it will probably have poor consequences.

Do you still reload if a MERC loses attribute points?

I think it's possible, depending on how you played, to not get a Kuei-Jin option at the end. Even still, it's not all that difficult. I played through 3 different endings using the save right before the cabbie.

But but but, it blows up DVDs!

You'll never know if you don't try.

Don't forget the Angorian troops in the area either! Africa has come to help France in its moment of need! Most of Republican SPain's forces are amassed in Saarbruken, Maginot, and Valenciennes. The Maginot has been extended up to the English Channel, though it's not quite as fortified as the Alscaise-Lorraine region. The Stuttgart attack was surprising. It was a multifront battle, but we had the advantage of defending in Winter. Though all of our provinces now require the Germans to cross a river, which can incur some pretty heavy penalties upon an attack. I'm not worried about that region...but the Belgiums...that's a bit nerve wracking.

You should give it a go.

Denmark has fallen to the Germany Army!

It is teh great!

It's certainly not cliched, as numbers said.

I wonder if real estate on the PCBs for motherboards and video cards is limited, and as a result you don't typically have the secondary BIOS. I know my motherboard has it, though I have only flashed my BIOS about 2 times in my entire time as a PC hobbyist starting in 1999. I guess a backup is typically not used because the BIOS isn't exactly something that gets flashed by accident. If a video card maker put a backup BIOS on their card, they'd almost be encouraging people to flash the BIOS.

Have you seen either the Kuei-Jin or the Camarilla ending?