Monte Carlo

Hmmm, if you don't mind me saying so Wrath, that's a bit of a lawyer's answer. It matters not what the mission is sold as, the brains should be saying... "look we are gonna be doing a lot of fighting in failed states. Our light armour solutions are sub-optimal because peace-keeping RoEs forbid us sending in an armoured cavalry regiment. So we need up-armoured light vehicles." This isn't armchair general stuff, serving friends agree with my basic argument and the UK has made the same mistakes. Of course, up until the mid 2000s even the US army sees itself as a war-fighting leviathan, not a girly peace-keeping force following COIN doctrine, happily that has changed to the point where the US Army is pre-eminent in the field. Lots of people died getting there, though, and many of them were in crap soft-skinned vehicles even when the writing was on the wall in the mid 1990s.

America does awesome TV, the consistency is there time and time again across all genres. I have loved Frasier, Dexter, The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Two and a Half Men, Band of Brothers and even more mainstream stuff like NCIS and The Shield. BBC does awesome TV.... occasionally. Although The Thick of It isn't really for me it is critically acclaimed, but stuff like this comes across once in a while. Not all the time. A lot of BBC comedy is dreck. I'd get rid of the BBC tomorrow, but that's an entirely different argument and my POV isn't mainstream in the UK.

The military was build to fight the Soviet Union, the Humvees were never meant to be on the front lines, the problem is with counter insurgency everything is a front line. The Cold War ended in 1989 when everyone was seriously digging Francis Fukuyama. 2003 was a long, long way off. No excuses there, I'm afraid. When did Stryker come online, and your Marine corps has had LAVs since the 80's IIRC. And they still got it wrong. Let me get my position clear: I supported the Iraq war until I discovered the absolutely shabby, arrogance-laden lack of planning by the Bush administration. No one expected 9/11 though, so there was no clear idea what the next war would look like. Unarmored Humvees weren't a problem during the first Iraq war. I'd have thought that after the Somalian debacle in the early 1990's some propeller-head at the Pentagon would have done some environmental scanning and worked it out. Apparently not.

I'd completely forgotten the Time Stasis Level, which I hated. But I'd forgotten how otherwise awesome IWD2 is.

trust me, its not very exciting in real life. It would be cool if you charged an exorbitant, made-up-off-the-top-of-your-head rate for every hour you played the game

The military was build to fight the Soviet Union, the Humvees were never meant to be on the front lines, the problem is with counter insurgency everything is a front line. The Cold War ended in 1989 when everyone was seriously digging Francis Fukuyama. 2003 was a long, long way off. No excuses there, I'm afraid. When did Stryker come online, and your Marine corps has had LAVs since the 80's IIRC. And they still got it wrong. Let me get my position clear: I supported the Iraq war until I discovered the absolutely shabby, arrogance-laden lack of planning by the Bush administration.

No tunnels? I'M OUT!

Just finished watching Dragon's Den. I think the programme started in Japan, and I don't know if you have it in the US or elsewhere but the deal is this... In an old warehouse, five pantomime uber-capitalists sit in big leather chairs surrounded by, literally, piles of cash. A hapless business person wanders up the stairs and asks for their money in return for a pitifully optimistic share in their company. Like panning for gold, there are squillions of utterly rubbish pitches then one that is a gem. It's the X-Factor for reasonably intelligent people. Here's the deal. All of us are Dragons. We all have half a million Obz Dollars, an exciting new notional currency that I have invented for this thread. Anybody can pitch their idea to us and we will then rip it apart like ravenous were-sharks fed a juicy steak. Then we will either invest or not invest. If you don't want to invest just say "I'm OUT!" and give a condescending reason why, for optimal realism. Games-related pitches are obviously sought, but hey it's a daft thread on the internet so other wacky business ideas are also welcome as long as you aren't Interplay (lulz). Like, for example, an MMORPG based on cheese or a Wii game about seeing how long you can stay completely still (Death Simulator Legend 3000). Cheers MC

The is a serious escalation of awesomeness in this thread, I particularly like the guy at the front's Were-Paw. Graraaahhhllll!

Those guys are awesome.

Put people from all over the world in a wet, over-crowded island. Add the world's most globalized city. Then sprinkle an eccentric tradition of avant garde artistic endeavour over the top and give it a good stir.

DA's combat is good, but some attacks were designed for spamming and the phasing / synching of attacks baffles me a bit. The 2-H weapon style guy needs a lot of micro-ing in combat whereas your slice-em-and-dice em dual wielder doesn't. But there were lots of tunnels to fight in which was generally awesome.

The Abrams was conceived in the 70's, but Main Battle Tanks are a bit like aircraft in that they are constantly up-graded to the point where the modern one is only marginally the same as the original. In Britain the army is still using the Spartan / Saracen CVR(T) series APCs which were about in the early 70's. Except ours aren't up-graded. I remember the infamous Iraq press conference where Don Rumsfeld is rendered speechless, and almost booed, by a load of US infantrymen asking him about up-armoured Humm-Vees. They were McGuyvering their own armour on them, the US army didn't have enough light armour. Tanks? Sure. Light armour? Hmmm. No. Bit of a smack on the FAIL button, really. The British army had the exact same problem with land-rovers. So you can be a top-flight military power and still get the procurement basics wrong. The US can deliver iced-soda and pizza hut in theatre in 48 hours, it can drop tonnes of ordnance on a precise area from a mile above the earth and it can ship an armoured bridge anywhere on earth completely independently by sea... but it can't provide adequate light armour protection. I'm not even being facetious, merely pointing out an interesting contradiction.

About EA being the driving force behind some of these decisions, well I've read lots of interviews with key Biowarians where the suggestion has been whole-heartedly re-buffed. I actually believe them. Bioware is all grown-up now, it is a heavyweight player in the industry. It is more than capable of making bottom-line business decisions all by itself, which is what I suspect has happened here.

Partially. The US quest for Full Spectrum dominance isn't predicated entirely on technology, although it's obviously a component. The US leads the way because it has consistently shown the political will to do so and sinks millions of dollars into (not necessarily high-tech) key military infrastructure like logistics and stuff like helicopters / transport aircraft and so on. For example, the American Abrams / M-1 tank programme is super-cool, but in Iraq it spent most of it's time behaving like a WW2 assault gun or crushing taxis. You don't need dozens of regiments of it. Maybe a couple of spearhead divisions, sure, but the US would never get all it's tanks to (say) China before the whole thing went tac-nuke. Iran? Seriously, I'd be looking at a medium / light armour solution there and the whole thing would be decided by US air superiority, which is high-tech and you have in abundance. One hi-tech weapons package can allow a military to adopt a lower-tech one elsewhere. If I were a combat infantryman I'd want to see the tax-dollar being poured into stuff like combat medicine, IED tech, up-graded body armour systems, digital reliable personal comms, helicopters, ground attack air assets... not super-carriers, air superiority fighters or the next generation of super-tank. But, hey, what do I know?

Clarkson is only 'anti-American' in a jokey way, because he'll always tell you about the things he loves about the States, particularly the cars. Although the car crash interview when he meets his hero, a very curmudgeonly Chuck Yeager, is a classic. "Never meet your heroes." Chuck wheels out the old "we saved your Limey asses" routine IIRC. The riposte should have been almost three years late and we're still paying back the loan.

I know it sounds odd, but there are a couple of really good pirate-themed games that fit the bill.

They won't. the Dutch, Germans, Scandies... they just won't. They think the post-WW2 peace dividend and post-Cold War world means decades of the Great Satan America providing all the strategic lift for them. They suckle at the US defence teat and resent you right back for it. German troops sit in their barracks playing token contribution while US and British grunts soak up the attrition. The problem is, the US wants all these deployments and offers blood and treasure as a carrot to get the European defence-lite nations to agree at the UN. A bit of isolationism followed by some local instability might get them to concentrate their minds a bit. But the world isn't like that now, power blocs and triple entente. We have foreign policy a la carte, a system whereby each nation chooses it's allies on a day-to-day basis. And Wals, the reason there won't be a great big war (to which you quote the Falklands, to wit an impressive feat of arms... but to call it a war is like calling my lunchtime BLT and an apple a banquet) is because no sucker in the West will fight. Even the Russians struggle with conscription. Where is the manpower going to come from? WW3 would be small-scale conflagrations, a shock and awe bout of cyber-blitzkrieg then tac-nukes. Ergo we need mobile forces, state of the art cyber defence and lots of bunkers and submarines. Tanks? Nah.

No, because in the 1930's there were no nuclear deterrents, cyber-attack capability, Web 2.0 global comms culture.... and so on and so forth. I'm trying to imagine the scenario where we will need armoured regiments with Challies cutting across the plains supported by shed-loads of panzergrens in warriors. I'm failing. Even so, we can mothball those and dig them out when required, even FRES envisages light mobile forces. The enemy for the next twenty-thirty years seems to be the insurgent driving about in pick-up trucks. If we start fighting the Chinese or Russia it's going to go tac-nuke very quickly, why fight the 1980's "Hold them at the Weser" three-day battle anymore? Defence is a pork barrel for civil servants and an arms industry that has become the tail that wags the dog. Time for a change.

Let's get rid of billion-pound air superiority fighters for starters, all we need is a shed-load of helis (army), tpt planes (give those to the army too) and some fast air for the crabs to... help the army. Fast air can be bought off the shelf from the spams like Apache is, under a licence. Oh, and work out how many one-four star officers you actually need and sack the surplus. Incentivize officer ranks below that with role-related pay increments and lateral development. Brigade the Royal Marines and the Para Regt. Parachute infantry battalions are now as relevant as horse-borne cavalry in 1939. Re-role half the line infantry into air-mobile light divisions, get rid of the Cold War era panzergrenadier mind-set. It's the usual, really. slay sacred cows. Cut the fat from management. Concentrate of core business. Sort of kit procurement. Doesn't matter if you are Tesco or the MoD, it's business 101.

And given that his brother is an infantry officer it was twice as vile... Yes. Well done, Clarkson.

Bioware in one sentence.

Mwuahahahhaaaaa!!! Tanks are where it's at and it's free. I am pleased to see my tunnel-fighting exploits are consistently awesome. I suspect that I will die repeatedly in the final stages of the game, though. Tigs, what armour is he wearing?

Sorry about the tardiness of the updates but work has been hectic. There will be one later in the week as our heroes try to remember their high school chemistry to figure out where 'Slime' fits into the periodic table.

Tigranes, can you post the character sheet screens please?