If there is one thing that all gamers love doing, it's bragging about their greatest victories, or reviewing their most embarrassing defeats. Often times, the players have so enjoyed a spirited battle that they post detailed After Action Reports (AAR's) at their favorite forum. These give the grognards their day in the sun, help others relive their hard-fought battles, and serve as a valuable learning tool for the scenario in question, and the playing styles of the antagonists. They also can be powerful advertisements for one's favorite scenarios and help to recruit opponents. The two Advanced Game Options, SitRep Log, and Movies shown in the picture below, assist players, in both solo, and PBEM games to analyse and log the progress of their games.
From the revised manual entry for each...
SitRep Log: This creates a text file in the Saves directory that contains news strings, and detailed combat results reports. If playing a PBEM turn, then the news strings, and only the last two lines of the combat reports and their locations are displayed. When using this option, players should make a habit of deleting their old logs on a regular basis to save hard drive space.
Movies: This option creates two .bmp files in the Saves directory at the end of each player turn. One is of the entire map at the microview scale. The other is of the entire map at the zoomed out (small 2d mode) scale. This can be used for creating AAR’s, and to keep track of your general campaign progress. You can link these images together using second party graphics software and view your progress toward victory (or defeat) as a snapshot movie. Keep in mind two things, when using this option. First, is that the time that it takes to write this file depends on the speed of your machine, and the size of the map. You will get the hourglass cursor appearing to let you know the program is working on writing the image to the file. This may take a few minutes on slower machines writing large maps. Secondly, the .bmp files can be very large in terms of file size. As with the SitRep Logs, you should probably clean out those you won’t be using for movies on a regular basis. You can also use your favorite graphics software to convert these files to a .jpg format, in order to save disk space.
The sitreps can serve as a helpful reminder in PBEM games (since most of the gritty details are truncated, to maintain the fog of war) of the battle locations and their results. In single player mode, more information is displayed, allowing for greater analysis of what the combat results were, and can help novice players better understand why the battles went the way they did.
In the past, some players have gone to incredible lengths to scroll, align, screenshot, and paste together these campaign maps. It is very tedious work on any map larger than what fits on a single mapview panel, when in zoomed out 2d mode. The Movies option allows for the program to do all the hard work for you, saving the image of the map and the units visible to the player.
