Admission or confession

[MarkShot]

I think I bought this game a few months after release (my first GG title). I have yet to play or even start the '41 campaign. I know I am getting older, no one wants their tombstone to read, "RIP - 195x - 2024 and never played the '41 GC".

I did intend to be up to it by now. Honest ... But then I built a new (expensive) PC (i9-13900KS + RTX 4090) in May/June ... I mean how could I explain to my wife if she saw me always playing games with nothing moving on the screen?

Forgive me, Gary and 2by3.

[altipueri]

Me too, so to speak.

The huge manual is still gathering dust - I bought it on release.

Flashpoint Campaigns - Southern Storm -- manual gathering dust too - I can see it out of the corner of my eye as I type this lying on the sofa with part read Gibbon's Decline of Rome and Herodotus' Histories by my side.

So many great games and books, so little time left.


I'm a sort of charity wargamer and reader - I buy stuff but never use it or read it.

Oh well; this week's world news hasn't been great for civilization so things should be kept in perspective.

[altipueri]

@MarkShot - a few minutes after my earlier post --

I've just printed out the Battles From The Bulge keyboard shortcuts - and realised it was done by you in 2009 !

Thanks

David Tallboys

[MarkShot]

I had been working my way through ever longer WITW and WITE-2 scenarios; preparing for the BIG ONE. Alas, it is so easy to get side tracked.

Speaking of Rome ... I am playing some Rome2/DEI and Attila/FOE+EUP ... they are jaw dropping given the PC I just built.

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BTW, check your PMs.

[ncc1701e]

I start with GC 1941. It was a mistake. Start with small scenario to learn the game. Velikie Luki then Road to Leningrad.

And I am still learning.

[Nazcatraz]

An honest advice is just start with the other big campaigns (either 1942, 43 or 44 as Soviets will do). Use one of those campaigns as your big tutorial game and just play it however you see fit. And then start a 1941 campaign after you feel like you've learnt enough. You won't even need how to do air war and logistic to win a 1941 campaign tbh. Just AI auto manage them and focus on ground troops and repairing railways.

And for a 4090 I hope you're running the game on 4K OLED. It would look phenomenal.

[MarkShot]

And for a 4090 I hope you're running the game on 4K OLED. It would look phenomenal.

I have 2 displays. A 4:3 21" 1600x1200 NEC LED (for very, very old games from the CRT era and office work; sharper). A 32" SONY TV at 1080p/60 mainly for games. This guarantees for aging eyes text will be easy to see. Because when you buy a big PC display as resolution goes up character size of older games goes up. Whereas a 1080p TV is fixed resolution whether a 15" or 83" diagonal.

I think WITE-2 has a resizeable UI (many older titles don't, and you are stuck without using mods; not just font, but art as well). Yes, I could run the game at 8K on something which would just fit on my desk, and I imagine it would look like a meeting of the The General Staff.

I run WITE-2 on the 32" TV and the manuals on the 21" monitor; with a custom utility I developed to make edge scrolling work properly. (2by3 said it was to hard for them to code multi-monitor scrolling; it is actually only 10 lines of AHK)

The 4090 was a bit of future proofing. It is impossible to make this card sweat at 1080p/60.

I have run 30 billion parameter LLMs locally on it. But I removed them as I don't want all this open source AI on my PC.

[MarkShot]

I think the ASUS ROG STRIX 4090 is one of the best AIBs. But I would caution potential buyers of two issues:

* 4090s from every vendor (including NVidia) have had an issue with 12v600w socket melting. It has conveniently been labeled a "user error" resulting in difficulty RMAing the problem. Actually, even confirmed by PCI-SIG, it is a cable design error. I've done unique engineering on my build that a melt/fire should never occur.

* Some 4090s are suffering from PCB cracking; particularly Gigabyte. Best to buy a well made one meaning sturdy PCB and aluminum frame which is supporting the huge weight along with a vertical mount or anti-sag solution. Personally, I don't like vertical mounts since it positions the cooling fans all wrong for air flow; and AIO cooled 4090s are not necessary. Air works fine with the huge heat sink which where all weight comes from. Only running flat out 100% of the time would make noise reduction worth the money of an AIO cooled version.

NOTE: The above can all be verified from YouTube PC build gamer hardware channels.

[Nazcatraz]

And for a 4090 I hope you're running the game on 4K OLED. It would look phenomenal.

I have 2 displays. A 4:3 21" 1600x1200 NEC LED (for very, very old games from the CRT era and office work; sharper). A 32" SONY TV at 1080p/60 mainly for games. This guarantees for aging eyes text will be easy to see. Because when you buy a big PC display as resolution goes up character size of older games goes up. Whereas a 1080p TV is fixed resolution whether a 15" or 83" diagonal.

I think WITE-2 has a resizeable UI (many older titles don't, and you are stuck without using mods; not just font, but art as well). Yes, I could run the game at 8K on something which would just fit on my desk, and I imagine it would look like a meeting of the The General Staff.

I run WITE-2 on the 32" TV and the manuals on the 21" monitor; with a custom utility I developed to make edge scrolling work properly. (2by3 said it was to hard for them to code multi-monitor scrolling; it is actually only 10 lines of AHK)

The 4090 was a bit of future proofing. It is impossible to make this card sweat at 1080p/60.

I have run 30 billion parameter LLMs locally on it. But I removed them as I don't want all this open source AI on my PC.

I highly recommend getting a 144/240Hz 4K G-Sync OLED monitor this holiday season. There's no point of using a 4090 on a 1080p screen unless you play competitive games that you want to reach 500 FPS.

[MarkShot]

Actually, my goal of future proofing happened yesterday already.

I reside in Taiwan. The USA just extended a further ban to sales of 40x series cards to China and other nations such as Saudi Arabia. I expect that Taiwan will leak video cards like a sieve with black market sales to buyers in China. The price of the 40x series just sky rocketed in China today. Thus, those here legally buying cards will have to pay black market prices; brings back memories of crypto miners/scalpers in the USA.

The price of remaining RTX 4090s in China just increased many fold today. So, mission accomplished; I got mine in May.

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What triggered my timing to build was the single thread work load of the i9-13900KS reached double my i7-5930K OCd to 4.3GHz (static) from 2015. As all my games were CPU limited (some seriously so), then all would move from "cursing" to totally playable; especially since with XMP RAM OCing my memory to 6000Hz; I actually ended up with a 3X FPS gaming boost. Yes, the 4090 RTX is overkill at the moment, but I am retired looking at 70 and this was to be the only PC I will DIY. So, why not?

PS: It was pointless to OC the i9-13900KS ... the best you can expect is boosting another 300MHz. Instead I undervolted it by 0.06v to make it run quite a bit cooler.