General Question

[xwormwood]

Hi.

I started to love the crisis in command series with Battle of the Bulge (BoB).

But Drive to Moscow (DtM) and now El Alamein (EA) have changed one point compared to BoB, and i would like to know why you changed it and if there is a chance to get the feature back via update.

BoB played radio news and speeches and historical Songs during the turns, and it added so unbelievable strong toward the historical feeling of the game (Lale Andersen, Goebbels propaganda speech, etc).
I really loved that, just as much as i loved this feature in SSI's Pacific General. I loved it because it made me feel as if i really was in the BoB-Mess myself.

So i was puzzled and pretty much disappointed when DtM suddenly abondoned this radio-feature and that EA followed RtM, and not BoB.

Would be very nice to here from you guys about this topic / feature.

[Miguel_TSS]

You'll be happy to know we kept and actually greatly expanded on the radio music and speeches in both Drive on Moscow and in Desert Fox.

From the in-game menu select "Briefing" and enjoy. ( all your sound settings should be set to ON as well )

Thanks for appreciating this feature, it means a lot to me and the sound team!

[blahblah3502]

I think Claus may have posted this query because there are no briefing special radio sound effects/music in the initial automatic daily briefing reports (in BotB, there was). I initially found this worrying too, There is great radio sound design when you click on briefing after this though. Glad to see that Lili Marlene is back and enjoyed by both sides... ( I wondered if the music between the two sides were mixed in an odd way in DtM but LM here makes historical sense of course!)

So congrats to the sound design team on more awesome work with El Alamein! You really set a high standard,
However I noticed that the radio music in EA seems to be always very loud in comparison to the other sound effects - Churchill's speech, the desert environment & far-off battle noises etc are drowned out and can barely be heard. Clicking on Briefing seems to *always* trigger loud music immediately with perhaps some very muffled speech /radio distortion / far off battle noises/ desert noises. This does seem very different from BotB ( and maybe DtM as well? Not sure... I don't remember any radio effects apart from songs in DtM to be honest... The cracking ice was terrific though...). I think the sound design works better if the songs are not given such a strong favoured and always-firstposition - better that they're balanced out with the other sound effects in the same way that battle noises and weather/environment noises and radio songs & speeches and radio distortions faded in and out interwoven with each other equally in BotB.

It is this mix which made the audio design in BotB so striking.

[xwormwood]

You'll be happy to know we kept and actually greatly expanded on the radio music and speeches in both Drive on Moscow and in Desert Fox.

From the in-game menu select "Briefing" and enjoy. ( all your sound settings should be set to ON as well )

Thank you for hint, much appreciated!

I think Claus may have posted this query because there are no briefing special radio sound effects/music in the initial automatic daily briefing reports (in BotB, there was). I
.

Absolutly correct, thank for clarifying it for me!

Is there a way to get this back again?

Btw.: I would like to suggest to inform players where and how they can find your awesome historical clips. Maybe I'm not the brightest person around, but I concluded that you had abondended the historical music and speeches, and I even told other players about this, too (when they asked me how RtM / EA compared to BoB).

[Miguel_TSS]

Hmmm, must have missed an audio trigger when we switched sound systems for DoM, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

After the really great reaction to BotB Sound Design we put even more effort into gathering clips and recordings, especially since more and more useful information was filling the Briefing pages. One of the big differences between the song choices in Desert Fox is their brightness and energy versus the more subdued songs of Bulge and Moscow. Volume & Mix is an easy fix so I'll take a look at that too.

I'll write up the bug report now.