American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

We are quite a few turns into a game that just resumed after a 2.5 month delay. On about the second exchange of files following the resumption of play, the following has occurred:

- The replay from my opponent consists of no units showing at the start (including my own units are not showing)
- but units become visible once they move (to include his units out of my LOS),
- and then more appear as they shoot or get shot at.
- Once the replay is over, it says that time has expired and the scenario is over. Then all of my units appear and only those units of his that I should see. However, I can't move my units because it says that they are under remote control.

Could one of you fine gentlemen tell me what we need to do to get this game back on track?


Maj Gen Ned Simms
VI/AoS/USA
Blood 'n Guts hisself, a land lovin' pirate. Show me some arty tubes and we'll charge 'em.

Both of you delete the PBEMAIL.XXX and .YYY files. Then try the game. Also, make sure you are Zipping the file exchanges.

If that doesn't work, then maybe a reinstall is in order.

<b><font color="gold">Ernie Sands
General, Commanding, Army of Ohio

ACWGC Cabinet member
</b></font id="gold">

I've had that happen several times over the years in the Battleground and HPS games, although I don't think I've had the scenario end like you described. I've also had my opponent's moves from another game with another opponent show up in the replay of our game, on top of the replay for our game. As Ernie said deleting the xxx and yyy files seems to sort it out. My games have always come right again after doing this.


[url="http://homepage.ntlworld.com/a.r.barlow/acw/acw.htm"]General Antony Barlow[/url]
[url="http://homepage.ntlworld.com/a.r.barlow/aoc/XXAoC.htm"]Army of the Cumberland[/url]

I concur, I've seen it before. Scary, but harmless, if you are able to go back one or two turns from an old saved file after deleting the .xxx and .yyy files. In fact, it absolutely pays off to delete them regularly. I do it every day (I have a batch file sitting on my desktop that does it for all my games within a minute).

Gen. Walter, USA
<i>The Blue Blitz</i>
3/2/VIII AoS

I use a batch file to quickly delete these files too. In fact I have two: one which looks through my whole games folder, and a quicker one which just cleans out the HPS games (as I don't often play the Talonsoft games these days). You can just create/edit the files in Notepad and then change the file extension to '.bat'. Here's what's in each batch file:

'PBEM xxx yyy cleanup.bat':

<font color="yellow">cd c:\games\
del /s *.yyy
del /s *.xxx</font id="yellow">

'PBEM xxx yyy cleanup HPS.bat':

<font color="yellow">cd c:\games\HPS Simulations\
del /s *.yyy
del /s *.xxx</font id="yellow">


[url="http://homepage.ntlworld.com/a.r.barlow/acw/acw.htm"]General Antony Barlow[/url]
[url="http://homepage.ntlworld.com/a.r.barlow/aoc/XXAoC.htm"]Army of the Cumberland[/url]

Thank you, as that worked. We only had to delete the PBEMAIL.XXX and .YYY files and replay the last turn.

Maj Gen Ned Simms
VI/AoS/USA
Blood 'n Guts hisself, a land lovin' pirate. Show me some arty tubes and we'll charge 'em.