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Yeah, Andenne was an interesting town. I'd go to bed thinking we had secured it and the next morning you guys had capped it back. Sometimes that town, along with Namur, would take weeks to finally suppress and move past. Usually it would require us to move two army groups into the area in order to cap it but that always was a risk because it left other areas wide open.

My favorite areas were either central (Vireaux southward) the deep south (Verdun area) or up north near BOZ you could almost always find me down south. Since I wasn't in a squad, I'd go where ever defenders were needed. My favorite weapons were the Flak-36 or the Stug-III. I can't even remember how many precamps I busted up or at least disrupted with a Stug-III. I never got to use the Panzer-IIIH since I was gone long before it came out.

As for the Frenchies, they were the side most of the Axis detested. That is one reason they usually got stomped first. We'd throw everything at them and wipe them off the map just to tick them off and watch them whine about how the Char wasn't "uber" enough or the Panhard (Panchar as we liked to call it) died too easily. They also had TGIF as one of their main squads and anyone who was around from Day-1 remembers why the Axis hated them.

3CD was actually shuffled up to the north end of the map as part of the British Royal Marines just before I left. So instead of Namur, we were going to be fighting on those islands that CRS added a few releases back, then over toward BoZ and parts east. That's where I started out back in December '02, getting steamrolled by Deadlock and 94 every day. Remember ol' Capslock? :)

When they introduced the Pz IIIH, and "research and development," everybody knew what would happen...after 3-4 weeks of a map it would be Hordes of IIIH vs. Hordes of Crusaders or Daimlers, with the French kind of screwed because they didn't have a second-generation tank to research. Recently they got the M3 Stuart, which finally gave them a piece of armor with speed *and* firepower...and surprise, people actually started playing for the French again. But the nice thing as an Allied player was that most German players dropped 40 IQ points when they got in a IIIH. Seriously. They thought it was some kind of uber Tiger and would do some incredibly stupid stuff with it.

StuGs scared me. Virtually impossible to kill from the front, hard to even see in underbrush, with a gun that could shred soft targets (I was a terrible tanker, I mostly played infantry and anti-tank guns). Whenever I saw one, I figured that it had to be either (a) a newbie who grabbed it because it looked cool, (b) somebody who took it because it was the last piece of armor on the spawnlist, or (c) a total badass. I hope they can someday make the terrain and buildings more "deformable," so assault guns actually have a bombardment role instead of just being crappy turretless tanks.

I never knew any of the history behind TGIF and doc9. Those of us 3CD who briefly played Planetside ran with the TGIF crew over there, that's where they all disappeared to. Care to enlighten me? I can say, though, that the true hardcore players that played French were pretty good. They had to endure smaller player numbers, slow tanks, crappy guns, a constant barrage of French-bashing carried over from real life (and who doesn't enjoy bashing the French now and then, they deserve it)...and they kept playing on.

(Is this a small world or what?)

}:-)4