Simon Slavin <slavins.delete.these.four.words@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>On 02/05/2006, Joseph Nebus wrote in message <nebusj.1146559284@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Whatever that was, though, I wanted
>nothing to do with it
>If a country is involved in a large war already,
>and you make any military move which has impact on that country, they're
>too busy to consider you as a separate entity, they just add your lands
to
>their list of 'threatening peoples'.
Joining a hogpile on a beleaguered country isn't necessarily
against my principles, at least as a game player; just in this case
the pop-up panel warned me it'd put me at war with other countries that
I didn't want to be at war with, particularly if it was an all-out war
rather than a Colonial War. I could defend my colonial posessions, if
nobody really made an effort to get them, but the mainland would just
be hopeless. (I almost entirely skipped military develoment, in favor
of cultural and economic discoveries.)
>What's
>interesting is that I would have thought that adding yourself to the list
>of Russia's attackers should have automatically made you an ally of their
>enemies but you say
>> After declaring Colonial War, losing 50
>> points of prestige, I was notified I was now in a Great War, against
>> the Ottomas, the Russians, the British
>which makes no sense if you're grabbing a Russian province and Russia are
>fighting against the UK.
That is one of the baffling things, although I'd chosen to skip
the war with Russia and go against the Ottomans first. I'd though there
were no alliances or guarantees entangling the Ottomans, but I suppose
it's *possible* that parties started ru****ng to its defense, since the
Russian battlefield was moving naturally towards the Black Sea.
(One of the sad things about Victoria and its line of games is
there's no 'history review' like Civilization gave us. I suppose it
would be nearly impossible to write a game AI that could turn the event
logs into an 'alternate history textbook', but *what* a grand thing that
would be. It'd also explain missed things like guarantees between my
research and the declaration of war.)
>I'm currently involved in a long series of
>skirmish matches in Command & Conquer: Zero Hour. The AI is pretty good
>in a local way: small bands of units use good tactics when fighting with
>me. However, on a much larger scale the AI's tactics are abysmal: it
>tends to choose the closest target to attack instead of identifying
>secluded targets which can be surrounded. Also, if it destroys one of my
>installations it continues to fight with whatever small fraction of its
>units it sent in. A better tactic would be to withdraw those units to
>give it time to repair them and supplement them with fresh troops.
I've heard there's a Victoria cheat on the tactical level that
plays to one of its weaknesses. Divide your forces into a small (say,
1/3 of the troops) and a large (2/3ds) side, and attack with the small
... then, midway through the battle withdraw your forces. The AI will
suppose the battle is won, and order repleni****ng of its troops, topping
off its manpower and killing its organization. That's when you have the
main force scheduled to arrive.
So far I haven't been clever enough to use that, but it does
sound like it should psyche out the AI. I'm not even sure it would be
that much of a cheat, since it's not unlike a good number of generals'
approaches to winning battles, particularly when hopelessly outnumbered.
I really do like the ``Badboy Rating'' twist in the Europa
Universalis line, making the other nations in the continent/world line
up and stick together against a troublemaking nation. Their strategy
for the war may not always be very clever, but just the fact they'll
make pretty solid alliances effectively blocks the Civilization-style
rollover of the whole world.
Maybe that's what hit me. My Brazil was certainly a Great Power
when I started the war. If the Ottomans were too, it could be the other
Great Powers lining up against the plain aggressor. I didn't have even
the vaguest pretext, admittedly.
>Mind
>you, I'm sitting here saying it's bad but it still beats me
>occasionally.
Yeah, I hate it when it does that.
My game focusing on Industrialization First, plus my colonial
escapades, left me as the number 7 power in the world [1]. The previous
game where I focused on culture and industrialized haphazardly left me
at number 3. That means something, but I don't know what.
[1] Also somehow the US never had a Civil War, maybe because it
got occupied with an early 1850s war against the United Kingdom, and
after that to taking over Mexico. While the United States got British
Columbia and Alberta, the United Kingdom -- and subsequently Canada --
kept Vancouver Island, and got Alaska (spoils from its war with Russia),
as well as two-thids of Maine.
--
Joseph Nebus
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