shane
Posts: 16
Joined: 9/10/2003 Status: offline
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Pure EIA in one sense is not a balanced game (anyone care to argue that France and Spain are on equal footing?). But it is pretty balanced historically. What is the problem with altering the game--why the preference for game realism over historical realism? Good point about English fleet dominance. Points like these are why there should always be playtesters. But FOW is, like any other game mechanism, something that would allow good players to shine and bad ones to fade. It would hopefully put computer AI and human I on a more equal footing. As far as the extent of FOW, maybe something along these lines: Gametime is a month/turn, so each country has knowledge of what's going on up to 3 spaces away in every direction from its national & controlled borders. True, an army could hide 4 spaces away, but then to surprise-attack it'd be force-marching in. Yes, yet again, spy networks. This would encompass everything from hiring spys to paying off ambassadors to encouraging defectors (political instability might affect this?) It's easy to create networks in ports, and other cosmopolitan cities, more difficult and expensive in the farther reaches. Everyone has a certain # of spy networks to set up at the start of the game, and throughout its course certain countries (Brit, France, Aus) will have much more interest in creating & maintaining new ones. Then again there's counter-espionage, which would allow one to destroy or corrupt other's networks, and again political dominance among other things would affect it. Spy and couterspy networks would allow players to manipulate FOW.
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