OrvalB -> RE: **Unofficial GoA Hints and Tips thread** (11/14/2008 2:27:15 AM)
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The biggest single strategy tip I have learnt isn't that subtle, but involves the feature of the game that is most alien to most games and gamer behaviour: activation point management. This game does not reward massively aggressive play, like most do; rather, it punishes it. (Very good Frank, kudos.) HQ activation points are insanely expensive. You start out with a lot of them, which makes you inclined to burn through them like crazy. Don't. Because they won't come back. Things like replacements, artillery shots, naval assets, etc are given to you in multiples of your economic spending. Freaking activation points are exactly the reverse. Each single activation point is like worth 24 naval assets, for example. Placing your HQs carefully is so critical it is hard to over-stress. An activated HQ will activate all the troops around it, except for the ones stacked with another HQ that has points left. So the starting setup on the Western front, both French and German, is very bad: all those HQs nestled up against each other virtually guarantee wastage of your single most expensive (by far) resource. The first thing you have to do is get a good chunk of your HQs into reserve, stacked with nothing, but right behind your attack point. If the advance doesn't work out, the worst outcome is stacked HQs, which is totally fine, as it doesn't screw with the activation point burn ratio. A minor point: on the othe hand, the instinct is to try and use every single activated unit because they are so damn expensive-- you shouldn't. You want to activate as many units as possible, by clever HQ placement, to be sure. But then you have to be a little bit careful, because if a stack is successful and advances somewhere, what happens next? Will it have any points to advance further? Will it be knackered down to a shadow of itself? Is there any follow-up possible? On the other-other hand, a bad advance is probably better than no advance at all, because they cost so damn much. The game revolves around activation points and nothing else, but most newbies (myself especially included) don't realize this, and have a very hard time learning it, because it is so contrary to every other game. And you get so very many at the start, you think they are cheap. Basically, a single activation point in 1916 is worth like 20 activation points in 1914; hold onto those suckers! Aside from clever HQ placement, given the ridiculous expense of activation points, it is very much worth giving up extraordinary amounts of territory, numbers of troops, and even resource sources, to avoid spending them. It is very hard to wrap your head around this idea. I speak from very rueful experience, I was doing pretty damn good as the CP against what I thought was an extraordinarily passive TE until 1917, pursuing what seemed to be a pretty successful Eastern strategy, and all of a sudden I got my ass kicked something awful, the damn Ruskis had all their HQs fully loaded and HQ points in reserve to boot, and that was bad enough, but then the Western Front (where I stupidly thought I had put France on the ropes) opened up too, gah, it was terrible how badly I got beat down, with nothing left in the tank to fight back with. (Yeah, the body count and losses did indeed lead to Lenin, but by that point it was far too late.)
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