ericbabe
Posts: 11927
Joined: 3/23/2005 Status: offline
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Hi Arinvald, Excellent questions. The biggest limiting factor when building guard units -- the most important elite unit -- is that every guard unit built decreases the morale of every other non-guard infantry. So that it becomes counter-productive to build too many guard divisions. As for the other elite units, such as horse-artillery, many of these require infrastructure developments that most nations won't have until later in the game. Finally, there are simply economic factors that prevent a player from building too many elite type units. I originally wondered if we'd need some sort of absolute limit on advanced units, but in the long games that we've played this hasn't yet been a problem. In my last big game my 400,000 or so Russians met about 500,000 French in a major battle in Flanders. Of my 40 divisions I only had a few guard, heavy and horse artillery, with similar numbers for the AI-controlled French units (who caught me in a miserable starting location on the detailed battle -- straddling two sides of a river -- and soundly thrashed me, I might add.) The proportion of light infantry to regular infantry and light and heavy cavalry to regular cavalry also seems to work out to reasonable ratios in the games we've played. Breaking a treaty involves both a Glory (score) penalty and a national morale penalty. The tangible penalty for warmongering is an attitude penalty among the minor countries. We are considering a penalty for the efficacy of diplomats based on the number of provinces a nation has conquered. The chief benefit of total war is that the nation you are invading cannot surrender -- if your total war is successful you may end owning every province once held by that nation. Regular wars are fought until a limited surrender is accepted, or until a full surrender is offered, at which point the victor is awarded "victory points" which he may use to spend on a treaty that he may force the loser to accept. Typically this treaty cannot be used to gain permanent control of more than two or three of a nation's provinces. We tried to design the game to encourage players to emulate Napoleon's grandiose ambitions -- to get the big Glory scores you've got to try to pull off total war in Spain while simultaneously invading Russia. The quality of the rumor report is related to court developments. There's a book called "The Eagle in Splendour" by Mansel that describes Napoleon's building and use of courts and palaces in his attempt to cement his political hegemony over Europe, from which I derived inspiration for many of the rules of court improvements -- though courts may be considered a sort of "catch all" category of things related to diplomatic and political operations.
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