On the latest version. (the one before the ones hes trying to upload today) The U.S. has the largest army in the world. And as Germany i have spread my reach far and have a massive army, but the U.S. is ahead with 25% more military power then i have.
And Britain and France aren't large at all. None of Europe is. And Russia is that large in the real world...
In the games I have played the USA often builds up a huge military.
But do they ever use it? Almost never. Like I said, once in a while they conquer Mexico... but I have never once seen them ever conquer a single city that is not in North America.
Have you? I guess maybe the real solution is to fix the AI... as noted previously in this thread... the Civ V AI is terrible at handling its navy or conquering territory across oceans.
The British seem capable of taking on mainland Europe (I've personally witnessed them take over Norway and parts of Europe from the Nazis), and AI Japan has no trouble taking large chunks of mainland Asia from AI China.
Maybe that's because the amount of water between Japan and China is not very much. Likewise between England and France or Scandinavia. I don't know. Or maybe it's because they start with larger navies. The USA is able to build up a massive army (mostly because they never fight anybody) but the navy they start with is not impressive.
No easy solution presents itself. I do think the main issue is with the AI, and as rhett lamented earlier... it's difficult to get the AI to play as you want it to. He had to make the German military larger to compensate for the AI's stupidity.
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As to Russia being that large in the real world... well... yes and no...
first of all, yes Russia is the largest country in the world, but they appear even larger on maps including this one because of the fact that when you project a 3D surface on to a 2D surface the areas at the top and bottom of the map become larger. Russia, being at the top of the map, appears much larger than it actually is. On Civ maps, it doesn't just appear larger. It IS larger. It has more usable tiles. That's not really fair. Some scenarios, like Rhye's RFC scenario in Civ IV, compensates for this by making most of Russia unusable terrain- marshes or tundra. But in Civ V even tundra is pretty useful terrain. I guess you could make much of it ice.
Secondly, there is more to a map than just matching up to geography. This scenario is a perfect example as you can see... when the scenario creator decided to redo the whole map to make Europe larger. Europe on this map is much, much bigger than it is in reality. That's because it improves gameplay. Populations in Europe are very condensed and the cities there due to the industrial revolution were far more productive than most cities elsewhere in the world in the 1940s. If the map was perfectly proportioned to real-world geography it would be hard to give the European cities a realistic level of power/productivity versus cities elsewhere.
Also, just the fact that you can't cram that many cities into a small area means that there are far fewer cities in the European countries. In the original map, Germany had only two actual German cities: Hamburg and Berlin. The USSR has dozens of cities. But in real life in 1940 there were more notable cities in Germany than there were in Russia.
In Russia, almost all of the population and industry was concentrated west of the caucuses. The huge vast wilderness to the east was sparsely populated and almost entirely agrarian. But... in Civ V, every city can potentially become highly productive and populous.
You can balance this a little bit by making the European and American cities more developed, and putting improvements on the terrain around those cities (which rhett already did). It's just difficult to balance it properly and given enough time.. the civ with the most cities is most likely going to have the largest population, highest production, etc.
To balance this I would propose either making the territory of the USSR smaller.... or spreading out their cities more. If the US and the USSR had the same number of cities then the extra territory the USSR had wouldn't matter as much.