Thanks, Civinator! Some responses:
I chose the year for a few reasons:
-It allows the most modern forces to participate, which to me is a big part of the fun.
-It was, as you said, the time when NATO was most prepared to fight and had the best chance to win. Soviet forces alone were incomprehensibly huge, and if the Warsaw Treaty nations did fight with them, the West would have been in bad shape. Personally I think that the idea of fighting a conventional-only war was a delusion, but more on that when I revisit nukes in Post 2.
-It is a time period where a lot of accurate data is available on force dispositions.
You're definitely right about the turmoil in the WP nations, and within the Soviet Republics. In our timeline, we're dealing with a reactionary Defense Council that has rejected restructuring and has dealt with Berlin and Warsaw in the manner of Prague and Budapest.
In game terms, I like your ideas on war weariness and government. That's why I wanted to keep the WP separate and not in a locked alliance. The Soviet player, who moves first, can make military alliances and RoP, but when things go bad, these Eastern European nations might make peace with the West, or even swap sides. War weariness is a tough one, because although it might be more realistic, it's not much fun for a player to slow his roll because he has to garrison his cities with 'military police'.
There are only a few options open to us for nudging diplomatic behavior, besides the heavy-handed things like 'always war' and locked alliances. The Eastern European nations are mainly of the European culture group, while the USSR is its own culture group. Also, the WP have Communist gov'ts, but their preferred government is Democracy, and their shunned is Communist. All in all I have no idea if these diplomatic relationships will work at all. I may end up having to have a bunch of locked alliances and leave it at that. But I like your ideas and I'd prefer to test a few different styles to see what I like best.
Airbases: I meant to ask you if you moved all your forces off that occupied airbase and then back on, would it then destroy the aircraft?
I think I would like to attempt both ways and see how they turn out. Making invisible cities means I have to redo all that population work I did
. I'm sure there will be some city placement adjustments. I reason that they are so packed tightly, especially in central Europe, is because I'd really like to have normal artillery in this game. Bombarding artillery is one of my favorite features of Civ3 and I want to try as hard as possible to make it feasible. Otherwise it's all bore-snore Civ 2/4 style direct attacks.
But here an open word: When you do playtesting with that map and the tons of preplaced units, in my eyes there will be a good change, that you soon will wish to reduce the number of the cities cause of the looong AI-turntimes.
I don't think there's anyway around this!
I'm at 5700 units right now, with 553 cities. Trade only with the Airport flag in the capitals at this time. Personally, I don't mind long turn times. Especally, I don't mind watching the AI making his moves. I realize that game would be a lot more playable if I toned it all down, but I like the level of detail. I guess we'll see how it turns out. This game will most likely be decided in 5-10 long turns. In this way, I think Civ III will provide a fair prediction of the speed of operations. The rate of catastrophic destruction would have been unimaginably fast in such a conflict.
Thank you for the great comments and I hope to hear more. Also wondering when we can get our grubby hands on SOE!
As a general note, I've just done a bunch of work on the IDF and Syria. Iraq and Egypt are next. Also, I'm in the process of putting units in the biq and determining attack/defense values. I'm playing with the idea of having 'War Material'- a U.S. only build that takes the places of armies, flag unit, and captured unit. With no VP locations in the Western Hemisphere, the US can either ship these to his bases in Europe, or trade/gift them to friendly civs. No idea if it will work, but might be another way to con the AI into sending more troops overseas.
Also, if there are any PCX artists who would like to help, I have some very specific requests. I've been trying in this area but have zero artistic talent, and have already spent a lot of time attempting with no results. Suppose I just have to keep at it.