Speaking of TMIT I think him and MLS can cover the Smarta$$ quota just fine lol. Though ones like Mran are one of a kind.
. Looks like I'm on my own during most recordings then. I'll see if I can't channel some intelligent derriere here and there.
On stacks of doom and a bit of discussion about that, I agreed for the most part, but thought that there was a little confusion about what an exponential penalty would do. It wouldn't reduce the power of each unit to 1, it would just mean that for each additional unit in the stack, less total power is added to the stack than when the previous unit was added. So each additional unit in the stack makes less of a difference than the preceding one. So a stack of, say, 20 units would still be more powerful than a stack of 19 units, but that one unit difference would not make as much difference to the total power as the extra unit difference would between, say, 9 and 10 units.
That's interesting, and a better implimentation than a strength penalty. However, it's not a great deal different from the current situation due to collateral damage. As stacks get bigger, a lower % of that size is needed in siege + cleanup to screw it over decently. I guess you could use this feature to tone it down, but beware that it also encourages stacking to an extent.
Also, there was the misconception that people complain about stacks of doom because they hate the AI using them against them. This is not generally the case (although that is annoying). Most complaints come from the lack of ability to use various strategies in war, because there is only really one that is clearly dominant. People would like to be able to split their invasion force up and attack across a wider front, but because stacks of doom are so dominant, they are forced back to using them, because otherwise they will lose.
The AI is the only side shackled to a SoD. I often do 2, 3, or 4 way stack splits to speed up wars. But that's for conventional, land unit + siege fights. My record I think is ~ 20 way stack split, with a sub or two filled with tac nukes, and a transport with 4 marines in each one. Obviously, whatever naval stack or units the AI had was gone after that.
Big SoD is also not QUITE as dominant in multiplayer. The AI can rely on bonuses to deal with surprise back attacks, forks, surprise naval razing raids (some people might still be a little sore over that 9x city razing in one turn
), and chokes. Humans can quickly fall to any of those if not prepared. One can make a valid argument that AI strategy plays a larger role in the SoD tendency than the mechanics, and that if it didn't the game would play out very differently.
However, I think it would be hard to give the AI decent algorithms for these strategies. The only relatively easy ones (saying this w/o any programming knowledge, but intuitively) would be getting it to pillage/choke more early (this would be unreasonable on high difficulties though) and/or getting it to pull forks (try to stand equal distance between cities so that the human can't properly garrison both).