Germany vs AI SID 1.9 (first) report
I decided to can my game at emperor level and give your special SID scenario a try, especially since you asked for feedback on it. I was crushing Russia and lost interest. A worthwhile note on that game though: Russia was producing about 10 tanks every 3 turns, but it was losing more than it could produce against Germany and Japan. I think Russia had a lot of its units tied on the Japanese front since I never saw an armor offensive from them. Italy however is utterly worthless. They are not contributing anything to the war effort. Except the occassional cannon fodder stack
Currently in the new SID game, I'm at the end of 1939.
First 2 turns went really well. I took Poland, Denmark, Holland and Belgium. However, the next few turns were purely defensive. The French sent a huge army against Brussels and it wasn't for my 6 88 defenders posted there, I would have lost the city for sure. I was really worried when I realized that France had such a powerful mobile force. What added to my problems was the fact that I couldn't use my bombers versus the French stacks since they were in range of both the French and British air forces.
The turning point was: one French stack came out of the area covered by the Allies airforce, so I really pounded on it with everything I had (air, navy, land). That really helped to stabilize the front.
Also, one of the biggest flaw of the AI was to constanly try to reach the weakest city in its range instead of concentrating its firepower against one city. I would have lost more than one city this way. For example, the AI would have a stack with 30+ units beside a city with 10 defenders. 2 hex away, there is a city with only 5 defenders so the AI will lose 2 turns trying to reach that city instead of hammering the city it's already next to. Too bad we can't mod the AI behavior.
I also redeployed my figthers to be able to attack the Allies air force in France in order to lower their fighters strength there. They had so much. It worked out pretty well but I had 3 cities producing Me109 for a while in order to rebuild my losses.
Also, thanks to a very well timed armor blizt, I was able to annihilate a huge part of the Bristish airforce stationned in the airfield north of Paris. You should have seen my grin and sadistic laughter
Continental France is now mine and will now spend a few turns to mop up the remaining fortresses. After that, I will probably move against Spain and Portugal.
I'm using the following house rule:
1) Never draft more than 4 infantry
2) When a naval unit leaves port, it has to finish its turn at sea (not in port). This gives the AI a chance to counter-attack. It also makes me lose one more turn to move the unit back at port before I can heal the unit. So this reduces the overall efficiency of Germany at sea.
3) Won't attack Russia before the end of 1940. That should really boost their OOB and recreate a historical feel to Barbarossa.
The no-army design works well, but I find the special leader unit too weak to be an effective offensive unit. Their stats are great but their very low hit points really hinders their performance. I only use them against damaged units in open terrain. I still prefer this system though.
It also seems that the AA batteries in city are more effective. I lost a lot of bombers in this game so far, compared to the other version. However, the same can be said for the AI against my cities.
In this game, I also started building workers in order to build some terrain improvements. I noticed you increased the railroad cost. Good design. I always thought it was too cheap to build railroad (in vanilla Civ) considering the benefits it provides.
Overall, a much more challenging game so far and a lot of fun. Good work. Will keep you posted on the game progress.