Since the USA and USSR can't make freight themselves, our proxies must make it. Since the freight can't be transported via the gifting mechanism, it will usually make sense to send it via ship. This means that there will be lots of freighters on the ocean. Strictly speaking, my best play is to send most of my navy out into the oceans, and commerce raid the Pro West ships, which would be more than a little weird historically. If there is a diplomatic convention to prevent attacking freighters, you have a situation where interdicting a weapon shipment into a war zone is, perhaps, a bit too hard. Inspection (with a cost) would provide a sort of middle ground. This 'commerce raiding' loophole seems like it should be addressed somewhere in the game mechanics.
Oh I see what you mean. Yes, that does make sense. If I had built this with the template, #2 below would be an easy solution as I'd use one of the combat modules. I'm not even sure how to approach it with the hodgepodge mess of files that is Cold War. Here's a few thoughts:
1. Your boarding mechanism is interesting and perhaps the best solution for the MP game. Now that you explain the why, I think it's important.
2. For the SP game, I'd propose that the simplest solution is to not allow Europe the USSR or USA to destroy Pro-West or Pro-East freighters
if the superpowers are not at war. Their proxies (who each have very limited navies, and who can be hunted down by the main navy) can still attack, which I think is reasonable/can represent piracy, but yeah, you shouldn't be commerce raiding nor should I take my immensely more powerful fleet and strangle your access to the sea.
I wasn't trying to negotiate house rules here, nor do I think it is a house rule to abide by agreements that are made. It is in my interest not to have battleships bombard Pro East cities in Europe, and I'm willing to make some concessions to achieve that. War declarations (not required in advance) are just a norm to show you're not escalating things outside of 'normal' limits, at least in Europe. Omit the declaration, and others just might take it the wrong way, or at least not trust future agreements to have as much meaning. This kind of 'break' on escalation seems like something both Europe and the USSR would find useful.
For my part, I'm limiting my negotiations with the Soviets to Turkey and adjacent regions. I have no expectations that the Reds will call off their subversion in Indo-China or elsewhere. They should not expect sweetness and light from me in return.
Oh I don't think anything any of you are doing is "wrong" I'm just reinforcing the experience. I think we have 4 strong players here who can all act in their self-interests and it's going to be interesting seeing how things develop diplomatically as one or the other starts to pull ahead in certain regions. If someone lurking eventually takes one of the smaller civs and we get a 5th, it'll be interesting to see that power dynamic as well.
Your scenario is the first one to provide a mechanism for military conflict which doesn't result in the principal powers being in open warfare.
Thanks - it's a goal anyway. The main powers can attack each other directly but there are some fairly significant penalties to doing so. The Soviets can only capture 5 cities without a stiff financial penalty and that penalty increases quite a bit with every 5 cities they take. If they were to completely occupy your starting cities in Europe, they'd be looking at at least $4,000 in penalties per turn. Probably not the sort of thing that anyone wants to do right off the bat, though later in the game it could be manageable. Also, you'll note Europe has no objective cities, so the only point to grabbing these would be to deny them to the West (which eventually might make sense but probably not until the economy gets going).
The United States gets hurt even worse. Let's suppose a hypothetical where forces from Rammstein invaded the USSR. Long before they even reached Russia proper, they'd be incurring a $13,500 penalty per turn.
On the other hand, Europe can conquer any city it wants, including Soviet ones, so I expect the Red Army to have massive forces defending itself.
This is all designed/hoped to keep most conflicts to the periphery as a land war in Europe just doesn't make much economic sense for anyone. I suppose one could transfer cities to their proxy, but to sustain a campaign over the distance, I doubt that would be the best way to go on turn 1 of a conflict anyway (it would be hard to sustain air support all the way across the continent), so a major war is going to cost some coin. And, of course, a major war is completely unnecessary "to win" the scenario. Unless it becomes necessary, that is
(may be not exactly as illustrated)
