All of the recent TR conversations didn't hold much interest for me — the system worked well enough before for most players, and it works well enough now. But I understand the appeal for the more detail-oriented among us, and for Gazebo, who is after all polishing a diamond.
The spear/pike developments were more constructive, in my opinion, but strike me as part of a series of adjustments that may be never-ending, given the number of moving parts in today’s VP.
For me, those discussions are secondary to addressing what still makes VP clearly less than almost-perfect. That would be anything that leads most of us to say “My game sucked because…”
I think the biggest remaining problems with VP are AI combat and runaways. The first makes the game less challenging than it could be, and the second flat-out ruins games, often after an investment of hours. But can anything be done about them that hasn’t been tried before?
The surest way to improve AI combat would be to reduce all movement to one or two tiles. That’s how I recall most war board games working. The problem would be that it makes game play more boring (I’m not sure).
Short of that, the AI often loses because it doesn’t concentrate hard enough and long enough on its primary target. In my games, they all too often attack halfheartedly here and there, then retreat when I hold them off. The exception is pretty much the AI superpower who believes it can afford to throw unit after unit at me. Given their supply advantages (especially at higher levels), I think the AI should favor concentrated attacks more, and diversion/survival less.
With regard to runaways, I’ve been trying to find a common thread, and came up only with REX. Rapid expansion leads certain civs to start snowballing. and if they have an early unique-something, the game is all over all too often.
Given this, would it make sense to penalize too-rapid expansion the same way that wide civs are already penalized in other costs? I’m not talking about (slow down Progress” so much as a game-warping expansion relative to the other civs in that game. I don’t know if this is possible, but it might improve competitiveness without kneecapping the lucky fast starter.
