jlocke said:
Oh I see.
Yes, Zeppelins are pretty useless...
Well, the zeppelins aren't really that useless when the skies are clear of enemy planes. The biplanes can't get anywhere near the kind of range a zeppelin would have. The Germans were, in fact, bombing Britain with zeppelins, and there was no way their biplanes were going to make it. Zeppelins could travel as much as 6500 km if need be. Zeppelins also carried a much higher payload than the biplanes could have. Zeppelins should have a very high probability of being shot down, but without enemy planes (which most of my games were spent without them) they can be rather effective. There perhaps should be an anti-aircraft gun unit that could be used to shoot down zeppelins as well as regular planes. All I know is that I want some opportunities for some strategic bombing.
Oh, another thing, playing as Italy, I spent the first X number of turns researching planes to be able to construct biplanes. Italy, in fact, were already using planes for military purposes by 1912. I think the tech for planes should be there already (at the very least the ability to build small scout planes) but you should be able to discover technologies to upgrade the planes to better models. Everybody had planes at the beginning of the war, but those planes became obsolete very very quickly.
but it would be a no-brainer for there to be immobile naval mines in the Bremen/Kiel area. I doubt the AI could mess up the use of immobile units.

Indeed. Hard for the AI to botch that. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to have several events that would trigger the laying of mines. First, there would be an event early on laying mines in the English channel and then more laying mines in the North Sea. The question is however: would it be fair or realistic to make them cover every square completely blocking in the German fleet? And if NOT, then why would the player do anything other than go around them?
Which do you think is better? more improvements and production/research/infrastructure? or more turns in which to build them up?
I think there needs to be just more improvements at the outset. There should be more turns as well, and there should definitely be more wonders... I'd like it if Rome, for example, had the Vatican.
I agree some of the resistance may be too much, more than in reality... but one way to perhaps get around that would be to have them spawn in more specific places, so that there aren't rebels outside london and Istanbul, but there are in Ireland and Arabia. Is this possible to implement, Trip?
Yes, every city in the game has an ID, so events could be created to specifically cause uprisings around a particular city or set of cities. I will try to implement this if Trip would rather just leave the scenario as is (and gives his consent of course).
I think more needs to happen in the event of capturing particular cities. I mean, I think if you capture Paris and you're playing as Germany or one of the Central Powers, you should be able to force France's surrender and removal from the Entente. Similarly, I would like to make it so that Brussels/Belgium will be returned to the Belgian civilization but Belgium will become part of the Central Powers in order to simulate the establishment of a German puppet state of Belgium. Similarly, the Allies recapturing the city would return it to the Belgian civilization and then force them into the Entente camp.
After all, it's rather rare that territories conquered are actually annexed into the country proper rather than just made into a client state of some sort.
As for the trenches, it would be nice indeed to have the trademark part of the war represented. I don't know what the best way to go about implementing this would be, however. The AI certainly isn't going to build the trenches... it will have to be some kind of an event. But what to set as the criteria? I mean, the war was rather mobile in those first few weeks... but there was just too many men in too small a space and so the trenches were a virtually inevitable conclusion if one side or the other couldn't produce victory in those early weeks.
However, the prospect for scoring victory in the early fall WAS there. Of course, just because Germany would have knocked France out doesn't mean the others wouldn't have continued. Also, different conditions for a peace would be good as well (as I was discussing above). It might be interesting to have an events system so that in the event of a peace being formed with one party or the other being the victor, that the European map would necessarily change based on it. So I personally don't think that a peace treaty should be game over necessarily. Many times a peace is just round one of a larger fight. If Germany had scored a decisive victory and forced France to the negotiation table, they might have been back at it within a few years.
Of course, if you go that route, then it's not a World War I scenario as much as it is a 20th century scenario with World War I
in it.