strategy and collecting intel

[bvanevery]

Are they strategic decisions in the second sense I mention, of allowing me to deny or derail my opponent's strategy? Only marginally. Even though I'm weighing denying a resource to my opponent, that's not something that will affect his strategy; I don't, in fact, know what victory condition Denmark is going for or their approach to achieving it, but unless they're banking on winning a domination victory in the Medieval period, iron won't help them.

You seem to be complaining that you can't collect intel about your opponent's strategic intents. If you could, then you'd be able to interfere with their strategy. As it stands, you have to guess. You don't like a game where the interactions between opposing strategies are unknown and random.

I suppose you could scout the map more, but your opponent's strategic intent may still not be clear from your scouting. Or scouting may be viable in theory but tedious in practice, because it takes too long to push scouting units around.

If you could have any user interface you wanted, what would "discovering strategic intent" look like? Would you find your opponent's plans to invade Continent X? What would make that intel accurate? What would invalidate it?

 

[PhilBowles]

You seem to be complaining that you can't collect intel about your opponent's strategic intents. If you could, then you'd be able to interfere with their strategy. As it stands, you have to guess. You don't like a game where the interactions between opposing strategies are unknown and random.

No, the fact that I don't know their intentions is incidental, not my main point. My main point is that the decision I take is, to all intents and purposes, independent of their intentions or strategy - if I had full knowledge of what that was, it still wouldn't influence my decision as much as any of the considerations about how it advanced my strategy (in fact, it turned out that the tundra resource was 6 iron, the Copenhagen resource 2, so in this instance the random distribution of iron in the landscape, and my need for iron, alone outweighed any other strategic considerations).

If you could have any user interface you wanted, what would "discovering strategic intent" look like? Would you find your opponent's plans to invade Continent X? What would make that intel accurate? What would invalidate it?

As an exercise in theory, espionage allowing one to identify, e.g., specific techs or policies would be interesting. Would that actual knowledge of intent alter my own strategy? Only in very limited circumstances.

 

[bvanevery]

Are you sure you're not just fixated on your own strategies to the exclusion of worrying about anyone else's? Maybe the problem is your enemies don't interfere with you enough and give you way too much breathing room. Thus you see following your own plans as your best option and you don't have to react.