Hey Samez,
Thanks for posting. West Germany is meant to be a tough position and the ever-present threat of friendly allies 'liberating' cities that you badly need is a danger to all players on both sides. I've beaten the game with France and Germany, and have played most of the other NATO allies but in test games where they couldn't properly be concluded.
The offense/defense land unit flags are a big part of the game and I'm glad you brought that up. The traditional Civ 3 method is to have tanks as offensive and mech units as defensive. The problem here, though, is that the enemy will dutifully use their mech units for defense and have no offensive imagination. As much as possible, I was trying to recreate 20th century mechanized warfare at its absolute apex in Civ 3 format. Position is inferior to maneuver; the defense is an undesirable temporary situation before regaining the offense. When the AI stacks great mech infantry units in cities, they are as good as dead. Other AI opponents, and certainly the player, will bombard and redline them as much as possible before directing overwhelming force to subdue the defender. On the other hand, by freeing up mech units with the offensive strategy, the AI becomes more unpredictable. Not any smarter, surely, but at least they won't meekly wait at home for you to kill them. I tried to exploit the civ mechanics as much as possible to put these dilemmas to the player. Knowing that the computer can and will attack in areas that you are weak changes how you play. In my last game as Poland, victory seemed almost assured when the AI suddenly launched a two-pronged counter-offensive in both France and amphibiously in East Germany. I lost three divisions and the Russians were wrecked; it completely switched the tempo of the game.
Anyway, I bring this up because I know you appreciate the trade-off difficulties when modding on how to 'program' things at the outset. I agree on the Low countries and Denmark...they probably will have a few mech units re-designated as defense for their major cities. I'm testing with Germany's Marders as defensive only units, too. The Americans are a special case, as they will only transport offensive units across the ocean and like you said, love to garrison cities with artillery and helicopters (with like 40 subs underneath). I've played a little bit with their settings, too. I just want to exhaustively check these new settings before the next release, because my name isn't Creative Assembly.
I checked the German M113. Its three required resources were None, Iron, Petroleum, which is probably why it didn't show up in the civilopedia. This will be fixed. Actually, there's a great solution for fixing the hyperlink bug if your units have less than three required resources.
One thing to remember about the oil problem (it's supposed to be aggravating
) is that your friends will build the small wonder also, so sooner or later you can trace your trade route through Le Havre or Genoa. But, yeah, it's tough for the Federal Republic.
I wish I could do something about the AI's mindless bombardments. It's especially bad when your own team bombards an enemy airbase with your units on it. I think the new layout (pictured above) will help reduce some of these problems.
Haddu: Yugoslavia only had engineer battalions at the corps level, with no larger formations. I may add one engineer regiment for each of the military districts just to give them staring workers, though. Thanks.
As a general update: this year is a busy one for me, which is why I wanted to get the game done by the end of 2014. I hope to have sufficient time in the next month to wrap up this update and have the game truly complete. I'm sure there will have to be minor tweaks or corrections later, but I have no intention of George Lucasing this scenario further down the line. I think it's incredible that nearly every military unit of the time is represented by Civ 3 graphics which says a lot for the unit makers. Since the game is pushing against the limit again, I couldn't really add much more even if I wanted to. So please, by all means, share your games, insights, and questions and I will do my best to address them, or at least try to justify my reasoning.
