ICBM: Escalation

It's a pretty good game. Many problems still need to be worked out. --It crashes often --I dislike how much of the tech tree is dead space which you have to interact with to advance from one era to the next. AFAIK, the best way to progress through tech involves a lot of "there are 5 worthless techs remaining in this era I'll never use. Which 3 can I get most quickly?" --I dislike how it's not clear how much of an effect each tech has. Instead of saying "your land armies do more damage" maybe you could put a number on that? 5% vs. 20% is a huge difference. There's a lot of guessing in the game. --Getting units into and out of army bases for airlifts is buggy as hell --"Sir, we've conquered New York and Philadelphia, but it's pretty much a draw until we conquer some random town 500 miles away." Get used to that a lot. --Game seems to be a roll of the dice where if you click on an event, about 50% of the time, it will bring you to the relevant location. If you roll badly, I hope you know where Bellem is. --It should be a lot easier at a glance to tell cities are in which province. (Almost 100% of the benefits of conquest happen when you have conquered the entire province). --Max speed is painfully slow. It's not actually 4x. I think, late game, it's realistically like 2.5x or 3x. There's a lot of slowdown. --I think the game is excellent for strategic depth in non-nuclear war. The nuclear war element is, ironically, meh. --It is stupid how the game handles an AI trying to grab cities that you are currently occupying. It always seems to resolve with a disputed territory going to an AI. --It is [b]stupid[/b] how underpriced destroyers are compared to pretty much every unit in the game. You have 10 armies costing 6x as much as my 2 destroyers. You can't do anything and will eventually get wiped. Destroyers make planes/carriers look mostly useless and are better at being cruisers than cruisers are, and are also the cheapest all-purpose fighting unit. For most of the game, 2 destroyers will also win against 3 airfields, which cost a combined ~8 destroyers. --I'm trying to make planes work, but they just suck for most of the game. In contrast, winning on the hardest difficulties with builds of all armies/destroyers is fairly trivial with possibly a few Specialized Airbases which are fairly useless until you have late-game tech but very efficient for destroying the world when you have a huge tech advantage and only then. Okay, so on the hardest difficulty, the AIs get a 75% boost to production and research or whatever. But, we both started out with 4000 production points and my destroyers are worth 3x as much as anything they built, so I'm going to win building *nothing* in the first hour and totally abusing how randomly they place their troops at minute 1 of the game. --By default the game gets into nuclear weapons jarringly quickly, at which point armies in general are not very effective at anything except for kamikaze airdrops to destroy key infrastructure. --The AI is very bad at recognizing when they have been destroyer-locked. --Against hard AIs, it is hugely important to NEVER BUILD ANYTHING pretty much. Pick your starting unit set very carefully. Optimize for destroyers holding key defensive points and clearing invasion points, and armies with a few airbases to airlift them into position. Be on 100% Research pretty much all of the time --It is stupid how critically important it is to spend 30-40 clicks at the start of each game offering 9 AIs the same research/production/nuclear agreements. It's like a 30% boost to research and production? Why? What is the point of this mechanic? 40 mindless clicks, GO! --The game IN THEORY has a war plan where you can automate your land troops to invade. I have never gotten it to actually work to get armies to split up and conquer cities on their own. --The game IN THEORY has war plans where you can automate nuclear forces to target cities. However, the game on its own will sometimes choose to autolock like 100% of your nuclear forces on an annihilated city with 0 people. Guys, it's not going anywhere, you can stop nuking it now. Please? Okay, this is pretty stupid.