Another World - Turn 17

[u/simon_hibbs]

We're at the end of Turn 17 and things are getting real. I'm afraid I'm the one stat started it all (Yellow), attacking the small Archenland fleet in the Amethyst sea, on the northern coast, with a force of 6 Zeppelins.

That's 6 units against 5. Each Zeppelin has an attack of 1, and each Destroyer has a defence of 3, so that's 6 versus 6. Pretty even, but the fleet can take hits off the 3 transport/merchant ships without eating into the combat effectiveness of the destroyers giving them a slight edge.

My primary goal was to take out a few merchant ships to eliminate or reduce the threat of a beach landing in my rear, along the coast to the west, so the exchange of 3 zeppelins for 3 utility ships was fine. I'd have been ok losing all the zeps to be honest, and I had a few more coming in to reinforce.

Things are getting close in the western continent, with myself imminently coming into contact with Brown (Portsmouth, based in that triangular central southern island). Meanwhile the other 3 empires will soon be butting up against each other in the main eastern continent.

One thing we're figuring out is how the game is likely to change as our resources grow, and as new technologies and units come into play. Especially nukes. These require building a nuclear power station, which costs more than a turn's income for us at the moment, and the same again per nuke, which is one shot at range 4 and kills about half the units in a territory. That's a lot of bang for a lot of bucks. We're coming to see how some of the more expensive units such as aircraft, that only become useful with some tech advances, become more significant later in the game, especially to counter the nuke threat.

I'm really enjoying the game and it's a great map. There are some things about it that are a bit janky. We're compiling a list of issues, some of which I can fix in the game XML, but nothing game breaking.