RE: unfair starting positions

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery at indiegamedesign dot com>]

Stan Shebs
>
> Quake III it ain't, but it isn't trying to be. :-) You were
> probably well
> on your way to being crushed by the AI, and only quitting
> saved you from
> total
> humiliation! Every player, human and AI, starts out with the
> same stuff
> (unless
> you ask for a handicap), so if you lose to an AI, it's due to
> lack of skill.
> I'm not trying to be insulting; the right strategy is not
> always obvious.

Last night I played standard Xconq all the way through, just to say I
had done it.  It was a tedious cakewalk.  The 3 hour endgame of bombing
the remnants of the last 2 guys into oblivion was particularly tiresome,
the inevitable outcome was known long before.

In a sense you were right about "lack of skill," I didn't understand the
counterintuitive combat system.  In Xconq units don't really defend,
it's mostly a "first strike" game.  You're better off having your units
*outside* the city you've taken over.  Putting a pile of infantry into a
city doesn't defend it like in other games.  It's just a way to throw
your production away.

I didn't even get a particularly good start this game.  I got an island
with 6 cities on it.  One of the AIs got a rather large continental area
about 20 hexes to the west of me, i.e. out of fighter range.  That AI
had every single city on the continent when I got there.  But,
continuous transport dumps made short work of him.  I'd estimate this
AI's initial resource advantage as 4:1.  But it couldn't defend itself
against local city attacks once I understood the "stay outside" rule.

The Easternmost AI had an island fused to the edge of the board with an
internal lake.  I think it may have been given no ocean-facing ports.
He did have a few ports on a lake.  The other possibility is that the
South AI may have bombed what few ports he had into oblivion, while I
was chewing up that western continent.  It may have been quite a battle,
maybe I was left alone because of their lockhorning.  On the other hand,
the South AI turned out to be an island of only 8 cities, and I wiped it
out easily when I got around to it.

> Even though Xconq is not a
> real-time game, I think other oldtimers here will attest to
> the nailbiting
> involved in getting a half-dozen full troop transports safely
> into a heavily patrolled landing site!

I did lose 1 or 2 transports to an enemy on the Southwest continent who
had good air power when I first encountered him.  I was moving somwhat
brazenly, just trying to get the transports in there and not sneak
around.  I could do that because although he had good air power, I had
far superior air power.  An entire northern continent chucking out
mostly fighters.  I correctly guesed that the AI does not understand
logistics, that it wouldn't know how pointless it is to have an
abundance of ground forces when there's nothing nearby to attack by
ground.  Ergo, that even if we were of comparable size, it wouldn't have
anything remotely resembling the air power that I was fielding, 'cuz it
was wasting its production on targets, er, ground units.

> >Terrain advantages / disadvantages would allow for more
> >tactics.
> >
> You must not have had a game where you're hosed because your
> armor can't
> pass through a forest or mountain barrier, or where the one
> road through is closely guarded.

I'm sure it matters more in multiplayer, but in single player against
AIs it's not a significant issue.  Overwhelming air power + a few ground
units can go anywhere + tear up any AI.  I'm surprised that the fighers
perform reasonably well in practice.  Reading the rules, they're not
supposed to be very good against ground units.  Indeed they're a bit
clunky for taking out infantry, but they seem to do ok against armor.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

Taking risk where others will not.