Manpower

Now that I've had some more experience with this game, I think I'm in a better position to comment on it.

My initial impression in playing this game is that there isn't nearly enough manpower, and that has been confirmed in all three games I have played. In fact, the more I play this game, the more I wonder why manpower even exists as a resource at all.

Shortage of manpower radically reduces the number of units you can build, and that in turn hugely impacts on your strategic options. I generally find I can only afford to undertake one campaign at a time. For example, I had a long struggle with a very active player recently on one front, though I only needed a couple of spare units to expand on another border into some weak minor countries, I could not do it because I needed absolutely every unit I could build at the main front. So you cannot create an interesting game where you are attempting to achieve several goals at once. It's one goal at a time, which makes campaigns quite one-dimensional.

Secondly, when you do finally achieve a major victory over an opponent, as I have done in the same game, you find it very hard to exploit that victory because of lack of units. Whenever you take a new enemy province, you have to leave a garrison behind, and contrary to what I've read on this forum, a single unit really isn't enough, because half the time the province will continue to burn into the next day, while on other occasions you will lose that province to rebellions. So you must either critically weaken your spearhead by dropping off units for garrison duty, or wait until the province is pacified before continuing. Neither option is helpful when you need to drive deep into enemy territory and take his production centres before he has time to recover.

Because manpower is so limited, I also find, like another player, that I mostly just spam light tanks in the early game. Infantry I build only when I am short of iron, or to defend crucial cities. Even so, by a couple of weeks into the game, I've run out of manpower and all the production facilities I have so painstakingly built up are mostly lying IDLE. So at the very moment when you have got the infrastructure to start cranking up production and establishing dominance, you can build nothing! Meanwhile, your opponents, who have done very little by comparison, are still almost as strong as you are because you both have about the same amount of manpower.

The really absurd bit is, even without the manpower limits, resources are very tight in this game. I am constantly running out of iron in one round and having to buy more in the market - in another round it was oil and grain. So why on earth do you need manpower limits on top of all the other resource limits?

In summary then, I think manpower should be dispensed with, it is a pointless and arbitrary factor that severely limits the fun factor. I really don't know what Bytro were thinking when they introduced this resource, but I hope they have a rethink and decide to just get rid of it.