short cut

Maximum Thrashing wrote:

I just played the fastest game yet, 66 days

As AI tend to park units in every single province, I don't see the advantage of getting ROW just to walk across the land, split your forces up, and then declare war. My OCD prefers to sweep the country cleanly from one side to the other, and with as few losses as possible. Having my units trapped deep in enemy territory when declaring war is an alien concept to me. I want to expand outward from where I am to where I want to go, and not leave an opening for the AI to run around behind my front lines.

Seems like you would need a lot more units and lose a lot more units using this method.

This tactic could be used to scrounge up the final necessary points to close out a game, but still they could probably just attack it directly, and wouldn't make much of a difference in who wins at that point.

My coalition partner and I are currently more than halfway to victory, and it's only day 16. We've done all our attacking head on, so I would argue that parking units inside a RoW country then declaring war isn't that much faster than just plain invading.

It might make the game end quicker if you're low on units, but yeah, usually it's still easier to march through the land. But I still do like the idea of preventing these attacks somehow, maybe the AI can turn to elite if one player has over 30 units in their land at one point, but even this might be excessive, I don't know, it just stinks to see other players get easy points from an AI.

Another Idea: When the first player gets to 30% of the required VP for the map (aka 20% of all VP), AIs turn elite.

And if possible, it would just be elite against the players who have reached/surpassed 30%/20% of VP.

Shhhhhhh, im using it... i call it „Order 66"

iDragons wrote:

so I would argue that parking units inside a RoW country then declaring war isn't that much faster than just plain invading.

With Right of Way you can travel through the territory at 80% speed for the entire province.

If you declare war you travel at 50% speed until you conquer the province, and then 100% speed once you own the province. So if you travel halfway at 50% and halfway at 100%, that averages 75%.

This gives the travel speed edge to the ROW players by a minor amount, however if you are waiting for your troops to occupy every province before declaring war, then some troops will be very far behind the line when the war is over. This will slow down preparations for the next enemy.

Now in combat: A large well balanced stack will cut through a few of your enemies like a hot knife through butter. By this I mean a stack with 8 infantry, 8 anti tanks, and 8 anti air, or 6 light tanks and 6 armored cars (or some variation of that) . This 36 unit ultimate stack will dispatch a typical 2 or 3 unit Ai defense formation with a couple of hits with very few losses. So a one hour delay per province most likely.

By splitting those groups up in an effort to take multiple provinces at the same time you will end needing 4 to 6 hours to capture each province, and suffer casualties of 30% to 50% This requires time to replace units and time for them to reach the combat zone. This also slows down the process.

If you have planes, they are only going to be able to reach from your current airbases anyway. This can leave your troops deep in enemy territory with no air support, and they are also cut off from reinforcements as all of your units are tied up with an enemy at the same time.

So I am going to argue that that doing this is actually slower that an invasion that works cleanly across the country from one side to the other.

It just consider that a clever use of the game's system, albeit a bit 'meta' in a sense.

Still, it's far from abusive, and in now way more so than backstabbing a player with whom you share RoW by taking the same approach (which is also very effective).