RE: unfair starting positions

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

> >- One time I was on a continent, very far away from 2 enemies on the
> >same continent, and very far by water from anything else.
> The 2 enemies
> >consolidated into 1 enemy before I could get there.  I got a
> toehold on
> >an independent city he hadn't conquered yet, but he showed up with a
> >gazillion units.
> >
> You're losing to an AI!? One that's widely acknowledged to be
> completely inferior?? I wouldn't admit that to anybody...

I didn't see the entire extent of his empire before I quit, but it
looked like he had probably 3 times as many cities as I did, all very
compacted together.  To bring my forces to him was a very long
logistical train.  It's trivial for him to crush anything local to him.
Seems all I can do is scratch at him and he will inevitably repair
himself.  I suppose I could have tried leading him around by his nose,
offering bait in one place and then attacking somewhere else.  Even then
I am not sure, I think it might last about as long as the 1st few city
takes.  I suppose I will try again when / if the situation occurs, but I
expect this kind of slog to be rather dull.

One limiting factor of standard Xconq is it appears to be a game of
attrition.  There's no way to kill units that doesn't also cause your
own units to get killed in retalliation to some degree.  I suppose I
could build bombers galore, and fighters aplenty to suppress his
fighters.  But fighter-fighter is attrition, and only 1 fighter has to
get through to take out a bomber.  If the AI builds any sane number of
fighters, I don't see that attrition will be escaped.  Possibly it
doesn't; I suppose I'll see.

I think my ability to beat the AI is not nearly so much of an issue as
my ability to stay awake doing it.

Terrain advantages / disadvantages would allow for more tactics.  I see
that there are hooks for that, but they aren't used in standard Xconq.
A very typical Civ strategy, for instance, is to leave your crappy
Warrior unit fortified on a mountain top.  When people try to kill it,
they may die themselves, and if they don't they'll surely suffer
grievous harm.  Thus even a worthless unit can deny enemy movement if in
the right terrain.  I think of Civ as a rather "tactics lite" game;
Xconq is even lighter still.

> A string of bases can be used as a sort of "canal". Not an
> intentional feature
> of the original design, but very convenient.

Oh god.  I would call moving ships from base to base over land a bug.


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

Taking risk where others will not.