Originally Posted by
blaa
I'm going to continue my rant on the food/oil and inf/tanks on this topic as well.
Last set, before the wars, there were 2 oilers + some mixed strategy states, who had oil rigs. Those 2 oilers lubricated the whole game easily. Too easily, so one of the oilers switched strategies. There was a possibility that there might not be enough oil on the market on the last few days, but that one oiler took the chance.
That one oiler had over 20k land. That's more than 1 million oil per turn. That's like 200m oil per day. That's a huge amount. People were buying oil with quantities ranging from 1m to 20m. You can't succesfully play oiler this way. You need your money, you need it now (or in 12h), but you just can't be competitive if it takes days.
Farmers had it even worse, so I'm not even going there.
So current situation - play farmer/oiler when you just want to expand/sell/buy ships at the end. 150m/200m nw should be ok. But you can not win a set with oiler/farmer.
Question - should you be able to win a set as a farmer/oiler? Should you be able to win with normal strategy proportions? Normal proportions mean that there are enough indies/cashers/oilers/techers/farmers. this means that you aren't just winning because you are the only state running that particular strategy.
If oiler/farmer are meant for expanding states and not competitive states, then I guess it's okay and do not read any further.
But if all strategies are meant to be competitive, then oiler/farmer need a change. Shouldn't increase production. The resources aren't selling anyway. Reduce production/increase price? Increase demand?
Is our playerbase big enough to just tweak some constants and get things right?
I personally don't think so. We do not have enough players. One set we will have too few oilers, next set we have a flood of oil.
I think we should remove one of the strategies. Or basically merge them into one strategy (see the thread in suggestions subforum) so they can switch their production just like indies change their production. The latter one would be better, because mr president likes his oil.
Now to my second favorite subject: ground units.
Why on earth are there two of those. Just because there would be a reason to have both food and oil? The food demand is big enough. Last set the units I had consuming primarily food were spies. And still my food demand was 1/3 of oil demand.
infantry and tanks create confusion. On a set where there are not enough indies, there will be a situation when you can't get either of those, or according to Murphy you would get the unit you didn't upgrade.
Before the oil/food nobody used tanks anyway. Now there's a dilemma. Lets lose the dilemma and lose one of those units. If you don't want to lose tanks because you want tanks to be in your game, then rename some of the infantry upgrade levels to be related with tanks. Like level 8 to be Infantry with tank support or what have you.
Summary:
merge oiler/farmer
lose tanks