From: utzoo!decvax!cca!mclure@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.games.emp Title: now harder to wage war\? Article-I.D.: sri-unix.1865 Posted: Thu Jun 24 00:50:36 1982 Received: Sun Jun 27 23:28:15 1982 >From one of our players: It looks as though the recent changes to the Attack and Enlist commands will pretty much put an end to conventional warfare (the poor soldiers will always be slogging through the mud). Shelling a country with a lower technology level, or total nuclear destruction seem to be the only reasonable alternatives. It seems as though empire now needs a way to wage a limited war by using something like a tank/troop carrier which would be able to attack across a number of sectors carrying its own mobility with it (you could defend with anti-tank mines and guns). Anyway, just a suggestion. Why the sudden change? In the attack command: The cost in mobility to the defending sector is the same as for the attacking sector if the attack is unsuccessful. If the attack is successful the mobility in the conquered sec- tor goes to 0, (the populace destroys the goodies before being captured). In the enlist command: Note that there is a cost of 0.2 BTUs per draftee in addi- tion to the basic cost of the command and enlistees use up some mobility in the enlistment process. So, a sudden enlistment will drain mobility from the enlisting (often attacking) sector; and once a sector is taken it has no immediate mobility. Thus, you can only whittle away at the edges of a country on successive nights, and if the country on the receiving end retaliates, you wind up with a WWI style trench war with neither side making any progress. This seems to me an unsavory way of doing things, so I would opt for a nuclear strike and bombardment if I wanted to zap a country. JRO, Director