So back playing the game and I noticed a couple glitches

[esteban]

So, after a putting this game aside for about 18 months I thought I would come back and give it another try.

First off, I have to say I like the improved AI. I've played my current AIgame into November/December 1917 and the AI is not as good as a PBEM opponent, but I can no longer wup the Triple Entente navy playing as the Central Powers, and the handling of Allied armies by the AI has significantly improved.

But here are the glitches:

1. AI Great Britain is still bad at putting transports in the North Atlantic so it can feed itself. The North Atlantic has pretty much been an Allied lake for the last 2 years of the war, and even my subs on unrestricted sub warfare have had major problems disrupting (lately mostly French) convoys. The Brits have built something like 20+ transports (there is a Brit 20th transport naval counter floating around in the North Sea). Under the circumstances the biggest problem the Brits should have is chronic obesity, but they keep putting fleets of transports in the East Med and North Sea on amphibious missions.

2. I conquered Russia in my current game, and when I did the computer removed a dozen corps to garrison the place. This turn however, the corps have returned. In an AI game I can "house rule" this and those corps will spend the rest of the war sunning themselves along the shores of the Baltic, but if I was playing the AI as Triple Entente then this would be a big issue. I thought that these returning garrison troops were taken care of in earlier patches?

3. The limited use captured food hexes/food hexes being destroyed by battles in the hex work fine, but once you capture Russia you get a HUGE swath of territory that contains something like 5 food hexes in the lower Ukraine, where usually there is no fighting during the conquest. I captured these hexes intact, plus a couple remainders out of the Russian food hexes near Riga and Kiev my armies took on the way to victory. The result is that now Germany has had a huge food surplus and these captured food hexes are not going away. I thought the ability of Germany to capture Russia and then ahistorically run large food surpluses was going to be taken out of the game? Shouldn't all food hexes become limited use when they are captured/conquered intact?

4. Romania is a similar but smaller problem. I surgically avoided damaging their food hexes and conquered them by trouncing only their cities and armies in non-food hexes, and now they are producing 4 food per turn for Austria-Hungary. Is it realistic that rather tiny Romania should be such a big "breadbasket"? Forget Russia, if you can capture the currently resourced Romania intact you can pretty much offset both the Austrian AND German food deficits.

[esteban]

I should say that I downloaded the commercial 1.32 patch before I started my current AI game.

[FrankHunter]

I don't recall a demand that the rules on garrisons be changed.  The rule is that after a year or so most of the combat troops are no longer needed and can return.

And yes, Romania and the Ukraine can produce a lot of surplus food in the game if you can avoid battles in those hexes.  Those areas were seen by the Central Powers as answers to the food problem and I wanted that same goal to be available to the CP player.

The food from Romania and the raw materials from the Ottomans not only give the CP good reasons to make the Balkans a priority it does the same for the Entente who I doubt would otherwise even contemplate a Salonika type invasion or a defence of Romania with Russian troops.

Anyway, that was my thinking for what its worth.