Slitherine

I don't think Allied Corps is too easy. In fact, in a certain way it is too hard. It's not that I have any troubles achieving a DV. The AI simply is no match for a human player.

However, because the AI is somewhat inept the scenario designers have decided the make the German forces in most scenarios unrealistically strong, especially when it comes to German air defense. The airforce is where the Western Allies excelled and under normal circumstances the player would purchase lots of air units. So the designers tried to make the game difficult by denying that advantage.
This ubiquitous air defense make it almost worthless to invest in an airforce as the Western Allies. In most cases you simply cannot use your bombers at all because they'd get shot down in no time. This in turn leads to a very unrealistic core force. When I played AC the last time I only purchased Churchill tanks and artillery.
These strange incentives bother me a lot.

I'd much rather play a game that is too easy than one where I am forced to build an unrealistic force.

Egge wrote:I don't think Allied Corps is too easy. In fact, in a certain way it is too hard. It's not that I have any troubles achieving a DV. The AI simply is no match for a human player.

However, because the AI is somewhat inept the scenario designers have decided the make the German forces in most scenarios unrealistically strong, especially when it comes to German air defense. The airforce is where the Western Allies excelled and under normal circumstances the player would purchase lots of air units. So the designers tried to make the game difficult by denying that advantage.
This ubiquitous air defense make it almost worthless to invest in an airforce as the Western Allies. In most cases you simply cannot use your bombers at all because they'd get shot down in no time. This in turn leads to a very unrealistic core force. When I played AC the last time I only purchased Churchill tanks and artillery.
These strange incentives bother me a lot.

I'd much rather play a game that is too easy than one where I am forced to build an unrealistic force.

That pretty much sums up why I played through Allied Corps only once. Due to a fixed core size you're almost forced to pick the best units for the job and these are mostly the ones with a high armour rating like the Churchill tanks. If the game would allow to deploy 2 medium tanks for a heavy tank or something like that, it would offer more variety but very unlikely to ever happen with this game.

Incidentally, I am playing Operation Cobra right now.
IRL, this was a major success for the Allies. In-game, I wouldn't stand a chance against the German Juggernaut if onyl one of my precious core slots would be wasted with inferior American tanks. Purchasing American tank destroyers - that made up a substantial part of the Allied forces IRL - is completely out of question.
I still like the game, a lot actually, but I am no fan of power-gaming and power-gaming is what the game forces me to do.

hugh2711 wrote:I am impressed some people actually remember MAX, used to love that. It was abandoned but there is currently a project called MAX reloaded wich is trying to recreate it; cross platforn, i.e. unix and apple as well as windows. I believe they have got it up to 200 turns, the old game would usually crash by 400 turns

Would not want a pure remake except they vastly improve AI. The challenge in the hardest campaign I ever played in a TBS was the design of the scenarios, the AI itself was brain dead. I still could play M.A.X. but it keeps gathering dust - I would rather play MoO 2 a 20th or MoM a 5oth time .

Regards,
Thorsten