English colonies and US

[PDiFolco]

After reading the manual, it seems that colonies are purely abstracted entities, giving money through ports to the homeland, that can be blockaded. But nothing is possible against the colonies themselves !
Yet it was Napoleon's plan to distract the RN by attacking the Antillas, to get a few days of naval control of the Channel to invade England : it failed, led to Trafalgar, but was strategically sound. Now there's no possibility to simulate this, and this let not many options to the French .
For the USA, in the game there's only a risk of some US fleet appearing. Yet the 1812 conflict also required a British corps.
Altogether, both factors play on the (perfidious) British side, that has nothing to fear for her colonies, and nothing to engage to defend Canada and tame the USA.
Maybe it's not a big problem - I've just played a Prussia game [:'(]!- but why was it designed this way ?

[ericbabe]

We had considered putting colony boxes along the left side of the map, but nobody to whom I explained the idea and showed the mock-up liked it very well: the general objection was that it was too confusing, and there was some concern about how much work it would be to teach the AI how to use the colony boxes.

[Dreadnaught]

I'd like to have a larger map and the ability to attack an enemies over seas holdings. Also pirating overseas supply lines would be great.

[Dreadnaught]

Would it be possible to to have a full world map with this engine? I'd love to be able to play Japan or whoever during this period. Plus it adds much more replayabilty and much more 'life' to the game. I'm guessing the systems demands to do that would be much too high though.

[PDiFolco]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

We had considered putting colony boxes along the left side of the map, but nobody to whom I explained the idea and showed the mock-up liked it very well: the general objection was that it was too confusing, and there was some concern about how much work it would be to teach the AI how to use the colony boxes.

I'm used to Ageod games and have no problem with "off-map" boxes. [:D]. And it's not more confusing than any island, I don't get the point about confusion of having Americas (Center and North) at its place across the pond, but with simplified big regions. It's just the same than the normal map!
Point taken for the AI, sure it could be a problem. But well, in the end Britain got advantaged by the choices, there could be something to balance that - events requesting to commit X men or Y ships against colonial problems or lose Glory or the colonies themselves(I let you think about how it could work [:'(] ). Or diplo action to push the colonies to revolt, change side...

Anyway, thanks for the reply, and the game is great [:)]!

[ericbabe]

We can do a whole world map with the engine -- we have experimented with this for future products.

We talked about doing the game around-the-world, but in the end, we decided we wanted to keep the focus on the key Napoleonic theater and to represent major items out-of-theater with the events system:  so when it came down to choosing whether to add, say, rules for fighting in India versus adding cavalry screens in detailed battle, we generally chose to add depth to the current theater (i.e. the cavalry screens) on the theory that there are more Napoleonics enthusiasts who would be happy about the cavalry screens than there are enthusiasts for the Fourth Mysore War -- though I have to admit that although coming up with rules and sound effects and animations for elephant charges would be kind of fun, elephants menacing infantry squares isn't the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Napoleonic battles.

[Dreadnaught]

I see.... If we could have cavalry screens AND elephants though, that would be awesome! Game is great though, just thinking about 'wish list' ideas. I'm a long time paradox gamer and I'm used to a world wide theater.

[NobillyT]

I would have liked to have seen out-of-theater boxes in CoG:EE. As it is, colonies are way too abstract, and representing issues with United States and the colonial ambition of nations with large out-of-theatre possessions and interests (Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia) suffers a bit.

Perhaps I am too used to the AGEOD games, and heck even Axis and Allies had special boxes for islands and zoomed in areas like Gibraltar (and Axis and Allies is not widely considered excessively complex, I grasped the concepts of the game at age 8 ), but I don't think out-of-theater boxes would be too complicated.