USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

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Anthropoid
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USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by Anthropoid »

Having observed the 'inexorable slide to blue sphere' problem

http://www.bgforums.com/forums/viewtopi ... &start=105

and also noted that Fistalis hypothesized that the preceding oppositive problem (inexorable Red sphere shift) was in large part being driven by the US AI engaging in air incursions and souring its relations driving everyone into Red sphere

http://www.bgforums.com/forums/viewtopi ... 66&t=18999

I thought it might be instructive to do a quick play test with me as Red Sphere captain and intentionally NOT engage in any provocative air incursions.

Settings will be ALL DEFAULT and game is vanilla (in interest of helping provide data salient to basic game balance). Intent is to play on quickest mode for a few years and see what happens with the sphere distributions.

Obviously I will NOT engage in any air incursions nor ANYTHING else that might worsen my relations with my red sphere or neutrals. Beyond proportioned response and support of allies as required by scripted events, etc., I will not antagonize Blue Sphere. I'll just focus on building economy and infrastructure and helping my red sphere partners. I don't normally play on auto-settings but for this test I'll see about putting most everything on full auto.
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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by Anthropoid »

Starting Economic Settings: The Minister is given complete control! and encouraged to make our people happy, and keep the budget balanced . . . something which recent experience has shown are nearly mutually exclusive, but I digress . . .

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Land, Sea and Air military are all set to FULL Initiative. Fabrications are all turned on Auto, balanced Off/Def and Quality. Military Minister is instructed to Increase Readiness and Deploy Defensively.

Production Minister is also set to full auto and instructed to engage in "Conservation" (reduce demand, keep production close to demand). Lets see if we can keep a fairly self-sufficient economy and minimize inflation and production costs.

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Science Minister is fully unlocked and told to research Societal techs.

Starting Sphere distributions are: US 21Align 7 Lean; Neutral 36; Soviet 7 Lean 13 Align

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This may not turn out to be much of an AAR, but I thought it might be helpful and I'm bored.

Ah, one thing I almost forgot . . . air pathing over neutrals is turned off

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Nov 1 1949, I have traded (for free) the Mountain Infantry design to all red sphere members and red leaning regions.
Last edited by Anthropoid on Jan 14 2013, edited 1 time in total.
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number47
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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by number47 »

Anthropoid wrote: This may not turn out to be much of an AAR, but I thought it might be helpful and I'm bored.
:lol: :lol:
Anthropoid wrote: Ah, one thing I almost forgot . . . air pathing over neutrals is turned off.
Be careful with this as every time you load the game, you'll have to re-set this option again!. By default, sphere leader countries always have air pathing over neutrals turned on!!!
"If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking."
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Anthropoid
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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by Anthropoid »

number47 wrote:
Anthropoid wrote: This may not turn out to be much of an AAR, but I thought it might be helpful and I'm bored.
:lol: :lol:
Anthropoid wrote: Ah, one thing I almost forgot . . . air pathing over neutrals is turned off.
Be careful with this as every time you load the game, you'll have to re-set this option again!. By default, sphere leader countries always have air pathing over neutrals turned on!!!
What benefit is there to air pathing over neutrals? Given that it pisses them off?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the State Dept Minister; I set him to promote Trade Relations and Influence.

Any suggestions on this 'test' Number47? Do you think this has any value to BG in providing more information on the apparent 'bug' in the Blue Sphere spread?
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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by number47 »

Anthropoid wrote:What benefit is there to air pathing over neutrals? Given that it pisses them off?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the State Dept Minister; I set him to promote Trade Relations and Influence.

Any suggestions on this 'test' Number47? Do you think this has any value to BG in providing more information on the apparent 'bug' in the Blue Sphere spread?
As for the benefit, the only thing I could think of is shortening the path (but mainly I see incursion as simple case of showing off)...I tend to shoot down all planes that are committing incursions :D

I firmly believe if USSR is played by human player, we will not witness the massive flow of red and white states running towards the blue sphere that I am witnessing while USSR is played by AI. If you prove that it is still happening, than the problem might be bigger than I originally anticipated...
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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by Niko465 »

Playing as the soviet Union, 100% of my earning go to USA, so they can keep me challenged.
And then, one day, Reagan got elected... Since then USA is stoling all my sphere member(I dont care, half were of no importance and I worked like a madman to get country go to US sphere) and I bribe only my allies to stay in and the US economy is unbelievable. They got max millitary spending and their immigration is higher than mine(I got low taxes and max spending)
while I can baraly fund my millitary training at 10%(Thanks to goddamn defcon)
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Anthropoid
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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by Anthropoid »

Niko465 wrote:Playing as the soviet Union, 100% of my earning go to USA, so they can keep me challenged.
And then, one day, Reagan got elected... Since then USA is stoling all my sphere member(I dont care, half were of no importance and I worked like a madman to get country go to US sphere) and I bribe only my allies to stay in and the US economy is unbelievable. They got max millitary spending and their immigration is higher than mine(I got low taxes and max spending)
while I can baraly fund my millitary training at 10%(Thanks to goddamn defcon)
:D Should've struck the death blow under Carter :lol:

Okay, here are the results so far. What I did after I posted the info above is, I actually went and took a nap and left the game running on normal speed with me doing absolutely nothing (well apart from telepathically communicating with my mobo via the dreamspace . . .). My wife has been a bit sick and I got woke up at about 4am this morning, so I was glad to be able get back to sleep . . .

I was convinced my economy Minister would drive my economy into the dirt but, nope. Even with him locked out of the bonds we've stayed in the green.

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I was surprised that basically 3 hours on Normal speed is not even one year; probably should've left it Fastest for the purposes of this test.

As you can see though,

US Align 20
US Lean 7
Neutral 36
USSR Lean7
USSR Align 13

absolutely no change to the sphere distributions at this point (except of course that ROK has ceased to exist). Also, as has been noted by others, with ZERO intervention by the human, Republic of South Korea has been crushed.

One thing I would suggest with that Korea War is that efforts to rebalance it so that it works out to be a stalemate would be appreciated. Not sure how to pull that off but given it _was_ a stalemate in history, any way to make that more likely to happen would be a good thing. Same thing with Indochina/Vietnam. If there was any way to make that drag out and remain a relatively low intensity conflict instead of an all out conquest by the AI that would be sweet.
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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by Anthropoid »

Left it on UberFast for a while as I puttered around the house. Still haven't taken any real actions. I did turn off the auto-build as I seem to already have a quite massive military and assuming I give up on the sphere test and actively play this in a while I'm likely to try to modernize my military anyway. I also locked the Minister out of buying bonds but otherwise everything is on fully automatic.

So, this pretty much represents one instance of what happens to the sphere distributions when the human plays USSR in a very passive way = very little active effort to change spheres (traded that one unit design to all red aligned and leaners and have accepted a couple of diplo deals I was offered just cause I happened to spot them).

Sphere distributions as of Aug 1951

US Align 27 (+7 in 1yr)
US Lean 10 (+3 in 1yr)

Neutral 27 (-9 in 1yr)

USSR Lean 10 (+3 in 1yr)
USSR Align 10 (-3 in 1 yr)

If this continues for another year, then the rate of automatic sphere switching would seem to be no different than what I observed in my Egypt AAR and as such would seem to be a result of something other than the AI USSR doing air incursions. Although I have full initiative on my air units, I also have incurse on neutrals turned off.

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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by Anthropoid »

Little bit puzzled by this . . . loss of one region from the Soviet side of the equation down from 20 total to 19 but without any change in the total neutrals or blues

US Align 27 (21 at start - ROK fallen =20; total change in 2 yrs [TC2y] +6)
US Lean 10 (7 at start; TC2y +3)
Total US 37 (27 at start; TC2y +9)

Neutral 27 (36 at start; TC2y -9)

USSR Lean 11 (7 at start; TC2y +4)
USSR Align 8 (13 at start;TC2y -5)
Total Soviet 19 (20 at start; TC2y -1)

So US has gained nine from the neutrals and Soviets have had had four of its aligned shift to leaning plus one go into an apparently unmarked category; will have to see if I can figure out which regions these are.

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Last edited by Anthropoid on Jan 14 2013, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by number47 »

Anthropoid wrote: If this continues for another year, then the rate of automatic sphere switching would seem to be no different than what I observed in my Egypt AAR and as such would seem to be a result of something other than the AI USSR doing air incursions. Although I have full initiative on my air units, I also have incurse on neutrals turned off.
Whites going to blue more than red is not a problem, but the moment reds start moving from red align to red leaning to white and further (primary USSR allies from WP) than it is a problem... :-?
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Re: USSR - A Nicer Shade of Pinko

Post by Anthropoid »

I have edited my immediately preceding post 47; double check my counts if you will.

It does look like Red Aligned _are_ sliding into Leaning and then at least one has gone from there into either white or not counted.

ADDIT: haven't been taking saves but I just grabbed one at Jan 1952 so it can be worked out which have switched up to that point at least. The interim times shouldn't matter I would think.

ADDIT*2: have just noticed something I didn't realize before and which it would seem complicates this simple tally sheet. Colonies are not counted in the nations list. This means that as colonies gain independence, the totals can change without anyone sliding into or out of a sphere per se. Moreover, it is possible for colonies of one sphere to be "leaning" toward the other sphere!

Notice that Aden Protectorate and Gold Coast are both UK colonies but leaning USSR. I would not think that these two colonies start the campaign leaning toward Soviets? If that is the case, then in fact, the Soviets _are_ gaining more, but just colonies that have yet to gain independence.

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ADDIT: July 1952 few more USSR leaners go neutral it seems

US Align 27 (21 at start - ROK fallen =20; total change in 2 yrs [TC2y] +6)
US Lean 10 (7 at start; TC2y +3)
Total US 37 (27 at start; TC2y +9)

Neutral 34 (36 at start; TC2y -2)

USSR Lean 5 (7 at start; TC2y -2)
USSR Align 8 (13 at start;TC2y -5)
Total Soviet 13 (20 at start; TC2y -7)


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