From: fred_s@earwax.pei.com (Fred Scott)
Newsgroups: rec.games.board
Subject: Re: Empires in Arms
Date: 13 Oct 92 20:52:06 GMT
Organization: Protocol Engines Incorporated

In article <BLRRBH3S@cc.swarthmore.edu> hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai) writes:
>[ Obligatory EIA question:  should France ever build cavalry?  French
>  infantry has a 4.0 morale, the same as cavalry.  Are the extra $$$ and
>  extra waiting worth it for calvary pursuit?
>
>  My personal feeling is that if you're France, you should build Guards and
>  Artillery first, infantry second and calvary third.  There's nothing like
>  having a corps with full Imperial Guards, a full Artillery corps, and lots
>  of infantry led by Napoleon.  Reminds me of the Death Star ("The ultimate
>  power in the Universe!") ]

Good question, but I'm not sure if I agree with the way you've set the
parameters.  When you play France, you have a considerable amount of money
above and beyond what is necessary to pay for all of your manpower to become
infantary instead of militia.  However, this "considerable" sum is still
finite as compared to British monetary resources.

The way I see the French ecomonmy is that most of your manpower will either
be trained as regular infantry or as militia over time.  The question is, how
much money do you spend and in which priority sequence do you build the premium
things: artillery, guard, cavalry, and ships (you forgot ships).  You cannot
possibly afford to divert any considerable fraction of your manpower into
building these things in a given quarter.  Also, you don't really need to,
since regular infantry and militia will be the overwhelming majority of
casualties in battle, and therefore, the others usually need be built only
once.  So it doesn't make sense to include infantry on your priority list -
you build what you can afford of the others, and the rest is some form of
infantry.

I think you should normally build the Artillery corps first because it's an
exceptional value.  Some Guard should also be built immediately because of
it's utility in battle.  Whether you finish the Guard corps before you start
on Cav in earnest is an open question.  I generally do because I don't want to
have to worry about the Guard corps getting reinforcements when I need it in
some foriegn country spearheading my campaign. Therefore, once I start
building it, I want it built quick.

As for Cav, I'll bet I build a lot more of it (I believe I had something like
42 at one point in the current South S.F. Bay game, now nearing completion)
than a lot of French players would.  I accept some militia in my army in
order to build a few extra (also because the militia can so frequently be
used as cheap losses).  I guess I consider EiA's cav to be like today's
high-tech weapons: it seems incredibly expensive, but it's a great way for
the richer countries to drive the poorer countries bankrupt forcing them to
match your total - or at least put out comparable numbers.

An alternative to building lots of cav is building lots of ships.  That's a
decision which depends heavily on the nature of the game.  In some games, you
might desparately need the ships while in others, you won't get any real
use out of them.  So I wouldn't offer any hard advice about ships.

Fred