Alliance Asia 2010.scx

Review by dokebi 11

Exactly How China Would Rule The World

So one day, this Chinese dude who'd been hacking most of my Diplo or War East games decided to play the full game. Usually someone would leave or get dropped, or it would lag so bad, or a very-unhappy-guy-with-no-life might break all the rules & ruin the game & leave with this sort of msg - "noob map it sucks." (Why does he do that, where does he find the energy & time... it's quite a mystery)

Apparently one of his main grudges against my map besides very trivial things like no high/low grounds, unit balancing that he doesn't quite understand, and the rules that i added to the game was that my map didn't have North Korea, China's favorite pet country!

Before then I never really noticed how he would join every one of my games with a spoofed account & ask why there wasn't a North Korea. The reasons were obvious to me - North Korea's GDP is the size of my wallet & all of the countries in the map have much bigger GDP (South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, Australia, Indonesia, and India) & there is no space for 8th human player to represent North Korea, sadly!

We had a pretty long debate about whether North Korea mattered enough to be included in the map. His main point was that North Korea had one of the biggest armies in the world. I told him no one, including S. Koreans, cared & in fact the NK military sucked & it would never wage a war because the dictator's primary concern is the survival of his regime.

So evidently he decided to make his own map - Alliance Asia! You can pick every country in Asia plus Australia & minus Russia, so it's kind of similar to Diplo Infinity & Gold. Honestly I think this is quite unnecessary because most countries in Asia are dirt poor, but just to add North Korea (and also to highlight the fact that China is the big bully in the block) he had to make every country in Asia playable.

This is how the balancing goes: China is God. This was intended by the maker. Notice how there is no version number; Alliance Asia 2010 will not be followed by versions 2.0 or 3.0 to accomodate balance changes. As far as he is concerned, China is rigged enough, and that makes a good map.

Then comes the tricky part. Although the maker has been telling everyone "India is rigged," it's actually Japan that has biggest chance of avoiding sinification. It can expand very quickly on sea & build up forces while China and India compete on land. Though why Japan? I'm guessing that it's another way of bashing S. Korea, which "sucks" & evidently displeases him b/c of its technological image in contrast to the totalitarian portrait of China & North Korea. Every other country is piece of shit & anyone would recognize that if they picked Taiwan or South Korea or Burma and saw 2 pixels go online on the minimap.

The author didn't bother to distort the map to make China & Australia smaller and include Russia, which is a major player in this region. In fact, he expanded regions of the northern & southern mid latitudes & pushed aside the corners of the map, shrinking Korea & cutting Japan off 2/3 way. A bit too sinocentric? And ironically it was him who said China was too big & hard to defend on Diplo or War East.

The incomes are not very reflective of either fair gameplay (aka everyone gets same income) or even realism. The bigger the country, apparently, the bigger the income. I never knew Australia mattered enough to have its own slot in lobby & Japan was in fact one of those "Other Nations." Taiwan, which is about 1/3 the territorial & economic size of S. Korea, gets about the same income & land. Although India and S. Korea's GDP are similar in real life, the former receives many times that of the latter. Japan, currently the 2nd largest economy in the world, has income that is only a fraction of China's by virtue of its artificially nanoficated size.

The game's not reflective of real military strength either. Japan must rely on a "US" fleet, although its own navy is in fact one of the largest and most advanced in the world, surpassing many of the European naval powers. Also, China starts out with a navy although in real life it isn't much bigger than S. Korea's. China is supposedly balanced by the fact that it has weaker infantry than other countries, but shouldn't that have exactly the opposite effect of causing China to tech up its military while other countries rely exclusively on infantry?

As for the game play, it actually runs pretty nicely. The terrain is well done, the city system similar to Blood & Iron is neat, although I think there should be 2 sets of locations for each cities - one that recognizes initial presence of enemies & a bigger location that continues to detect enemy's presence even if the nearby enemy troops get killed. There are also too many units of different races, making it harder to actually use them b/c it's costly to upgrade them & prevent them from becoming obsolete.

Related

Meta

Author:

dokebi 11

Posted On:

March 31, 2010

Rating

Overall:

• Needs Improvement

Needs Improvement

Terrain:

Units:

Originality:

Replay Value: