I’ll consider barely redundant any technical comment on this game prior to 1913, since this has been another one severely harmed by non-playing users. It’s my fault too. I’m not going to complain about this, I have created the game and if I remember correctly I did not set a Reliability Rating filter in order to join in.
Personally I have to raise up that threshold.

I’ve spent the most of the game trying to have European Union as a friend and trying to build the 4th unit, which I’ve not been able to.
I wonder why E.U. didn’t put in the draw vote. 2 or 3 years passed before 1915 when contemporary me, Japan and Australia had the draw vote in.

This said regarding the game.


Regarding the variant “War in 2020”

Isn’t the first year supposed be 2020 instead of 1901? Just a notice, it’s definitely a minor issue.

The problem here is balance.
OPEC position is almost unplayable. Before my last draw, out of 9 games 9 were defeats. No wins, no draws, no survivals. I refuse to think that all the previous 9 OPEC players were poor.
Same thing applies to Russia and China.
The reason seems to be the lack of the “build anywhere” feature. In order to build your extra unit you need to have your single home SC free at the end of the year.

Until the variant is not “build anywhere”, the number of zones bordering your home SC plays the major role in the countries growth; here they are in increasing order:

2 Japan
3 EU, S.America, S.Africa, Australia
4 USA, India
7 China, OPEC
8 Russia

Thus, especially after the first 2 years, the chance of having your home SC free at the end of the year is almost zero, because of moves and/or “malicious” retreats. Translated: you are unable to grow as OPEC, since you can’t keep 3 SCs and OPEC free simultaneously with 2 units most of times.

If you have a look at the stats (only 10 games finished, we can just have a rough indication) you’ll notice that the “performance index” order is almost the same as above: the leading countries are those with the least number of zones bordering the home SC.

Either the map is re-shaped, which is not my purpose to suggest, either the variant should be “build anywhere”. As it is now, it’s overly unbalanced.
Probably this won’t solve the problem, but at least Russia, China and OPEC will have a better chance.