This is a bit of a long story so bear with me.
As some of you may know a group of AGEOD fans have been playing a particular type of PBEM on the Paradox Forums for the sake of a larger audience for AAR writing. We call this a Mass Game where nations are divided up between players so as to make the factions more manageable, but that is not what I am posting about today. We are currently on the 4th of these "Mass Games" and something that became very prevalent in all of these games was a phenomena of "Deathstacks" Traffic was something of a mitigating factor but it could be ignored by clever use of rail movement and eventually became irrelevant in the third game by some point in 1915. It was at this moment that Nostra, a fellow player, hit upon what seemed like a radical idea that could fix this problem, simply removing MTSG would eliminate the ability to bypass traffic this way but it ended up having unexpected and, in my opinion as well as that of others, positive side effects.
With a simple altered settings file plus traffic we suddenly found a situation where more than one stack would refuse to engage in any region at any time. This may sound negative but bear with me. Suddenly, the game properly simulated static warfare for the first time ever. Battles were less severe in casualties per turn, but instead will go on for months with multiple formations in areas of dense concentration (i.e. the western front) and troops being rotated in and out of line. Fronts were encouraged as having more than two armies in a region unless one was about to attack became completely pointless, and even then no more than 3 or 4 depending on their weight. On the eastern front long fronts are encouraged, and warfare remains fluid due to length of the front precluding the concentrations necessary to fight months long battles. This one alteration turned the game from, in the words of my distinguished colleague Merlin "CW2 with infinite railcap and machine guns" to something that both looked and felt like the first world war for the first time ever.
It should be noted that there is a dissenting opinion, held by Merlin, on the benefits of this quick modification. However I do not entirely understand his argument in this matter. I will include the altered settings file below and I would encourage others to try this in their PBEM's so as to get more feedback. The alteration is a mere two lines deleted as I understand it, but the effects are incredible. Whilst this is a radical suggestion, I felt the improvement it brought to the game warranted sharing on these forums as well and perhaps a peek at it by our hardworking devs.
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