Starting productions; Germany: 90 Japan: 45 Italy: 25 USA: 85 UK: 65 USSR: 45 No Chinese front and no Soviet-Japanese War. The Western Allies and the Soviets can't land on each other's territory. The Soviets and the Japanese get conscripts with 0/1/1 stats with a 4 IPC cost instead of infantry. I'm still working on distributing incomes better, though. Like, the British mainland itself is currently only worth 10 IPCs, which is too low to be worth bombing compared to Germany's 30 mainland IPCs. So, Germany is prevented from using more than one bomber, which is a bit lame. Maybe the UK could be raised to 75, Germany to 95, and Italy to 30.

Update Draw borders hides the relief while you draw, so you see exactly what you are editing. No more shadows: after Make territories, the relief is rebuilt where you drew. One Undo takes back both. On older maps, run Create relief… once first. Other reliefs stay untouched; a message offers Create relief… instead. Unit places: the unit size shows before you lay them out, and centers can move up to 27 px to fit more places. Overflow arrow on the last unit place; switch the side in the right-click menu. Right-click menu to add or remove unit places and to put markers where you click. Save lists the files it will write and keeps the XML's order and formatting. Places menu sorted and grouped, with "(none)" for empty kinds; capitals are a yellow star, PUs show "6P". The map no longer jumps when a banner or goal appears.

Recent modifications to this map: Because I'm using a different version of the engine, this cannot be played on the TripleA lobby. There are other ways to achieve networked play, however, and today some changes to my version of the engine were made to achieve this. Also, I've started the grim task of getting this ready for AI play. Step 1 was to have the AI play for 15 rounds without the game generating errors or crashing. This has now been achieved. Step 2 (currently in progress) is to have the AI make decent decisions during the research phase. In the test games (AI vs. AI) Moscow fell on round 12 or so. China fell as well. Is this a game balance issue of the Axis being too strong, or is this the result of poor AI play? From the verbal description I was given of these test games, Britain launched some minor raids on the German coast, but not a large scale invasion of Western Europe. The descriptions were a bit vague as to what America Atlantic did or didn't do. Also, Conscription 1 tech provides the USSR with 5 free infantry per turn (assuming it still holds the Soviet interior). This is doubled to 10 free infantry per turn with Conscription 2, and maxes out at 20 free infantry for Conscription 4. Those are in addition to the free infantry it gets each turn for its Propaganda techs. If the Soviet Union wasn't researching Recruitment--which I'm pretty sure it wasn't--then that's a huge wasted opportunity for it to have put up a better fight against Germany. There could well be balance problems with this map--that wouldn't surprise me even a little--but I feel the AI needs to improve before it can accurately reveal those problems. I'm at about 50% of my weekly usage, so we'll see how much progress I'm able to make on the AI front before that usage is consumed.