Ok, that is the first time anyone has ever told me I'm not bloodthirsty enough. I'm touched.

And what's wrong with strategy? It lets us use our nukes more efficiently!

It's a nuke. How do you use it efficiently? You fire it and it goes boom and kills everyone in your target city. Rinse and repeat.

The most strategy you might need is to trick other countries into nuking each other so you can save your nukes to remove ugly-looking islands from the globe.

Like New Zealand?

All the time you spend thinking and planning could be used more effectively building nukes!

Hah! You're all fools. All I'd have to do is develop a missile defense system and I'd automatically win the game.

No, you'd just have the most people alive.

Especially New Zealand.

"The most"? Tricking our enemies into enemies to shooting their ICBMs at each other instead of us, is only minimally different from just charging without any thought or plan and throwing as many bombs around as we can before everyone kills us, which they will. I mean, true that we'd most likely win the game using the former, whereas we will just as likely be the first to lose using the latter mindset, but that's barely relevant!

Seriously, this is a strategy game. We should use strategy. And hell, if we can use bluff and strategic alliances to make Asia launch its missiles at Europe, instead of us, great! It wouldn't be easy (we would require restraint, planning, quite a few risks as well), but it'd be majorly beneficial.

But right now, when I speak of strategy, I'm talking less about a double-bluffing Xanatos roulette (though we can totally try to arrange one of those), and more about questions like "Where do we station our fleet?", "Where to locate our airbases?", "Which enemy is likely to be the biggest threat?", "Should we eliminate them preemptively, or focus on defending against them?".
Cause that sort of thing is strategy too. And saying that we should play the game without it is not beneficial. To anything. Ever. AT ALL.

In fact, d'you think you could betray Russia, and go over to Europe's side? Start giving them advice. They'd never recover!

Edit:
Disregard everything I've just said. I have been...
Enlightened

On a completely unrelated note, please excuse me! I'm off to do something completely legal and approved-of-by-society, and definitely not buy several kilograms of enriched Uranium and then retire to my underground lair. Because that would be wrong. Yes.

I don't care who you're playing, as long as you do this first opportunity.

:dance:

Calm before the storm...
 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...ry/defcon2.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...ry/defcon3.jpg

The only default settings I changed were the number of cities per player, which I maxed out, and the total population per player, which I also maxed out at 200 million. So comrades...what to do first? I wouldn't worry too much about Africa, as they almost always end up getting fucked early. It's Asia and Europe that scare me. They know they can get quick points by gangbanging us, but they are the only logical targets for the Americas. Decisions decisions...

I guess the first things we need to know are where to set up our radar arrays, then airbases, then silos. We also have to give our fleets orders to lift anchor and sail once we know who our threats are and who we'll be hitting with subs late in the game. Fleet and installation numbers are listed in the OP.

Also, you are to refer to me henceforth as "Commissar". Bottles of Popov for everyone upon victory.

Commissar we are to kill the Europeans! Spend all your non-nuke money for defending our capital! Silos everywhere!!