So just a quick derail:

I just had this game delivered, and after taking forever to get working, it's actually really fun. In the year 2005 as Canada, I have a balanced budget, a 60+% approval rate in a multi-party democracy, Panama, and I'm occupying a slice of China.

I say slice because it was divided up quite nicely after every country in the world save Syria declared war on them. They did this because China launched four nukes at Zimbabwe. During the invasion China launched it's entire nuclear arsenal between South Korea and Russia.

Half of China's nukes on South Korea.

Holy fuck, that should be as smooth as glass.

I'm holding off on annexing the region, however, as it completely fucks my economy. I'll probably sell it off or something and continue with my occupation of Central America. Just have to avoid having the world invade me, like it did China.

Thanks Bob for letting me know about this game. It is very fun :)

Curse you for making me think there'd been an update.

Though your Canada game sounds nice. When I get it I'll probably start with Germany and resolve to invade France before 2014.

How did you get your hands on it, by the way?

eBay. Got it for 10 CAD, including S&H. Good deal so far :D

Although the autarky bug is going to bother me. I wanted the time to conquer the entire world!

Yeah, grab patch 1.4 if you can, but don't download any mods if you want to play multiplayer. XD All of us playing a game would be awesome. And it lets you save multiplayer games so you don't have to finish in one go.

I'm glad you're liking it. I had a game i posted about a while back where in the year 2040, the world just spontaneously lost its mind. I think Japan invaded North Korea, because of that China nuked Japan, then Russia nuked China, then China nuked Russia.

Update later today if I can, if not today definitely Monday. Sorry, it's been a ridiculous weekend.

March 15, 2044

Our nuclear program is well underway. This should present us with land-grabbing opportunites far beyond anything we have ever dreamed...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...ntitled-19.jpg

...of.

It appears a small coalition of nations don't find us deserving of our newfound technology. Our nukes will not come without a fight. Japan, along with a ragtag gang of third-world countries (and Israel) declared war on us together and launched a simultaneous assault on all of our current holdings, with most of their forces scheduled to make landfall along the coast of Liberia. On a normal day I would reload my last save and try to find a way to get around this obstacle without fighting.

But, today isn't a normal day.

I immediately called our troops out of reserve and enlisted 20,000 more to have on standby. I ordered our regiments sitting tight in Venezuela and mainland Netherlands along with the ones still in midwestern Africa to the coast. This was going to be fun.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6.../untitled2.jpg

This was Normandy circa 2044. They engaged them with precision and cunning, cutting off most of the invading forces before they could get inland. The ones who made it any further then the beach were soon cut down from behind.

After the initial onslaught, Israel and Japan's armies arrived.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6.../untitled3.jpg

The fighting went back and forth, some of their brigades marched south to the Congo to liberate it. Most of our casualties (and their were plenty) occurred in western Africa as more and more of their men dropped anchor and swam to shore. Our #8 ranked military were finally being tested to their extremes.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...ricabattle.jpg

At the end of the war I found that this would be the deciding battle. Pakistan. The AI actually tried to pull a fast one on us by sending massive amounts of small regiments to Africa, but sending their largest most destructive units to Karachi, trying to free Pakistan's missile fields so they could launch a counterstrike before it was too late.

As soon as the other battles were over I sent everything we had left to Karachi. The fighting there lasted almost three months, but we ended up dodging that bullet.

Wait, what's our navy been up to during all this?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...ry/oceanic.jpg

o_O *eep*

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6.../sealosses.jpg

Well, at least they put up an honorable fight before they went down...all of them. :(

After retaking Benin and a few other regions we lost in the beginning, I sent our troops over to mainland Japan, Israel, Papau New Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and took control of them all. Anime for everyone! And this is funny, in the process of attacking Japan I ended up liberating the coast of Venezuela which they had been occupying. Maybe they can actually start defending themselves from those terrorist attacks now!

The newest additions to our family.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6.../holdings1.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6.../holdings2.jpg

Oh, and our remaining forces, which I'll get right to rebuilding tomorrow. Nukes should be ready for construction in about four months, and with our new territories, there are plenty of options for where we want to build our silos. Maybe in Venezuela to hold an interesting trump card over the U.S. and South America. Or Mauritania to hold Africa hostage. Or Israel. Or all of those places. We do have the money.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...ary/forces.jpg

This is so much better with some SP2 context behind it. I can't help but notice a little bit of enemy-held territory between your Africa annexation and our occupied territory. Please acquire it, and put nukes there!

I'm too lazy to read through the thread; do we have AMDS yet?

You can only put nukes in annexed regions, and that region in between our owned portions of Africa is Nigeria, which if we invaded there would result in us getting glassed.

As for AMDS, I'm going to hold off on that for a good long while. With the recent war, and us getting WMDs, people hate us enough.

Heh. Awesome.

We probably shouldn't do anything that might rub the US the wrong way, so we should put the silos in Mauritania.

I hear you on the AMDS, but I meant that tiny little bit below our annexed region. I think it's Senegal? Yeah. Capture it and annex it :)

Wait, what? Japan? Israel?

I like this. I like this a lot.

The fact that we lost a lot of our armies is negligible at the moment... We can rebuild. Though damn Nigeria for not being in that coalition of doom.

Where to place our nukes depends on who is likely to dislike us most in the next few years. One option might be to station them in Israel, which'd allow us to target both Africa, the Middle east and parts of Europe.
Of course, the question is whether those countries pose enough of a threat that it warrant the deployment of defensive nukes, particularly since they'll belong to us soon anyway.

No, I think that the best way to use these nukes is to intimidate larger nations that object to our policy of gradually taking over smaller nations.

So... which countries are these?

China? I'm not sure, but I don't think so. We've left Asia well enough alone, and we should continue doing so.

Russia? Yes, they interfered in our Nigerian matters. Threaten them. Threaten them hard.

USA? We're allied with them, but should we turn our eye on South America (which I recommend), they might get annoyed... We can rely on our diplomacy here to keep us safe, I hope... though since we're considering an invasion anyway, we might as well add nukes to the mixture.

Europe...
This is interesting. I think our relationships with them are good at the moment...
The question that is to be posed is "do we want to attack any NATO or EU members? If the answer is yes, then we should be threatening them as well, probably by setting up silos in the Netherlands directly.

What we need to to be able to answer this question is to decide what we want to do once Africa, the Middle East and, possibly, South America are in our grasp. What is our grand plan once we own the oil?

Edit: Actually, never mind. I forgot about ballistic missile submarines. Is it feasible to split nukes into two groups, offensive and defensive?
The defensives are used to threaten Russia and Europe, to stop them from interfering. The silos for them are placed in the Netherlands.
The offensives are stuck into ballistic missile submarines. We deploy these submarines wherever we launch an operation that might require the use of nukes to discourage our enemies.
If we produce 80 nukes we'll have enough to wipe out every european capital or Russian major city as well as having 40 offensive nukes around the world which we can use to support any invasion we want to.