I’m sure somebody has run a thread like this before but since I do see some people viewing and not much discussion I figured I’d just throw it out.

What Units do you actually use in your games? As a corollary it is probably a good idea to describe the game type you normally play.

I like small fast games 50 North South by 65 East West, East West wrap 4 computer opponents everybody set to default reduction and combat. Everybody starts with 2 cities. There are 50 cities and Victory is 75% city occupation.

The result is I’m generally getting bombed straight out the gate. Which leads me to believe A) The computer always build Aircraft 1^st or B) On the default settings the computer is still cheating:^).  The temptation then is to build some AA right away which always ends in early abysmal defeat.

So what do I build? Infantry until I have a few wandering around then switch one city to Fighter. If it winds up being a 2 city island I’m screwed and start over. 3 city island switch 1 city on and off building fighters and bombers the other two Infantry and Transport. Then really I have got a lot of trouble justifying building anything besides those 4 things for the rest of the game with the exception of starting an early cruiser build, on a large island sometimes before the Transport. The computer seems to build exactly the same stuff except Destroyers instead of the Cruisers which sometimes can be embarrassing Transport wise. But they usually can be dealt with by aircraft operating alone or with a cruiser.

Sometimes I get side tracked into building other stuff when I get a specialist city with a high production level. It’s like those things are so cheap they got to be good for something. Almost always I wind up wishing I had built Infantry, fighters, Bombers or cruisers instead.

So what kind of games do you play and what kind of units do you wind up using?

When I was a kid I played a lot of games of empire with my dad, and both of us ended doing exactly this - there was almost no incentive to make anything other than infantry, transports, and planes. We played on huge maps almost exclusively, so anything that took longer to get to the front probably wouldn't get there in time for it to matter. Now I usually use wide and short maps with a horizontal wrap so that the fighting is more linear.

I think EDCE helps fix this with the addition of antiaircraft guns, but they can still be overwhelmed by a larger group of planes - which are cheaper and more mobile than the antiaircraft guns. An antiair costs 1.5x a plane, and the plane has added value due to its speed.

This brings us back to the original problem - it's often easier and more effective to just throw more of the same units at things they're bad at fighting, rather than bring in or produce units that counter them.

Another 'problem' is that empire focuses a lot on expansion. Infantry, transports, and planes are the best at expanding because they're the cheapest and fastest units. Expansion is the obvious priority early game, but the shift from expanding your domain to protecting it from threats when they appear doesn't involve much change in behavior. Mostly, the player just directs more units to wherever the threat is.

The AI isn't really good enough to pose a threat to a player because they don't direct their forces in a very focused and sustained manner like a player would. The only real incentive to use the specialized units to fortify an area comes when you are fighting an opponent that would direct sustained resources to you, such that you

1. expect to fight over the same area for a prolonged period of time and

2. have to care about the cost efficiency of each round of combat.

Even then, making something other than infantrytransportplanes is a hard choice because throwing more stuff at the enemy just works.

I don't like every situation in a game having the same answer, because the whole point of a strategy game in my mind is to adapt different solutions to whatever the situation is. I've just barely started tried to fix this, and what I came up with is to scale the counters way up. The effectiveness of a unit in its 'role' should be very high, but so should the costs of ignoring that role and throwing it at something it isn't supposed to fight.

Planes in my games are now very good at attacking, but bad at defending, especially against fighters.

Infantry are good at taking on structures like cities and airbases, as well as defending, but are bad at attacking armor.

Armor fight well against other ground units but are only mediocre at killing dug-in infantry and poor at taking cities.

Antiair and heavy artillery are now time-consuming structures built by engineers, so they don't take up a city's production line but still aren't practical to spam everywhere.

Ships are mostly the same but the small ships like transports or patrol boats do very poorly against larger boats - medium boats can fight larger boats at a slight disadvantage, but the disadvantage for planes and ground units is much sharper.

I then decreased the time for engineers to create infrastructure like roads, minefields,  ports, etc. to encourage their use.

The hope is that all of this creates a gradient of undeveloped frontier areas where infantrytransportplanes rule the day to more developed and better defended interior regions where shore bombardment and missiles become more useful while infantrytransportplanes will get killed if they rush in without help.

I've tried making some stuff less expensive. Like I can justify AA being cheaper since it does not perform the additional important Recon roll of aircraft. But I swear once the AI runs into a few AA it just stops sending aircraft. Like for the rest of the game. Your idea of having engineers build stuff is interesting. 

Lots of food for thought here. I've never tried modifying units or the rules but this has inspired me to try. Where would I find this ww2 mod?

I play on a 27" iMac with 24Gb RAM so use a game size of 125 by 125 and have 3 opponents each enhanced standard AI, everybody starts with one city. My initial priority is expansion capacity so I build armour which explore trying to find a city to conquer and build transports. I produce a single bomber to explore while I am building up invasion capacity. On this size of board finding the enemy quickly is vital so I try to build surveillance satellites as soon as I can  and meanwhile build bombers which I throw away on 24 move reconnaissance missions. Similarly I build destroyers as soon as I can so they can perform high speed exploration.

I find cruisers and battleships useful for defending the first couple of cities taken on an enemy island. I also use sea bees or engineers to construct oilfields, ports and roads to speed up transit across poor terrain. Due to their anaemic range I have no use for missiles or nukes. I find air transports too slow to be useful and I have never built an aircraft carrier. In old empire I used carrier loaded with patrolling fighters for rapid exploration, now there are satellites.

I quite like the capital kill variant as this means you have to carry out missions inside enemy territory in order to take out one city.

The link to the ww2 thread:

https://itch.io/t/190268/a-ww2-mod-to-be-released-soon