As a rule, I always play as India and only India, primarily by finding Indias that have CDed and playing them. Nationalistic pride, I suppose?

My one finished world game, I played as India and did quite well (until goldfinger took over Brazil and nearly soloed). I've heard Kenya is popular.

I played a few World games back when I was a noob and got smoked in the face :P I've recently joined another and done pretty well as Brazil, but then it was a take-over. I can't lay claim to vast experience as a result :D Brazil seems pretty cool though if you can clear south america for yourself.

I'm always wary in taking over games. I took over (a very strong) Russia once and was immediately slammed by a 3-way alliance.

and a while back I did a statistical survey on World Games. It wasn't too stringent in terms of which games I looked at, but I found that overall Kenya is by far the best country to have, followed by West Canada, Argentina, Oz, and India....I really should've saved that. It's burying in a thread from last August or so I believe.

And one thing I've always wanted to do in a world game was solo....never was able to though. I had a few chances of it but never made the run (or a huge CD or general apathy compelled me to draw)

Brazil is indeed a very awesome nation. Two armies give an advantage in war with Argentina, but you can still build up a navy fairly quickly with two coastal centers.

One difficulty, though, is securing that second neutral center in 2000. Argentina can, with ambiguous moves, set himself up to bounce you out of Colombia in the Fall, while only obvious aggression against Argentina can threaten his own builds.

Defeating Argentina, of course, provides Brazil with a very solid home base that takes considerable effort to penetrate, due to the fact that defending armies can cross the continent far more swiftly than an invading force can sail around.

Has anyone seen a strong Brazil-Argentina alliance? It seems that the two usually end up in conflict.

I have only played Brazil (in a gunboat). Argentina went CD early on and I went on to a 3-way draw.

I've seen strong Argentine-Brazilian alliances. Usually in the face of a strong North America and in higher quality games they form. Pretty much every world game I've been in recently features a Brazil-Argentina

@goldfinger threadID=779369

Wow, thanks for looking that up ghug! Here's the re-post so everyone doesn't have to follow the link

Draws Wins Survive
Kenya 43 5 16
China 32 2 10
Frozen 32 3 9
Near East 26 3 9
Quebec 31 5 7
Argentina 30 7 9
Ghana 28 5 10
Pac-Rus 24 1 9
West Can 33 1 6
India 26 6 12
Oz 20 1 10
USA 20 4 15
Europe 21 4 8
Brazil 27 4 11
Russia 28 2 13
Libya 14 2 7
South Af 17 2 1

I hope this posts correctly

Wow, that's actually not as unbalanced as you'd think a 17-player variant would be...

Yeah...I tried putting spaces in there, but again it didn't work.

Libya and South Africa are by far the worst, with Oz, USA and Europe falling quickly by them. India and Argentina seem to be the solo leaders, with Ghana, Kenya, and Quebec in the next tear (surprisingly Oz and USA, two of the worst countries in terms of draws, are some of the best in terms of solos)

Awesome chart! That is actually rather fascinating.

And yeah, the relative balance of 17 nations is another reason why I enjoy the variant so much. That couldn't have been easy to make!

Why do you guys think Kenya performed so well in the samples above? Personally, I think that its compact position (which can be easily extended to include adjacent neutrals) makes it relatively defensible, and that both its neighbors have a difficult time launching an early assault. South Africa is scattered and can only bring two units to bear early on, while Libya has plenty of other distractions and only has a single unit in range.

Keep in mind that Mr. Goldfinger's list includes games where countries CD - which is just about all of them. The main reason a South Africa or USA will manage to do well is because their neighbor(s) disappear(s) mid-game, allowing them to expand easily.

And Kenya does so well because 1) South Africa is divided on two continents, and always has to fight either Argentina or Frozen-Antarctica to hold onto S-A's two Antarctican centers; 2) Libya and Ghana usually go toe-to-toe early on (Ghana having nowhere else to go until it can build a few fleets); and 3) India is always too busy in Asia to interfere in Africa. So Kenya's three neighbors are four times out of five already tied up with conflict on another front, leaving Kenya free to choose which neighbor to stab first.

Tolstoy is right. I had it posted in the other thread but didn't do so here. I didn't realize there would be quite so many data points, so my standards were lax in the beginning. I didn't differentiate gunboat from full press, games with mass draws in the first few years, CD's, etc. About halfway through I started implementing some standards (only counting games that went past 2005, etc) but overall the data is not exactly reflective of actual gameplay when all countries are present. It still can serve as a rough estimator though due to the sheer number of games I collected reducing the error.