I've been running a hands-off game for a few hours (picked Cuba, nofog cheat, handsoff cheat, Normal difficulty, Normal AI aggressiveness), just to see what would happen. Here's some things I noted:
1. The picture for the USA armament minister Robert F. Wagner is missing.
2. Saw a large group of 70 subs operating as one (they operated off the south of Japan for awhile, then moved away as a single unit, so the AI had definitely grouped them all together).
3. A few years into the game, not sure when exactly, something made the French AI pull all of its infantry units from the entire country (except the ones just west of Italy) and place them all into Dunkirk (the stack had 49 units in it, it looked like a blue empire state building *laugh*). I suspect, but I'm not sure, that this happened when France joined sides with the Allies in attacking Japan. But this didn't happen to any other country, and it's a nasty problem because they left the entire eastern part of France wide open if the Germans had felt like waltzing in. And this stack of 39-49 units has been sitting there now for like 2 game years. I tried closing the game out and restarting it (thinking the AI might be stuck) but the uber-stack remains.
4. It's now Nov 1943 and there's been no European war at all. Everyone gave in to Germany's demans (the last one I noticed being their getting the 3 provinces from Poland south of Danzig) and that was that, now everyone is just turtling up.
5. So, all the action has come from Japan. They invaded China and it played out -very- well, almost exactly like it did in real life. They took the northern half of China easily enough, then they started bogging down, at their best they had about 60% of China and it looked like they might outright beat them, but then the Chinese counter attacked and the line stabilized at around the 50% mark. From this point on neither side could make headway, they trade the borderline provinces back and forth but no real gain for either. Then at some point the US entered the war (I think it was because Japan invaded the Phillipines), and that got interesting because the US, instead of island hopping towards Japan like in real-life, ran its navy right up the China sea and dropped an invasion force into Manchukuo (who was currently Japanese puppet).
Ballsy move, because if the US navy loses control of the China Sea zones then this force is hung out to dry. But they didn't, and the US proceeded to conquer/annex Manchukuo, then liberate Korea, then attack Japan-occupied China from the north. Now the Japanese in China are totally screwed, they are trapped between a hammer (the US) and anvil (the Chinese). The Japanese decide to make their stand here, and boy does it cost them, by July of 1943 China is free of Japanese troops except for Shanhai, and Japan is down to 11 combat infantry divisions and 23 garrison divisions for the rest of its empire. It has 6 carriers left (had 9 before the US got involved) but only 8 planes total, and only 36 subs left. IC is down to 122/78 so they lost a research team too.
At this point mainland Japan is wide-open for an invasion, but the US isn't going for it. I think part of the problem is that a lot of the US troops are pinned down covering the borders of Manchukuo/Korea plus the occupied Chinese territory. Neither the Chinese nor the US AI trusts each other it seems, so both insist on stacking defenders along each other's borders, which ties up a -lot- of their troops.
We'll see what time does for this situation, the US production machine is in full gear (18 carriers, 267 subs, 240 or so infantry divisions, just to give you an idea, and this is still just Nov 1943), so there's no reason why they shouldn't invade the Japanese mainland fairly soon.
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Anyway, that's what I've seen so far, a non-war in Europe (but not in a buggy way, more like in a 'Everyone caved to Germany's demands and then Germany decided it had gained enough' way), and a very nice war in southeast Asia. Two potentially nasty bugs (both involve overstacking), one with naval vessels and one with French infantry. I saw a thread where someone else reported naval overstacking as well. I do know that no other country is overstacking infantry like France has, so I suspect a bad event might have caused this. The naval overstacking seems to be more an AI flaw of some kind.
The game does have a memory leak, not a horrible one, but after about 6-8 hours of playing at Very Fast (from Jan 1936 to Nov 1943) it had allocated about 350 or so megs more than it actually needed. Not such a big deal, but it does cause performance issues, especially at 1:00 GMT game-time when the engine recalcs the world's data.
