That said, I found Superpower 2 to be less entertaining than watching paint dry.
"Spreadsheet game" just about sums it up, yes. You're facing a few decades of nothing but balancing a spreadsheet. And a spreadsheet based on bogus data too, that assumes every country has the US/western europe kind of economy.
E.g., sure, in some abstract model, the chinese (almost) 1 million man army sounds like a major expense. But repeat after me: it's less than 0.1% of their population. That's it. It's actually less army than any western nation has. It costs China very very little to keep that army.
E.g., sure, it sounds cool to apply some abstract model where each citizen needs X dollars worth of milk and cheese per day. So China needs X billion dollars a day in milk and cheese, and has major dissent for not producing that. Except they're genetically lactose intollerant. That's why they don't produce or need much dairy stuff.
Basically the whole economic model for anyone below, say, 75% human development is plain bogus.
Then comes the cool stuff like ethnic and religious groups. According to the manual giving a group more or less rights, affects the relationships to other countries that have that group too. Would be nice, if it actually worked. Almost no groups exists in more than one country.
E.g., let's say you persecute your "Chinese" language group. Ought to get China annoyed, right? Well, no, because China has no "chinese" language group. It has "Cantonese", "Mandarin", "Manchu" and others instead.
E.g., let's say you persecute the "Eastern Orthodox" citizens. Ought to annoy Russia and Ukraine, right? Not really, because neither of them has an "Eastern Orthodox" religious group. They have "Russian Orthodox", "Ukrainian Orthodox", etc, instead.
In fact, either of the above will annoy the USA more than it annoys the countries which IRL have those ethnic or religious groups.
And it only gets worse when a war starts.
For starters, any country has an infinite naval capacity for transporting troops. So the USA for example can move their whole bloody army to the USSR (if you play that mod) within a week. Or viceversa. Never mind that IRL it took a year of shipping troops and staging them in Saudi Arabia to be able to attack even Iraq for the first time. Nah, in Superpower 2 you can magically move everyone over the water in a week.
Then come the land battles which are so bogus, it's not even funny. Everyone just charges at each other at top speed, with zero regard to formations or elementary tactics.
E.g., Infantry, for all its high cost, just stays somewhere in the back and does nothing whatsoever, while everyone else dukes it out. Then whoever won comes around and slaughters the defenseless infantry with zero casualties in the process.
E.g., I've seen artillery vehicles charge in front of the slower tanks. No, honestly. What kind of military sense that makes, is completely beyond me.
And then they reach for the nukes. That's probably _the_ thing that ruins the game the most for me.
E.g., China decides to attack India. So two weeks later, it launches all its nukes at... Russia. WTF?
"Spreadsheet game" just about sums it up, yes. You're facing a few decades of nothing but balancing a spreadsheet. And a spreadsheet based on bogus data too, that assumes every country has the US/western europe kind of economy.
E.g., sure, in some abstract model, the chinese (almost) 1 million man army sounds like a major expense. But repeat after me: it's less than 0.1% of their population. That's it. It's actually less army than any western nation has. It costs China very very little to keep that army.
E.g., sure, it sounds cool to apply some abstract model where each citizen needs X dollars worth of milk and cheese per day. So China needs X billion dollars a day in milk and cheese, and has major dissent for not producing that. Except they're genetically lactose intollerant. That's why they don't produce or need much dairy stuff.
Basically the whole economic model for anyone below, say, 75% human development is plain bogus.
Then comes the cool stuff like ethnic and religious groups. According to the manual giving a group more or less rights, affects the relationships to other countries that have that group too. Would be nice, if it actually worked. Almost no groups exists in more than one country.
E.g., let's say you persecute your "Chinese" language group. Ought to get China annoyed, right? Well, no, because China has no "chinese" language group. It has "Cantonese", "Mandarin", "Manchu" and others instead.
E.g., let's say you persecute the "Eastern Orthodox" citizens. Ought to annoy Russia and Ukraine, right? Not really, because neither of them has an "Eastern Orthodox" religious group. They have "Russian Orthodox", "Ukrainian Orthodox", etc, instead.
In fact, either of the above will annoy the USA more than it annoys the countries which IRL have those ethnic or religious groups.
And it only gets worse when a war starts.
For starters, any country has an infinite naval capacity for transporting troops. So the USA for example can move their whole bloody army to the USSR (if you play that mod) within a week. Or viceversa. Never mind that IRL it took a year of shipping troops and staging them in Saudi Arabia to be able to attack even Iraq for the first time. Nah, in Superpower 2 you can magically move everyone over the water in a week.
Then come the land battles which are so bogus, it's not even funny. Everyone just charges at each other at top speed, with zero regard to formations or elementary tactics.
E.g., Infantry, for all its high cost, just stays somewhere in the back and does nothing whatsoever, while everyone else dukes it out. Then whoever won comes around and slaughters the defenseless infantry with zero casualties in the process.
E.g., I've seen artillery vehicles charge in front of the slower tanks. No, honestly. What kind of military sense that makes, is completely beyond me.
And then they reach for the nukes. That's probably _the_ thing that ruins the game the most for me.
E.g., China decides to attack India. So two weeks later, it launches all its nukes at... Russia. WTF?
