sjb (10/07/82)
Well, I (and the other people in our game) do have a couple advantages over many others: 1) We all started out on islands. There is also one big mainland that is uninhabited, and this is where the conflicts are starting to break out. We had a couple minor encounters with people running into everyone else's islands, but since most all of the countries in the game are allied, we had no problems persuading the person attacking to stop. 2) Most of us started out at the same time. Also, of the few people who started late, two of them got already running islands from two others that had to quit for one reason or another. 3) As I said, out ETU is 20 minutes, not 30, which greatly speeds the game up over a course of a couple months. By the third day, I had built a PT boat! 4) As I mentioned in 1, most of us are allied, so there is not as much threat of war as there is everywhere else (though we do have a threat of war in some places) I guess we just have a good environment in which to build up running countries. The biggest advantage is the island bit; not having to worry about expanding quickly gives you time to do it efficiently.