[Edratman]

I want to confirm that this is a great game and an equally great community.

Just be prepared for the most complex, yet consistently logical game you have ever seen. I'm a few weeks shy of turning 56 and have been playing computer games since the dawn of the computer game era (circa 1980), and I have never seen a game like this. Expect to lose a lot in the beginning. I did.

And I don't think anyone really has the entire game figured out, at least not for more than a few nations. The forum is full of postings where someone thought they were king of the hill and then someone else found some new combination that disproved that idea.

Even the pre-game pretender making strategy is almost a game in itself.

The primary thing to remember is that this is very much a rock/scissors/paper game. Every single strategy has a counter strategy that defeats it.