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[BiffaloBuff]

As far as I can tell, there are 9 stages to the World Campaign. The first is Europe. After completing this mission successfully, Greenland, Africa and North Asia open up as options. After completing either of these, other areas of the map become available for conquest.

As in the Roman Campaign, it's you vs. everyone else combined. Note, however, that the winning criterion is neither controlling 3/4 of the occupied area nor total annihilation. You must obliterate everyone else's headquarters.

Europe: If you finish this mission successfully on your first attempt, that's pretty impressive. I was slaughtered twice before achieving success after learning the geography and one crucial area in particular. If you can get this far and survive the initial wave of attacks, you're home free, although it will take quite some time.

Africa: The landscape is a bit unusual here, especially in the early going, so you'll have to adapt. The assignment is pretty easy, although again fairly lengthy. You'll cover nearly the whole continent, and if you click on the map, you'll see it's shaped like Africa. I hadn't noticed this with Europe, but had the saved game, and it seemed to also resemble the continent. I suspect the internal geography is fairly accurate too, although I don't know enough to say for sure.

Greenland: This one is reminiscent of the Thor's Island mission. You'll have to work for it, but it goes much more quickly than the previous two.

North Asia: If you want to torture yourself, try this assignment. It's positively brutal. Two of three opponents have all the resources: gold and coal for quality, coal and iron for numbers. And more and more I get the feeling that battles are rigged in the game. It certainly seems as though I lose 3/4 of the general vs. general battles when both are healthy (and yes, I have a functioning brewery, for what that's worth). Finally I realized I'd overlooked a third source of gold, some distance from home base. But coal, normally in abundance on most maps, is fairly scarce here! After a huge amount of time, I wore 'em down and won a war of attrition on my first attempt on this mission.

North America: Here's the continent with which most of us have the greatest familiarity, so I was looking forward to exploring it all. Sadly, the arrangement precludes this, unless you want to play for fun. Still, I was able to see the Rocky Mountains, Great Lakes, some of the Mississippi River and mountains out east. The assignment is not a cakewalk, but isn't terribly hard either. It goes more quickly than most of the others.

That's all for now! There are missions for South Asia, South America, Japan and Australia as well, but I haven't gotten to them yet.

Bill