G7 - France vs. England

I can't see France working as a divided position. It was tried earlier in G7, but failed for a variety of reasons including the way the French Colonies are economically tied in to France with their own strategic development plans. Diplomacy was very limited as no subsidiary player should be free to conduct his own foreign policy which could embarrass France. By the same logic, I had made it clear that I didn't want to expand the colonies until they were financially self-sufficient. This would have taken at least 3 years and a huge investment from France for the FCO to invest. Really left the player with few options to use his own ideas or play the kind of role in the game he was used to.

If team positions are designed from the outset (as the Spanish positions are), then it is a natural part of the game. I suppose it may also work in more advanced games depending on the relative power balance, but it is always tricky to split any position into self-sufficient parts. Any player could do the exercise and try and split his own position up just to find out how hard it is! There are a lot of very practical issues to be solved including the division of income, recruits, naval and military power. The initial subsidy France had to provide to the FCO was £3-£4M/year, with duplicated costs such as treasury and government running costs adding to inefficiencies. If the FCO had a naval academy, were their developments able to be used by French ships? How were standards (a key part of French planning) maintained? If an FCO ship was attacked by a Spanish pirate then did that automatically trigger war between Spain and France? What happens if one player leaves? Are the positions put back together (at a real world cost), or is one inactive, possibly for a long period of time? There really are a lot of practical issues.

I tried to get the colonies to the point that in peacetime they would look after themselves. In war any gain in having another player would be cancelled out by the need to divide French forces between those players and co-ordinate plans. I won't go into detail as how this was achieved, but in a way that was the easiest part. Even so, there was always the risk that if 100SoL were to attack Guadeloupe, French forces would have to come to the aid of the FCO so in practice there really are very few benefits in wartime.

Historically Stuart is right about England and Spain being easier to split. Spanish Viceroys operated independently, and the English Parliamentary party setup always allowed for decentralised power.

France of Louis XIV was very centralised. Interestingly, Louis XV did experiment with a more decentralised style of government, giving more powers to ministers and being far more tolerant than his grandfather. However, he failed and the experiment was abandoned after about 10 years of dysfunctional government.