Regor/Basileus/Deacon, you're all right up to a point!
Regor - the FCO was split out of France part-way through the game and then came back to be part of France. Yes it was a pain to reorganise, but in terms of a financial drain on France, it wasn't significant. So you are wrong if you are thinking the FCO added a layer of complexity which wasn't there already at the start of the game. It deflected me for about a year from my long term strategy and meant colonial development proceeded in a slightly different way than I hoped. However, the damage was soon repaired and general French strategy in this period was unaffected. It could have been very different if the FCO had supported France in the same way that Spain supported Austria. It would have certainly made it a more even diplomatic fight and helped alleviate a lot of pressure on orders. You are right that I should have focussed less on treaty terms, though what is not recognised today is how many players privately supported the stance I took about the need for players to act honourably and keep their word. It is a shame that those players chose to remain neutral and not go against the propaganda out of fear of being attacked by the Hapsburgs!
Basileus - you are right that I certainly didn't help myself by adding in period detail, or by focusing on the legal aspects expecting such period play to bring support from NPCs within the HRE. Clearly with several players supporting your diplomatic push, you were always going to be diplomatically stronger than France. Though your strategy of piling on lots of enemies did seem to work well for you, it brought its own problems: yes, lots of nations opposed France, but co-ordinating these into some kind of military benefit has proved very difficult for you (raising the Armies of the Circles?). Consequently, I don't think you can make a case that France is collapsing due to number of enemies. Clearly when you have a group of players all co-ordinating their plans and picking on one player, however large and powerful, it poses command/control difficulties. But it was certainly not that which affected France when I had the money to pay for orders. The proof is in 1704 when we had the Battle of Medway and France took Jamaica all within a couple of months. OK, not everything went entirely to plan (that is expected and is fair 'fog of war'/frustrations), but there clearly was no command/control difficulty back then.
French troops in England are largely a mixture of old foreign forces which didn't fit into the new French armies I had created to defend France: they are certainly not needed back in France to defeat your armies. So that part of your plan was based on a fundamental misconception of the strength and quality of French troops. You have been successful so far not because of your tactics, but because I couldn't pay for the real world orders to respond. I did try to simplify the number of fronts I was fighting on, and successfully: the Caribbean war was wrapped up by the start of 1705 leaving just England and France. This was manageable. In England it was hard to co-ordinate with King James and challenging to fight whilst not destroying England. Again I thought that by behaving in period as the rules encourage, this would be recognised by results, but to a large extent it wasn't. In France itself there wasn't much I could do until your forces arrived (a few months ago in game time). I was not going to wear out the bulk of my forces to drive out your advance guard in Besancon so they could be crushed by your main force when it arrived. Neither was I going to march into the HRE and risk pushing neutral states towards you. My tactic was always to wait and bag the bulk of your army, defeat it, then pick off the remnants using my reserve forces if you still had the stomach to fight. So concentrating on England until you arrived was perfectly sound. If I had still been playing your army would have been destroyed by now and your remaining forces would be marching out of those empty towns you marched into so easily. You have been incredibly lucky in how things have worked out.
You were similarly lucky that other players you attacked (Prussia, Saxony) left the game. Had the players for Prussia and Saxony stuck it out and other HRE states united behind them rather than staying neutral, your attempts to assert your authority within the HRE could have not only blown up in your face, but you would have found yourself facing multiple enemies (your own pack of dogs). And that was without all the propaganda. Would Bavaria have thrown in its hand on your side or turned on you and supported the sovereignty of individual states? In such a scenario it would have been relatively easy for Bavaria to have dislodged you and stood for Emperor himself, quite possibly with the support of France. You may not remember the early stages of the game when that possibility was live. How would you have dealt with that? Would you have been overwhelmed? Possibly/possibly not, I don't know. Austria is far more geographically concentrated than France/colonies and so in theory is easier to defend without having to worry about delayed military orders reaching America. The old rules accepted that larger nations had the infrastructure (command/control if you prefer) to fight larger wars and although unit performance is no longer tied to honour score, this change in itself didn't negatively impact on France. There was, in the history of the period, no state so centralised than France under Louis.
Deacon - you are right about the money. When unlimited orders were introduced it was done in the hope that Agema would not be overwhelmed by the work and that the game would not become one where those who paid the most got the most done. It was also clear that restrictions would still operate in practice 'since the workload Agema can cope with is restricted'. Fair enough, but the assumption under the old rules was that there was normally enough time for Agema to process the average amount of orders requested by players, and within any given turn if some players submitted fewer orders then there would be time to process orders from those players who submitted more. To get more orders processed in the same time either the orders or the rules must be simpler. The change to unlimited orders was accompanied by new logistics rules which aimed to replace the cumbersome counting of number of men wounded in each unit and their replacement by SL level. At the start of G7 that was incredibly frustrating and a nightmare to administer, so in itself that was certainly a change for the better. However, beyond that there is a limit to how many further orders can be completed simply by technological innovation. Meanwhile demand (total quantity of orders from all players) has shot up. The logic behind the move to unlimited orders was that the only driver for extra orders was players wanting to build up their positions more quickly or do more things. We've all done it from time to time: the start of a new position, we want to make all the trade investments, build all the buildings, raise all the units in the first turn. We don't need to do things that quickly so we should wait.
Unfortunately the need to get orders done is not only driven by the ambition of one player, but the situation a country finds itself in. If one country is at war with several others, the only way to fight that war is to pay for orders. Churchill is now in that same position: he has no choice but to respond to what others are doing to England, and to get those orders done he has to pay for it. If he finds he can't pay then his country will be ripped to bits however clever he tries to be.
Again, the old rules made a distinction between players who were aggressively expanding and those who wanted to play quietly. If you had defensive treaties, these protected the quiet players. Take that away and add in unlimited orders then there is nothing to stop a player who is prepared to spend much more on the game than others from breaking treaties, refusing to settle and being successful through outspending other players. When others join in and act as a gang, it takes a heroic effort on the part of a lone player to match that real world spend simply to stand still. It is, as Deacon correctly states, not the kind of game which LGDR was intended to become. G7 is probably the most extreme example to date, but I am told a similar thing happened in G2. Of course it is exciting for players and it may even encourage them to spend more on the game (which of course means even more orders are submitted) But if success in the game is merely down to how much real world money you and your friends can spend, it undermines the whole structure and balance of the game. So I agree with Deacon that it is bad "design" with the proviso that the flaw was not deliberate, but an accidental consequence of incremental rule changes over the years.
As we are now finding in G7, the absence of an active France is affecting many other players. From postings on the forum, some larger and complicated positions in other games are also only semi-active which tends to make the games less interesting for players. To restore playability to these more complicated positions, one thing which would make a difference is for there to be less confusion about the details of player's own positions (towns, units, ambassadors, etc) which would not cost Agema any more to provide, but would help players to spend the money they have for the game on orders which are of benefit to the game generally and their individual positions specifically. It won't fully solve the issue of too many orders being sent in by all players to be processed in a limited amount of time. But it will help players prioritise better This does not affect the GM's ability to create confusion and FoW as that is a natural part of the game. But it would at least avoid players having to query basic information on their asset lists before they can submit orders. It should therefore help them to prioritise, put all players on an equal footing and allow for any confusion arising to be cleared up quickly so the game to move on.
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, some of my characters in Agema games have not invaded anyone at all and they have not killed any Moldavians in years and years.
, the value is truly stunning. If you find your game orders and costs are running away with you - change your style or change your strategies. If your trying to do too much it will hit you. Any government which tries to do too much at once will fail, this is what the game reflects. Which means that the game mechanics are really good. 
