2 De Mayo -General strategies

First note; I haven't played this game yet, also I have not taken the deck of cards into account. However I Think these strategies are pretty general and can maybe even be applied to the card plays. For me it seems that the French have 3 main strategies to pursue. 1. Limit the amount of choices the Spanish has. Most obviously use Artilleria, but more in general, get larger groups then the spanish and place them into key positions,where they can move to several regions of the city, again most notably 15 when artilleria is not in effect. 2. Make sure the Spanish do not create large goups. This is to ensure that they do not threaten your earlier troops and limiting your options, plus they can easily make a "last stand" in the later part of the game. If they do create a large group make sure you can "force" it into a corner early on, possibly by using baite. 3. Play defensive early on. Make sure you don't lose pieces, obviously, but even more, if you save all your pieces early on you can "sacrifice" pieces in the later game to easilier hunt down spanish troops by added movability and also know whether he got the 2 cards to

end the game by killing 3 french units. The Spanish should mostly counter these strategies, important things to look for are: 1. Keep freedom of movement. I think this is most important because you will be able to adapt better at later game situations if you still got freedom to move. Possibly make an early "last stand" on region 15? 2. Threathen with several posible attacks. If you got fredom of movement around the board you are in great advanatage because handing out an unlimited amount of orders is one of the advantages of the Spanish, wich is at it's best with many options. If you have this it will be possible to psitions your troop in a way that they are able to attack or threathen more then 1 french group. This forces the french to play defensive and "waste" orders that are not really advantageous to them. 3. Keep your options open. Again refering to the first strategy to follow, namely keep freedom of movement, if you keep you options open by not cluttering in the begin of the game and have freedom of movement you can always exactly pick the right time and stratgy to pursue. Either get your units in one large group or scatter them along the board. But don't decide to this until you

are forced to choose either one. In general, there seem to be several opening moves that seems better then others and to wich there is no obvious counter, for example french opening; 19>16 and 11>12. I think the best thing to for the Spanish is along the lines of: 12>15, 20>18, 17>18? I think it would be usefull to look for the best opening and the best counter to it, and hopefully this will result in a set of openings that can then be variated by the players because each known opening can be countered. My question to the developer is: Do you have noticed standard openings in the games you have played and seen?