I just played BOP 1990 for the first time yesterday, then I see it come up. Mysteeerious!
And Chris comes off slightly insane to me.
Yeah, the Balance of Powers series is great, altough I do dislike his reasoning for why a minor standoff over an small African country should logically result in nuclear war ("If you didn't WANT nuclear war, you shouldn't have escalated it up to a nuclear war").
IMHO, there's two glaring problems.
1) Reality is entirely defined by the AI's expectations. If they want something, you HAVE to give it to them.
2) There are no restrictions on superpowers beyond the threat of nukes.
3) Then there's the smaller fact of protest against actions that wouldn't be protested...
The first and second points happened to me repeatedly where the USSR would invade Iraq on the first turn and Iran on the second. First of all, can you say "fiasco?" Second of all, I wasn't allowed to do anything, or they would launch the nukes. What? You are allowed to invade and I can't do shit?
Then of course there's the fact that nuclear war starts over stupid shit because you always lose prestige for backing down over stuff, even when that's unrealistic. Every crises is not a Cuban Missile Crises where one side has to blink. Sometimes, one super power is completely unable to stop the other from doing stuff, because it would look freaking ridiculous even if it won. For example, I had a game where the Soviets nuked me for saying nasty things about the Sadinistas. Nevermind that IRL, the US actually supplied the insurgency. There's no way the Soviets would be able to come out looking like anything but clowns for starting a crisis here. Just imagine how this would play out:
US President mentions: we don't like the Sadinista's.
USSR on the red phone: shut up!
US on the red phone: huh?
USSR before the UN: WE THREATEN WAR!!!
US ambasador get's up and says in a puzzled voice: um, you really can't start a war over this...
USSR goes to DefCon4!
US goes before the UN: In the interest of avoiding nuclear war, the US has agree'd not to badmouth the Sadinista's.
US loses 1 prestige point for backing down from saying nasty things. USSR looses 1000 prestige points for convincing the world they are batshit insane...
It's a cool idea and he did do a lot of stuff right, but the game boils down to whether the AI is insane enough to win or reasonable enough to let you win. Brinksman ship has it's uses, but geopolitics has more to it then JUST brinksmanship.