ROFL, I dropped out of three games like what, a month ago? And now all of them have ended. Makes a guy feel missed.
I wish I could post something constructive, but I really just can't. The map was way to builder-oriented to for my tastes, and the slow pace and complete inability to rush anyone resulted in a lack of any sort of early game, well, at all. Things I would have done differently about the map and set-up?
1) 7 players is too much. Period. And 6 only works if you plan playing times out well. I'll note that some of the screw-up in scheduling here was my fault; no one else stepped up to make a player order, so I hammered out what was in retrospect a poorly-thought-out disaster of an order. At the very least, I should have been after Mardoc, and I'm sure there were some other defects as well.
2) This map was weird. Not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but in this case the map simply didn't work very well. Each player got a massive area effectively shielded from attacks, which already itself cries "HAY GUYZ REX AND RUN A FARMERZ GAMBIT GUYZ!" And then, you had the massive distances between players; the fact that railroads spanned them was irrelevant, the distances made an sort of pre-industrial attack both impractical and lacking in any sort of benefit to the attacker _at_all_. I'm too busy [and lazy] to figure out and extol upon what should have been done, but this was a flawed map from the beginning, flawed in the sense of only allowing the one Right And True Choice of building up. Which kind of, you know, was never discussed in the set-up, and kind of $#%&ed up anyone who picked any sort of military-oriented civ or leader without knowing that any sort of aggression before like Turn 150 was going to be impossible [YES I'M BITTER WHAT ABOUT IT].
3) Identical starts, as it turns out, are extremely boring, and make it really hard to recover from early mistakes. Just a note more than anything else.
But anyway, gg guys. Kinda.
Played in: PBEM 4 [Formerly Jowy's Peter of Egypt] | PBEM 10 [Napoleon of the Dutch] | PBEM 11 [Shaka of France] | EitB XVI [Valledia of the Amurites] | PB7 [Darius of Rome] | Diplomacy 3 [Austria-Hungary] | PBEMm/o vs AutomatedTeller
