[no players] We like to lurk lurkers lurking.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Ha, i was the actual admin for this game. The original pb17 cast wanted one.

Congrats to team Babylon, that was a pretty good roflstomp by the end. Just like it looked like it was supposed to be in the midgame with the lead they had back then. Well played overall!

Thanks to the legion of replacement players for allowing the game to make it to a conclusion. Early on this game looked doomed to be abandoned. Well done all for avoiding that.

[Gavagai]

I read through this and other threads and found that there were two common misconceptions about the causes of our lead and eventual victory.
First, it is widely beilieved that I "took over" from Zanth and destroyed clueless "greens" who were no much for me; second, it is thought that our late Oracle - Colossus play was the most significant factor which made us a runaway.
Both these misconceptions can be destroyed by one picture:



It's T75 demos and they already reflect a significant lead (especially in food). And this is before the Oracle was built and before I started to take any active part in the game. Of course, I would agree that my advice was useful (though Zanth always was the primary turn player and he made most of important decisions) and that Colossus helped our economy but true causes of success lie in earlier events.
I think our initial advantage was a gold mine in the capital which is a pretty big deal. But even more important was our ability to extract value from this advantage by taking early Mathematics (a huge boost given that we had a lot of forests around our start) and early Monarchy (a tech often unduly delayed in RB games). These techs removed important bottlenecks from both horizontal and vertical expansion. From this point we had a larger snowball than our competition.
Our biggest mistake, of course, was ill-conceived war with Slowcheetah which deprived us of our lead. Fortunately, Mardoc, the new leader, made mistakes of his own. In my opinion, he was too indecisive in going to war. It is fascinating to read how he was for forever planning a war with constantly switching targets and schedules. At last, he decided to attack, made an investment into an army - and then aborted his plan and just did nothing. This was the most significant blow to his economy from which he never really recovered.

[Commodore]

Darius also is awesome. Honestly, why we ban Pacal and Willie but keep him in these BtS games...

[spacetyrantxenu]

Or from a balance perspective, why we still sometimes play BTS games...*

*I know there are both technical (Mac computer users) and flavor reasons for not preferring to use one of the balance mods.

[Gavagai]

Darius also is awesome. Honestly, why we ban Pacal and Willie but keep him in these BtS games...

I wouldn't agree that Darius is noticably better than Mansa.

[flugauto]

Darius also is awesome. Honestly, why we ban Pacal and Willie but keep him in these BtS games...

I wouldn't agree that Darius is noticably better than Mansa.

Mansa better. Darius suck.

[Mardoc]

Fortunately, Mardoc, the new leader, made mistakes of his own. In my opinion, he was too indecisive in going to war. It is fascinating to read how he was for forever planning a war with constantly switching targets and schedules. At last, he decided to attack, made an investment into an army - and then aborted his plan and just did nothing. This was the most significant blow to his economy from which he never really recovered.

Yeah, in retrospect, that's pretty clear. I need to get over the idea that I can have a perfect war. There were a few times I could have had a good enough fight, and I should have taken at least one of them.

That said - I don't honestly think I was ever the leader. I managed to get ahead in GNP for a while, but we were so far behind in overall beakers before that we never caught up.