[SPOILERS] Rusten and Hitru laugh off any and all mistakes as bad RNG

[Gavagai]

Understandable, and I agree that you had the 2nd worst starting position.

So how'd my starting position factor in?

All you needed to do to succeed was to kill Commodore. This is a much better situation than for some other starts in this game...

[Gavagai]

(For the record, I am pretty certain, I would not be able to eliminate Commodore in the ancient era war, I do not think any other player would. But this fact has nothing to do with the quality of your start.)

[Hitru]

Yeah, SD was not killed by map but by a leader/civ combo of Commonator. Looks like Rusten answered questions already, but I concur concur that you probably would not have been able to burn our FP/NE city as we knew you might be coming after us and kept navy close. We were happy to give former DZ land back to you though ( from your thread it looks like you did not appreciate us taking them in first place ) but our plan was to contain you from sea after that and we were pretty confident we could do that. And if you would have tried we would be forced to burn your ciyies before going after Commnator again.

[Gavagai]

So, you are saying that I could have saved Commodore by sacrificing myself.

[Hitru]

At least you would have bought him more time, not sure if that would have been enough as earlier SoL+Grens would still give us nice advantage. Basically our plan would probably have changed to capturing your islands while containing Commonator with SoL.