(SPOILERS) SuperDEATH Kills the competition

[superdeath]

gotcha

[Old Harry]

Hey, nice thread! Sorry about being such a dick with our boats, but I just love that naval warfare... And I think you misinterpreted that bribe - it was 100 gold for each turn we left you alone.    So in the end you got an extra turn of peace for free!

I have a couple of answers to your question to the lurkers about how you could have played the game better. I agree your starting land wasn't great, but then neither was anyone else's except Krill and OT4E and you were way better off than Lewwyn, so perhaps these would have helped you make more of it:

First up is that there are a lot of micro tricks and priorities that aren't totally obvious (like granary first always unless the city will never grow) that let you get your settler out or complete that improvement a turn earlier which really add up for the snowball. I learned a load of that stuff from Krill's PB5 thread - https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...p?tid=4792 - where he went through city-by-city every turn explaining what's going on. It gets going around about post 80 and is only about 1000 posts long, so should be a nice lunchtime read.  

The second thing is that from the start you sacrificed food and production for commerce (moving the cap gained gold but lost you clams and the plains hill hammer, building the great lighthouse rather than settlers when on 3/4 cities, then getting libraries up soon after when you were already lagging on number of cities). I think you saw the flaw in this when you eventually started hard expansion around t150 and noticed how much more productive other player's cities already were. If you'd gone for only one (or perhaps two) of the commerce moves (probably TGL - that was great for you long term) and had focussed on settling your continent and islands much faster you could have been eating Mr Cairo or us rather than the other way around come t200.

Hope to see you in the next game, and the one after that, and the one after that.