[SPOILERS - El Grillo & Charriu PB51] One step at a time

[Kurumi]

So since you're in a stand-by mode from now on, any thoughts on how the game went overall? The map?

[El Grillo]

My main takeaway from this game is that I got very lucky to show as good of results as I did. The improbably successful Amicalola rush helped cover up some of the glaring flaws in my t50-t100 development where I didn't expand quickly enough, settled cities in the wrong order due to poor risk and yield evaluation, and in general ended up being too passive for too long. I think if you were to somehow look at all the parallel universes where we played this game, the result in this one would be way better than the average. Due to the map contours and players around me, I think my expected outcome would be to get stuck on at most 8 mainland cities, never get to settle any of the islands, and then fade into midgame irrelevance after failing to fight my way to more land.

Plemo's game deserves an in-depth read and analysis, but I'll sum up what I saw from my perspective. He managed to continue snowballing with:

1) Managing to peacefully secure extra mainland cities while GKC/Ramk fought each other and while I was too slow to settle to my north. I maintain that I didn't want to get into more fights against my AGG and PRO neighbors in the age of Axes and Skirmishers, and I was simultaneously nervous about over-extending and getting mauled badly by a bunch of 2-promo Plemo units, and complacent that I had enough of a longterm advantage in mainland cities to play it safe in the north. That leads directly to...

2) Immediate access to the big island to his east and then the island chain to the north of that. If I had calculated based on the map dimensions and land tiles on the mainland how much of a role islands were going to play, I perhaps wouldn't have been as complacent with my mainland territory advantage, but I was way too slow to realize that Plemo would unlock 8 more city sites with Galleys out of a core city, The Hague. I ended up delaying my own coastal exploration to opt for my Mausoleum attempt instead, which was also around the time he beat me to circumnavigation by a turn, and by that point it was too late.

3) Smoothly maximizing tech and wonder builds while getting away with cutting corners. Plemo scouted his secure mainland Stone tile and converted that into a disgustingly efficient Hanging Gardens build and used Pyramids for Representation for happiness. I didn't realize until getting Alphabet around T150 that Plemo had skipped Construction and Calendar while heading straight to Banking. I think he was able to keep his Power rating so high with cheap AGG Barracks and pop count, and manage happiness with Representation and the extra luxuries on the islands. Meanwhile I insisted on getting Construction ASAP for defensive purposes and failed to leverage it at all, whereas that could've been Calendar first for a much more competitive Mausoleum date, or Metal Casting to try and compete for the Colossus. The fact that Plemo was able to expand so quickly and still claim the majority of the best Classical wonders means that he was de facto tech leader even during the turns where other players had probably generated more overall beakers.

At that point, I was stuck playing reactively, pretty tilted by a combination of in-game events and tons of IRL overtime, and increasingly out of my comfort zone strategically. I felt like I needed to stay competitive military, but ran out of steam due to skipping economic techs, infrastructure builds, and having to whip so heavily for units (this was an especially poor aspect of my play, I had to panic whip at times and didn't make use of queue-whip upgrades, and stopped paying close attention to managing whip overflows). As a result, I was increasingly reliant on my shrine gold and never caught up in pop or food and thus continued to lag in GNP.

My medieval military mismanagement deserves a whole other post of lessons learned. This is really where my MP inexperience became painfully obvious and it was only going to get worse, not better, as we got later into the game.

[Kurumi]

Thanks for writing this, very cool to see an analysis like this since I can learn from it too!

[superdeath]

I do want to congratulate you on pulling the Hannibal of Egypt rush off alot better than i did lol