[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Fintourist]

The game is practically down, I'm too tired for doing anything useful, but can't sleep because my better half is studying for her exam... So let's clear the backlog of nice posts!

Good luck

Thanks!

I suppose one needs luck against mackoti.

I use this opportunity to state this one more time, then I try to reduce my ranting.. Maybe When forgetting the geopolitical lottery we were completely on the same line with mackoti ~20 turns ago. Similar crop yield, similar MFG, more cities, probably a bit ahead in tech + Philosophy. We had even 2-3 more cities. We also had the same power level. The main differences were:

1. Because mack only bordered m_h and suttree he had managed to create himself a backline that he is filling up now. We have created more or less 2 sensible filler spots that get us to 18 cities when we want and I think that is already a good performance in our squeezed position. Even without war mackoti could have easily settled 20+ cities.

2. His power consisted of units able to perform an attack (2-movers) while we had to built an army just to protect us from suttree's cat+axe stack. Shock axes were simply the most affordable thing doing that job, HAs and Cats are hammer-wise more expensive, because we still would need more or less the same amount of units and our struggle to keep up economically also relied on our Alphabet & Philo plays. We also did not in the beginning really believe that suttree is going to stop his whole game and just whip all his cities down to revenge us so we thought we would get away with smaller military investment.

But then this thing with m_h happened. Have we shown the power graphs often enough? M_h had mackoti's graphs and there were clear border tensions, but still he decided to remain at the level of half ours or mack's power (even less in terms of actual units). That is just so incredibly annoying from our perspective. Of course well done by mackoti, but from his direction I think it only took something like 8 HAs (of which maybe 1 died) to take 4 cities during the first 2 turns. Falling for that is just basically the same thing as gifting your empire away.

I mean I understand we are humans who play the game. It's just really annoying for us that suttree's reaction after bad start was total revenge mode and m_h's reaction after bad start was not giving a sh*t. I can live with that, but it obviously pisses me off after investing a lot of time into this game.

But yeah, now I guess we need even more luck than what one always needs in a 18-player game. It's clear that things need to start going our way quickly if we want to be economically competitive still in 50 turns. If we can focus our efforts towards south I'm sure we can take suttree's land eventually and also make mackoti's game a nightmare. We will be advanced enough, we will have enough MFG and population to whip + sitting around doing nothing while waiting to lose just is not part of my or Harry's mentality. Our central position is of course the big problem here. We can maybe succeed in full 1-front war, but if our relationship with Ichabod or dtay does not continue peacefully we are simply out of resources, and out of luck. As a side-note of course we are considering opportunistic moves in every direction when the time comes.

Ok, I appreciate if someone managed to read my rant..

--> We are not going to go down without trying something radical. Be it attacking mack, dtay, ichabod, eastern continent.. Who knows when the time comes.

You are awesome and I'll be rooting for whatever it is you decide to do.

Thanks!

Btw, I'm not sure I've said it often enough, but while I also often rant about the map, I'm not ranting about you. The map is interesting and I think exactly was was ordered. (Apart from mack's plain oasis of course ) Randomness and luck was supposed to be part of the game so everything is totally ok. Of course everyone then hopes that the land and neighbor lottery goes one's way.

Buuuuut I don't think we won that lottery.. If you look at our early demos they are full of 2-digit demos. And we were basically running full farmer's gambit (although we knew our neighbor situation and had whippable bows) during the first 60-70 turns. And we also spent a lot of time optimizing our micro.. But still, those 2-digit demos were really the most we could do with this start. Yesterday I chatted with Harry and expressed my envy of Ichabod's start. I mean that's a super strong position where everything is in your hands, he has excellent tiles and should be at 20+ cities by now and conquering whole northern part of the continents in economical way should be totally realistic given the play of his neighbors. There are other examples too: e.g. Lewwyn's start gives a direct 5-10 turn lead compared to ours already during the first 40-50 turns.

Btw, we are happy to provide our sandbox if some lurker wants to prove that he can do with our land a lot better than us, but overall I feel that we played our cards pretty well (of course we made a number of mistakes in our decisions and execution too... I can provide that list too). We have never recovered from that slow start and never will but we will keep trying and hope that people keep making mistakes. ~10 civs or at least their warmonger neighbors already have...

that chat looks like good teamwork taking place. keep up the good work and good reporting!

Thanks! We are chatting with Harry on daily basis and Hydra also joined when we had crucial war turns. I'm pretty sure that I drive Harry crazy by sending latest civ news when he is trying to work..


Ok, that's the way I see things