ok! All caught up!
I'd like to put some thoughts down here - by the time this game ends, I'd be hard pressed to put much into a post.
These are my opinions as a minor adjunct to Bigger - he of course had the much weightier responsibility of making the moves. I could spout BS without having to pull any triggers.
Player relations:
Tasunke: Fail - obviously we'd have prefered GE over GF from the start.
Molach: Fail as well - I really wanted to take him up on his "for the lurkers! for the ratings!" diplo. I wanted to do it in a way that we defer stabbing scooter into the indefinite future. I guess that wouldnt have worked - it would have forced scooter to attack italy which he had made some agreements with. In any event - G+E at that point could have held against F - but it really wasnt clear how we were to make gains on the board in this situation. We'd have tons of units tied down on the F border. Again - it was short-term thinking. Longer term, with England's help - we may have been able to make slower gains against F and/or R and been in a great position.
Unfortunately, the path forward with F was so clear - we had tangible way to make solid gains by continuing with F .... as long as we didn't find ourselves with a very large dagger in our back. You know how that worked out.
Scooter: Great play on his part. Only annoyed at the 1+ hour of nice chat just before the stab. If he'd have been quiet, would we have been 1% more suspicious? no - we were blind to it - at least I was -- i was supposed to be the guy on the team looking out for that sort of thing ... so "FAIL" on my part.
Tatan: Well, we wanted him to survive as long as possible - as he was our buffer against RT and potentially I. Did any of those countries do us in? No- it was all our own doing with a little help from the dastardly (is that the opposite of "honorable") French.
Mattimeo: Not sure what we could have done better with turkey. The opportune time for us to pair with Turkey was when we were hitting Russia in Norway, but Turkey at the time was hooked to Russia for purposes of clearing the Balkans - it wasnt a good time for them.
Twinkletoes: He seemed to have negotiated on good terms with everyone. Again this is where the Tasunke fail comes into play. If EG+F, it would not have been hard to get I to dogpile in. He was basically crying out for something different than heading east. We couldn't offer it to him because we felt like we had to pair with F because of E's absence.
Rowain: My favorite line on Rowain comes from scooters recent rants:
scooter Wrote:he's not really in a position to be demanding
At least a couple of times, I review some short/strange outright demand and look at the board and think the same exact thing "he's not in position to be demanding" that.
His diplo style though was frustrating - I also felt several times (as scooter pointed out) that we were presented some "invented" reason for moves that played out the turn before. That invented reason usually involved some attached implication that we now owed Russia for said moves. We might be noobish, but we're not completely retarded <shrug>.
That being said, we made a huge error attacking him for minor gain given scooter's lurking duplicity. We didnt suspect this, obviously, and unfortunately, didn't secure our southern flank before opening a potential new one.
We could have done better with Russia, but hard to imagine a situation where russia and germany don't clash after a while.
Bigger/Waterbat: I should have been a better tactics guy. When it comes to tactics, I'm ok at pattern recognition - but this being my first game - had no pattern database to draw from. But the failure wasnt in tactics - it was in the diplomacy part - I just didn't bother to check for those kind of tactics each turn. Our course seemed set, our future dominance in hand!
I also kept thinking i wanted to build bombers and buy a bunch of research dice to try to get the heavy bomber upgrade.
other items:
Touching on the point of eventual clashes: Scooter talks about a FG 2-way win impossible. I didnt realize this was so. I think better analysis pre-game would have helped. I thought we had time - we'd grow to be powers together before having to battle each other if even at all. Lesson learned for sure!
Mattimeo's timing on his recent mistake move was so great.
Also - I dont think we were "leading on" Molach as mentioned in someone's thread. But it was one situation were having a teamate allowed us flexibility on diplo. For example, I could express interest in Molach's plans, but Bigger could easily distance himself them.
We never consciously worked together on this, but I thought of it a few times and was a little more liberal with my dealings with the other players (although there weren't many chances for that).
I'm very interested to see how this turns out. I don't think scooter had to justify that his going for a solo was "for the ratings!". It is the object of the game, is it not? This will be interesting how the FRT situation resolves- I am pulling now for E to make some kind of ridiculous comeback and get back into the thick of things.