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[SPOILERS] JR4 tries his luck in PB 37

TURN 16

Agriculture is now complete! Next tech is mining. The scout moved to the furs SE of dtay`s capital. He has a different luxury to the south (dyes) instead of our silks. Still not a single animal encountered. So far so good I guess. The next turn we can continue NE to that grass hill in order to get a good view of that area. Another option is going straight SE to meet a new neighbour asap. I`m leaning towards that northern detour before continuing SE.

And I finally remembered to rename our glorious civilization! We are now the Khatunate empire.


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Looking great! I'll try to take the demos apart later today - a lot of people got new techs, but I think I know (or can soon infer) what all of them were.

I can see arguments for either scout move: The grassland hill gives us more vision on dtay's immediate surroundings, most of which will look a lot like what we've already seen of ours (but which also - as you noticed with the floodplain and dyes - can't be relied upon for our own planning). Spotting any differences will make dtay's easier to track, and I believe after he's teched BW, scrolling back over for another look will let us see an extra hammer on his copper tile if it's in an area we've uncovered and in his territorial borders, even though it'll be back in the Fog of War. On the other hand, finding out who else is to the east (and how close) sooner could be quite helpful - and at some point, if it survives the Inevitable Animal Onslaught, the Scout would make a helpful (and disposable) fogbuster and sentry.

(Note our current plans include no real way to do any more scouting to our south for a long time to come.)

Have you checked the Espionage screen, by the way? If dtay has less than 4EP on us, it means he's met someone else. If we set EP spending on him to 1 instead of 0, we'll continue to put all our EPs on him (until we change espionage spending around again) even if someone else meets us. (This might help us get his graphs sooner.)
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International news: I think I finally know the explanation for some of the weirdness I've been seeing. Maybe I'm inventing drama now where it never really existed, but I think something went down out there after all:
Five new techs came in around the world:

1) Gavagai picked up Fishing, which doesn't fit very well with my theory that he's the Exp civ without the pasture and built a warrior last turn. Numerically, it adds up fine, but I don't see why he'd do it that way. If he had his choice, I mean. This is what made me realize there's probably been some drama - see below.

2) Dark Savant landed Bronze Working, and is first to get there by a mile. For his sake, I hope he remembers to start on some kind of food tech now. But who knows? Maybe he's got a nearby city site with copper and two pigs, all in the first ring, and he'll go for The Wheel while more or less ignoring his "capital!"

3) CML continues to be our dark mirror, and picked up Agriculture. His next tech will presumably be either Bronze Working or The Wheel.

4) Krill got AH, which is a huge relief: It means he's not executing the super-overpowered strategy where you just turn off research and run 100% gold from game start until everyone sees how rich you are and concedes the game.

5) Some other team picked up a tech; I forget who. Maybe Spain? Or Genghis Khan? The tech was either Agriculture or Improved Terraforming +50; no way to tell which for now.

In other news, nearly everyone has been working an improved tile since at least T15. Only "nearly" though: Ventessel is a little behind because China isn't great for this map, and Krill is still building his worker with his unimproved river corn or whatever it is because the start tile wasn't aggressive enough for him. Most of us have a cow pasture, but Coeurva has a clams net instead, and Gavagai ... I guess I really do think Gavagai has a rice farm now. But if so, then the question is why!

Here's the thing: My assumption that nobody's being scout-choked is mostly based on civstats, which shows players failing to observe turn splits at critical moments. Gavagai in particular played last on T9 and then first on T10 right after the turn rolled, and the only way a choke would explain the anomalies in the demos would be if the choke began before he moved his worker on T10. But that's not decisive. The choker could have landed the scout on his cows T9 before Gavagai played (or even on an earlier turn) and PMed Gavagai something - not illegal diplo, just working out the turn-split - like this: "Just a heads up that I declared war on you in PB37, moving my scout onto your cows. I've got the first half of the split, but I don't want to slow down the game, so feel free to play your turns in any order as long as you're not actually attacking my unit."

Then Gavagai agrees to that, and calculates that delaying his worker for a warrior would be worse than producing the worker on schedule, changing plans, and improving the rice before the cows. Once the worker is done, he starts a warrior, taking until EoT14 to complete it because of tactical considerations (such as the potential for the scout to move around and stand on his forest hill) and/or the new microplan he created after he got the PM, before he played the turn.

I still don't love this explanation, because if I were him - though I haven't planned the whole thing out - I think I'd have switched to Fishing (delaying Hunting) immediately, so I could start on my workboat as soon as the warrior was produced to break the choke. His new microplan might dictate otherwise though, and given the choice, he might prefer continuing his original tech path to minimize the number of neighbors other than the choker who realize something's wrong. The last thing Gavagai wants is for other players to smell blood in the water; he certainly knows what he does when he picks up that smell!

So if there was a choke, I'm quite sure the victim was Gavagai: He's the only player for whom it explains all the anomalies in the demos and civstats. (For instance, max rival soldier count went to 8,000 on T15, and Rival Average MFG was only 2 on T14, before any of the other Exp civs played.) As for the perpetrator though, there's really no way to know. It won't show up in the numbers even if the Scout died (which it didn't anyway if the choker knew what he was doing). Gavagai has a reputation for making attacks of opportunity and being both a strong player and an aggressive one. It would be in any neighbor's best interest, if the chance arose, to slow him down. No need to worry that he'll come after them in retaliation, since he seems to regard this type of play as normal, and if any opportunity arose, he'd be coming after them anyway just because he's Gav! So yeah, as far as I know, even if I'm right about the choke, there's just no way to tell who's responsible for now.

...

...

So how much you wanna bet it's Krill?
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If that theory is correct Gavagai surely is in some trouble! Krill is suspect number 1 here. We`ve got a bad neighbour in dtay as well, but I prefer that over an early choke. Maybe we could take advantage by claiming some disputed land if we border Gavagai. Time will tell. Actually I think our next scout move should be SE. Finding out who we border is so vital.

Btw I haven`t fixed the espionage spending just yet. I think we want dtay`s graphs like yesterday, so it makes sense to adjust it. I`ll do it next turn. Actually I was hoping for a turn now, but Ventessel hasn`t played yet.
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(May 15th, 2017, 03:35)JR4 Wrote: If that theory is correct Gavagai surely is in some trouble!

More than if the theory's wrong, sure - but his backup plan isn't terrible thanks to starting with Agri, and he's a good enough tactician that he'll most likely have broken the choke by now even if there was one. I do know the second Warrior (i.e. the one other than Dark Savant's) was either Gavagai's or GermanJoey's, and neither should have finished one T15 outside of an emergency, so it's hard for me to see a scenario that doesn't involve a choke here, especially since I also know at least one Exp civ wasn't working a pasture after T13.

Quote:Krill is suspect number 1 here. We`ve got a bad neighbour in dtay as well, but I prefer that over an early choke.

You and me both. Blaming Krill is pure speculation, but he has the most to gain or lose by choking his neighbors or letting them develop naturally. If all this is true, and he and Gavagai get into another game of chicken, that benefits their other neighbors immensely. If.
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More imaginary history to read while we're taking part of an online dramatization of Waiting for Ventessel:

(Further excerpted from Rise of the Ancient Khatunate:  A Cultural and Geographic Prehistory of the Toli Plateau, by R. F. Steel, Professor of Imaginary Anthropology, RB University Press, 2017.)

Though archaeological evidence suggests that the clam beds of the lower lake were discovered less than three hundred years after the so-called Palace of the Eternal Empress was constructed, it would take more than another century before seafood became a major staple for the people of Borte.  Tradition perhaps was slow to die among these long-nomadic herdsfolk, and the produce of their cattle - that old, familiar staple - was reliable, familiar, and tied up with many traditional rites among their people.  When change did come, it came rapidly, accompanied by - and perhaps precipitated by - a schism between two of the great clans of the Khatunate.  As one of the clans, perhaps of traditionalists, departed the city to return to a nomadic life among the cattle's grazing lands, the city of Borte itself underwent a kind of ancient renaissance:  Clamshell jewelry and ornaments are common among the grave goods of this period, suggesting not only increased reliance on the lake itself, but - in combination with other signs - an increasingly affluent populace, even as the population began to grow more rapidly than it had in some four hundred years.  Artifacts recovered from the hill southeast of Deed Tusgal Nuur suggest that the increased trade and commerce and diversifying interests of Borte's people even extended to its then-forested slopes, while their growing importance in the region and familiarity with smaller local tribes explains the military artifacts that begin to appear in this period as well.

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Photo credit:  American Museum of Natural History

The energy of this ancient renaissance ultimately seems to have carried even the traditionalist herdsfolk along with it:  Though the city's reliance on cattle went through a temporary decline, it rapidly resumed its place as Borte's primary staple as the nomadic herders began to control the wandering of their herds with fenced enclosures to ensure the most-efficient use of the grazing lands, protect their herds from predators and competitors for their pastures, and even to encourage the growth of superior cattle food as the elders and shamanistic leaders of the tribe took a growing interest in the preparation of grain flour, the many varieties of grasses that could be used to produce it, and especially the ricefields of the southeast, working toward a primitive understanding of agriculture.  The cattle herds grew and prospered even as the people of Borte itself began to assemble their earliest boats, for fishing and clam-diving in the rich waters of Lower Tusgal Nuur.

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Photo credit:  Mindanao Tours

The nomadic tradition still remained alive among certain of the clans - nominally including the Üneg, though that clan had not been seen by anyone else among the Khatunate in generations - but also including at least one deeply traditionalist tribe that rose out of the pasturelands of the cattle to resume a more nomadic lifestyle among the highlands beyond Deed Tusgal Nuur.  Yet even break-away tribesfolk like these were swept up in the new ways of the Khatunate, as many of them bartered their labor to young tribesfolk and travelers eager for a road through those very highlands - with many more of the nomadic tribesfolk taking part in the project, especially among the younger and more-able-bodied members of their clan, than those actually trying to eke out a living on the highlands' rocky slopes through still-more-ancient customs and hunting techniques.  The Khatunate was changing irreversibly, and growing in influence and power as it did.  Even far beyond the Toli plateau, beyond any region that acknowledged the Eternal Empress as a leader of their own, word had spread of her growing people, and tales were told beside many a campfire among small tribes, widely dispersed, in surrounding lands on every side, of the half-legendary seekers after knowledge of distant lands:  The skilled hunters and herdsfolk of the Üneg clan.
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And the continuing story of our intrepid wanderers:

The Quest of the Üneg

The nomads of the Üneg were notorious all across the fertile northeast:  A wild people who sought knowledge as though it were the bread of life, scrounging such food and water as they could as they moved from highlands to forest, proudly displaying the furs their ancestors had worn in the snowy taiga at the western neck of the isthmus, overlooking cold sheep pastures far below to the east and the summer feeding waters of migratory humpback whales beyond.  According to their own legends, it was from the high trees of this taiga that the Üneg last had seen a part of their ancient homelands:  The birch forests along the north bank of the Eastern Alph, where scattered tribes of hunters, foragers, and fisherfolk paid homage to the Eternal Empress of whom Üneg legends shared around their campfires still spoke.

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Bound by their traditions, proud of their inheritence and their unique mission - no matter how much or how many times the original mission might have grown tangled, forgotten, and recreated by the passing generations - the Üneg clung to their identity as clansfolk of the Khatunate even among the wild lands where no other tribe acknowledged any ruler but their own rumbling bellies, and where none dared try to reconcile and support so large a clan as the Üneg in one place.  The Üneg had their mission though:  Though they wandered in search of the food and water that they needed, following the seasons and the needs of game and grains, they never did attempt to support themselves in one place alone, for they always, always sought to learn more, moving ever onward in their quest to learn.  Through the dry woods overlooking fertile cornfields by the isthmus estuary and across the cornfields themselves, two generations of Üneg nomads ranged from the western silver fields to the riverbanks where they fished and traded with smaller tribes, asking after the fishing in the great eastern sea and the arid highlands they could just make out to the northeast, above cattle grazings that might - had any of the Üneg been as immortal as the Empress of their legends - have reminded them of home:  Highlands where local nomads claimed that still more veins of silver could be found.

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They followed the course of the river for generations more, keeping to its western bank at first in answer to some nameless superstition and the ready availability of forage, then as a matter of self-protection and the fulfillment of their mission, sending scouts to the top of the rocky, wind-swept, barren hill at whose feet they fished the river below their camps along its slopes, then to replenish their dwindling herds among the cattle fields north of the hilltop, keeping the high mountain ridge always to their left across the near reaches of the nearest great northern lake, seeking the source of the river that flowed down to an ever-more-distant sea.  When at last they found its source in another wide lowland lake and found their way forward blocked by jungles denser, hotter, and more oppressive than any they or their ancestors had ever dared to enter - thicker with vegetation and heavier of air indeed than any that the Üneg had even seen in centuries - there were some among the clan who nearly gave in to despair.  Yet there was one old man among them, the Keeper of the Eagles, second in spiritual import only to the shamanic elder of the clan, who counseled hope and patience, for the fulfillment of a central part in their ancient mission, he was convinced, drew nigh.

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Whether the legends and rituals passed down through five centuries and more were still truly remembered, and whether they still bore any relevance to anyone after all those centuries of social evolution back at Borte - the city the Üneg hardly could and yet still did call home - his words held hope and promise for his people:  He was accorded deep respect among them, for his age and station if not for any wisdom he had shown, and so the Üneg willingly moved forward, struggling through the jungle, staying beside the lake as far as they could, venturing deeper into its thick foliage only to hunt or to harvest its delicious yellow fruit - and they prayed that whatever omen the old Keeper of the Eagles had seen might prove true, and soon.

He would not live to see the truth himself, and his only son perished even sooner, of a fever he caught in the jungles, oppressed by the heat, but there was a single granddaughter, not yet born when her father died, and as she grew up, the Keeper taught her all he knew.

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She was still a child as her Üneg clan emerged from the fetid jungle, and when her grandfather was laid to rest, leaving her to take his place as the Keeper of the Eagles, young though she might be.  Though barely growing into adolescence, she threw all her heart and strength into her charge, and though she said little at the meetings of the clan elders to which she as Keeper was invited implicitly, she listened intently to all that was said, and especially for news from abroad.  It was there that she heard the rumors, carried to the clan by smaller bands of nomads who had heard it bandied across the river, from a family that had visited the montane forests just visible through the haze of distance far to the north and east, of the dread rulers of those highlands and all the lands beyond.

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Hunters they were said to be, sharp and violent in their ways, so eager to maintain discipline and control over their land and its people that they even dictated where and how the plants of the earth were permitted to grow:  Which might live, and which must die.  They were said to capture fish in nets and to tear what they needed from within the very earth, bullying all the minor tribes around them into declaring fealty to their despot, a strangely patient ruler with a foreign look, terrible in anger when he chose to take offense, brooking no travelers in lands he deemed his own on pain of war.  He was said to rule the tribal people of his lands without mercy, to give his enemies no quarter, and to take no advice from anyone living, following only his own inclinations and - it was said - the guidance of some ancient spirit or demon, rarely and only momentarily attentive but powerful, dangerous, and after its fashion wise, known by the mysterious name of d'tay.

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The young Keeper of the Eagles knew not how to trust the wild tales of the little nomadic tribe - themselves reporting stories they'd heard from travelers who came from afar - but for all their fanciful elements, the nomads' tales struck a cord in her memory.  So for the first time, she stood in the tent of meeting and proclaimed instead of listening, for the Keeper of Eagles was by tradition the bearer of the one earthly connection that still remained between the Üneg and the legendary Eternal Empress for whose protection, with all the people of her Khatunate, they still prayed to the holy spirits every day.  And so the small Keeper of the Eagles spoke the words she had been taught to speak on the day when she heard of another people whose rule, like the Khatunate's itself, extended across highlands and lowlands, lakes and rivers, forests and dry plains.  And flush with pride, she went to the cart that was made into a great eyrie for her charges, and she brought forth one of her eagles and smiled upon it and told it of its quest as though it could hear.  She prayed then to the holy spirits to guide her eagle true to the eyries of its distant ancestors in the lands of the Khatunate, and released it with a fluorish, grinning with pride and with joy as it took to its wings and soared into the sky.  Where it went or might go, she could hardly know herself, but she trusted that the spirits would guide it in its flight, and that the Eternal Empress would one day see it and understand, and know the truth.

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Perhaps the eagle flew true; perhaps on its soaring wings, diving to hunt from the air if it felt the need, it managed a journey in a day or two that might have taken the Üneg a century and a half of their slow, seasonal traveling, stopping at length as they always knew they must in order to gather food and supplies, to hunt, to learn the lay of the land around them, and to gather knowledge and stories from smaller local tribes and families.  Perhaps as they no longer did, the eagle somehow knew the way.  The Üneg could not tell, and could not know, and could not say - apart, perhaps, from their single shamanistic leader, who reported after a time that the holy spirits had told her that the eagle had returned and its message had been received with gratitude by Izabyella Khatun, the Eternal Empress.  The young Keeper of the Eagles believed her implicitly, and never doubted for a moment that the spirits were watching over her - and perhaps she was correct:  Who are we to say?  She died of her years long, long ago, and was buried in a verdant river valley, not many decades before her granddaughter came to the edge of a forest where leopards prowled, their sleek fur soft and warm and beautiful in the way of such noble creatures, and laid eyes for the first time on the lands whose people the Eagle had been sent to announce.

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They were green and fertile valleys, every bit as alluring as her people's dreams of home, fed by the waters of the montane lake known in the local dialect as Amanzi Esibukweni Ephakeme:  Upper Mirror Lake.  The name struck an echo with an ancient legend, but even that beloved tale was much-changed across centuries of oral transmission in her tribe, in isolation from the rest of the Khatunate, and though the landmarks before her might have seemed suspiciously familiar to anyone who had seen the surroundings of Deed Tusgal Nuur, neither she nor anyone in her tribe could remember an ancestor who had met a great-grandparent old enough to remember the lands the Üneg still called home.

And amid the highlands before her, at the crest of a great round hill, there stood a city:

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The dread fortress of Gobwin Knob!

Image credits:

- Mongolian campfire:  Photo by Justin Jin

- Vein of silver:  Photo by James St. John

- Elderly Mongolian hunter with eagle:  Photo by Batzaya Choijiljav

- Mongolian huntress-in-training Ashol Pan with golden eagle:  Photo by Asher Svidensky

- Zulu Warriors in re-enactment:  Photo from the Associated Press

- Tokugawa Ieyasu:  Painting by Kanō Tan'yū, 17th century

- Ashol Pan releasing her eagle:  Photo by Asher Svidensky

- River in hilly country:  Photo by Simon Fraser

- Gobwin Knob:  Painting by Xin Ye
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TURN 17

The inhabitants of Borte are soon changing their diet a bit. I suspect that some of them will eat seafood from next turn on. The scout continued SE and this is what he found. Well, that was kind of unexpected. It doesn`t look like that land connects to a neighbour further east. Hmmm, maybe we don`t have more than 2 or 3 neighbours? It`s also telling that we still haven`t met anyone else than dtay. Also, I put all espionage points on dtay, just in case. We are currently at 12 points.


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Heh - the Borte diet will be diversifying indeed!

As for the scout report though ... wow. That's ... quite unexpected. I guess it could end up being the same as I described above, but with all our "neighbors" across seas with the sole exceptions off the "close" ones. If everyone only has two land neighbors though, that's kind of unfortunate. I'd like to see more overland interaction than that in the game (and arguably, the more land neighbors everyone shares, the less impact individual neighbor luck has on the map) - but competition for the islands may make things interesting in that respect anyway. I guess we'll see!

From Civstats and reasonable assumptions, GermanJoey just completed Agriculture. I'll look into the demos more later in case there's anything interesting buried in there.

Back in the realm of unreasonable assumptions though, I'm still not sure that Krill (or anyone) is/was really choking Gavagai, though it's still possible. The following is an alternate explanation for the demographic weirdness, broken down into ten relevant items, mostly as a way to think "out loud" by typing stuff up. I'm putting it here so I can refer back to it next turn as much as anything else:

1) CML is not playing the turns himself; he has a friend playing them for him, presumably following a very precise microplan.

2) His friend isn't always able to play in a timely fashion.

3) It is imaginable that his friend could have queued his worker moves either to guard against missing a turn or just because he's not experienced at MP.

4) It is possible that queued moves are executed at the beginning of the turn, before anyone else plays; even if this is not true in general, it is probably true if the player has no other unit move options (e.g. if CML's Scout found an animal and either died or was fortified in place to heal).

5) If 4 is true, then dtay, Ventessel, Coueurva, or Krill (sorry make that or Krill) might have had an opening to move their scout onto CML's completed cow pasture before we played T14. This would fully explain the anomalies I saw in the demos - and would do so more cleanly than the Gavagai theory: Gavagai wasn't working his forest hill on T10, as he absolutely should have been if he was being choked by a scout on his cow tile.

6) If this is true, and if CML was building a Workboat straight from T10 (unlike us) then he wouldn't be able to break the choke until at least T18. In this case, the Warriors built on T15 were still Dark Savant's and Gavagai's; both built them by working their Oases for three turns followed by their pastures for two, and both were following totally normal plans. This makes everything fit! Except...

7) CML played last T15 and first T16. As in the case of Gavagai, it might just have been that the choker told him not to worry about the turn split at least until he produced a military unit, but that's one more thing that would have had to happen for this theory to fit. Moreover...

8) If 4 is false, the whole thing falls apart because the worker would still be on the cows, preventing a scout from choking until after we played our turn (and therefore preventing it from showing up in our demos when the screenshot was taken). Moreover, if Krill had a Scout in position to choke CML and was intentionally seeking an opportunity, he would probably have wanted to wait to play until after he'd seen from civstats that CML had ended turn: He wouldn't have expected to find the worker gone already. This might apply to any of the other suspects too. Except...

9) The choke could have been 100% opportunistic when the worker was seen to have left the tile. In fact, since CML could be inferred to have been working on a work boat, the choker could have intended to move from one threatening tile to another as if just exploring the neighborhood and then start the choke T15, with really nothing lost - only to find he could unexpectedly start the choke early.

10) There could be some other explanation that has nothing to do with a choke. Maybe Gavagai really did decide to improve his rice first on purpose, and somehow accidentally teched Fishing and Hunting in the wrong order or something! (No.) Maybe CML miscommunicated with the friend playing the turns for him, or his friend misclicked, and that delayed his pasture by a turn! I finally did come to the conclusion that Coeurva's weird start (just a few beakers worse than it should have been, but with nothing gained in exchange) was probably just a result of him misplaying his opening very slightly with a very understandable early mistake that he later partially corrected. So this could be another case like that one; there doesn't have to be any drama involved. I'm not clairvoyant, after all; I'm just trying to make sense of the numbers I've been seeing!

So how will we know?

T18, if CML doesn't grow to size 2, he's the one who wasn't working his pasture going into our T14. If this is so and two warriors are produced that turn, then CML was probably (and certainly if there were three warriors produced) being choked. If CML does grow to size 2 T18, that probably means the Gav theory was correct all along. So we'll hopefully find out next turn!
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Interesting times ahead. All other things being equal, I would rather see Gavagai having some early problems to cope with, as he`s a very strong player. That being said - if the Mr-first-to-all-wonders CML is choked, we (and all others) have a greater chance of competing for the key wonders later on. I quite like drama. As long as it doesn`t involve us that is!
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