About time we get this going. I'm almost done reading through Dazed's thread, and then I'll move onto the others. Anyone finished them all yet? I left a few comments for him in his thread, but I'll write all comments from now on in here, so we have it all in a unified place. Krill mentioned he'd stop by and post here once this thread was created, so we can hear his thoughts too.
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Postgame Discussion
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This post is just way to close for comfort, but also entirely "wrong". I named the game Slight Return because it was a slight return to the PB2 map. Everything is just coincidental.
Krill Wrote:This post is just way to close for comfort, but also entirely "wrong". I named the game Slight Return because it was a slight return to the PB2 map. Everything is just coincidental. That was all just a coincidence? Wow. I thought for sure I had it nailed. Go figure 
I'll start reading the threads when I'd done with the report. All the screenshots are in my spoiler thread now.
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. - George Bernard Shaw
I have read through Dazeds, TTs and the lurker thread and I was really wondering why my diplo was perceived as being harsh and aggressive - sure I am not talking around in circles. But that is because it simply does take me long enough to write what I am writing - I do not want to put an hour more into writing it
 Though I have to admit, I certainly do understand why my message which led to my war with TT was perceived as being rude - I was pissed at that moment and to be honest I am still a little bit, even after knowing that he really had a plan to get them back. But that plan simply was built around getting even more cities for SleepingMoogle. Thats not exactly what I had in mind and I think this event did influence the outcome of the game massively. Not that I want to take away from SleepingMoogles play - he outplayed us clearly, also and especially in that situation when he simply by diplomatic means got himself cities, an part time ally and myself into a war which hurt my economy. Anyway, I think I did wrong what I am always doing wrong: Not enough scouting, not enough workers, not enough expansion. @SleepingMoogle I read in your thread that you thought I had whipped my cities in the ground. I have told that in my thread as well as in some diplo-emails, but to be honest, I did not. Yeah, I whipped some troops. One city did have some 3 or 4 unhappiness from whipping. But thats it. I never really intended to throw my whole game away just to mess with you - but I hoped that telling that would get you to back out of the war. Guess that was not needed, reading your discussions with TT when we were at war. Oh, but that reminds me, there is another thing I did wrong: I should have never accepted the NAP with you, I should have not accepted the NAP with TT and I should have tried to get scooter to go together with me to war with you. I was to tired of some stuff ingame at that time, so was more then willing to simply let it go on without doing anything when it was pretty obvious that you will win if we don't hit you. You can not outexpand someone if he has already expanded more then you, has more production, GNP and crop yield and has NAPs securing him completely from all other players. Big mistake on my part, knowing all that and still not doing anything.
So.. the game has finished. I'm not sure if it did turn out quite the way any of us expected it to, but victory in hand I can't say I'm unhappy with the end result. There's some bits and pieces that can use improving, and hopefully the next game(s) will provide that opportunity. Looking back on how the game progressed, it felt like we were all pretty close together up until Serdoa and I made the move against Twinkletoes. That eventually resulted in TT losing his core cities, and Serdoa fell behind as well. I haven't actually read the spoiler threads yet, but I got the feeling that he whipped his cities quite heavily. The loss of population and the focus on hammers for military units reduced his economy to the point he was unable to keep up.
Scooter was able to avoid conflict for most of the game, and rely on the Great Lighthouse to stay competitive. During my conflict with Serdoa, I was convinced that it would allow him to become the runaway power and it was surprising that didn't happen. My best guess right now is that I focussed on food and commerce over hammers more than scooter did, letting whips do most of the production heavy lifting, and I built Courthouses quite early to reduce maintenance costs. The demographics support this theory at least, as it my food count was higher for most of the game, and my espionage graph starts rising earlier than the other Civs as well. What I am fairly certain of is that Representation won me the game in the end. Combined with Mercantilism and Caste on a food-rich map, the amount of specialists that could be fielded was pretty insane, which helped research along a lot. At the end, I was still gaining gold at 70% research, and I can't remember many Monarch difficulty games where I managed that. At the same time, there's also a few things I'm less satisfied with. Probably the one thing I botched in this game more than anything was the diplomacy. For one, there wasn't a lot of it going on. Also, the actual interactions could have gone a whole lot better than they actually turned out to be. It's hard to say in hindsight whether or not it would have made a difference, but at least it feels like more involved contact would have resulted in better relations with the other players. One problem was that generally speaking there wasn't too much to talk about. Both of my neighbours were pretty easy-going, and once NAPs and settling agreements were in place, there wasn't too much else to talk about. Perhaps that is a weakness of no tech-trading, and mirrored starts. Still, it feels like I could (and should) have done more. At the same time, I really did mess up during the war over the Ottoman mainland cities. When I accepted Twinkletoes' offer, I knew it would piss of Serdoa something fierce but declaring war on him afterwards to keep him from taking the other cities is a facepalm moment. Even though it paid off in the end by forcing Serdoa to tank his research, I consider it a failure in diplomacy on my part. Worse, I got angry with him when the war was at a stalemate (which was basically my own fault), and that caused me to lash out at both scooter and Twinkletoes as well. I said some things (both in messages and in the spoiler thread) that I still regret Hopefully there aren't any hard feelings; tempers flared on both sides of the war but that really isn't much of an excuse. This is something which I won't forget for future games. To my fellow players: I'm really sorry for that guys. If there is one thing I truly regret about this game, it was this. My war performance also needs some improvement. It's not so much that my actions were bad (although losing my stack to Serdoa's Knight's wasn't exactly the pinnacle of strategic awareness), but there just wasn't a lot of it. In the end, I was sitting on 15+ Knights, but had nothing to do with them. I think I'll need to get myself into a CTON or AW game or two at some point, and get completely trampled to pick up some combat experience. At the very least, that should make my consider myself more than a complete newbie when it comes to MP warfare. Finally, I need to better consider city placement and function in future games. Generally speaking, I think I did well setting up the Civ and growing it into an effective empire, or at least a lot better than my previous attempt, but there are decisions like not placing my HE city on a river for a later Levee, or obsoleting Monasteries while I knew I had to train a ton of missionaries in the future. Also, some cities just weren't really specialized, and giving them a better focus would probably have given a better output. These points I'm going to try and improve in the next game. Hopefully that will work out okay. The map was very interesting indeed. Now that Krill mentioned it, I can see the similarities to the PB2 map, but the name had me confused throughout. Encountering other Civs a few turns in was definitely a shocker, and forced a complete rethink of the map and how to approach it. Still, I get the feeling there weren't quite enough Civs to make the most out of the design. If there had been 6-8 players, I think the game might have progressed quite differently than everyone more or less doing the same. Or perhaps we were all just peaceful hippies happy to just sit around and build stuff. There are three points that I can offer to improve this type of map though: One is to make the original landmass smaller, as that would have made expansion and the islands a lot more important to quickly settle and defend than they actually were in the game. Perhaps wide enough to allow for two cities (maybe with some overlap) rather than three would have been better. The second is to give Calendar resources a more prominent role. Other than a single Banana resource on the first island expansion, there wasn't a single resource until the second ring, and this seriously devalued both the tech (although given the water-heavy nature of the map, that probably wasn't too much of an issue), as well as the buildings that doubled resources (Grocers especially, but also Theathres to a lesser extent and possibly Cathedrals). Markets and Forges were very powerful since almost all the resources they multiply happy for were readily available. Finally, I'm not sure if the mirrored starts really worked out. In this game, we already hadn't enabled tech trading, but when everyone has the exact same resources as well, there's just very little in the way of trading opportunities. In the end, that may have contributed to the game seeing relatively little conflict. Putting Copper on the capital tile also more or less ruled out early rushes, even though that did happen when Dazedroyalty was taken out. Still, seeing that Copper resource after finished BW meant I never seriously considered attacking until at least Cats and Maces. Still, the idea behind the map was a good one. Thanks again for designing it Krill! I have some initial thoughts on the players as well. This may change after reading spoiler threads, but I figured I might as well put it out here. Hopefully no one will be too offended by this.  scooter:Scooter should definitely be considered the diplomatic winner for this game. He positioned himself so that if the game would have turned into a 2v1, the Incans would almost certainly not be on the receiving end. Both Serdoa and I liked him a lot more than each other at least. Theoratically, his relative lack of war involvement would have allowed him to be the dominant power. The Great Lighthouse is hugely powerful on a map like this, and I get the feeling he leveraged the wonder quite well by settling a high number of cities. I theorized a bit earlier in this post why it didn't work out in the end, but he was the economic power to be worried about nevertheless. If anything, a little more aggression would help. If you're in that dominant position, then you should do something to levarage it. Serdoa: Despite our disagreements over the course of the game, I can credit Serdoa with being the most threatening opponent in this game by far. Scooter may have outteched him towards the end, but India was always the big question mark, and kept the bulk of my forces near our shared border simply because I had no idea whether or not I should be expecting a visit. At the same time, that unpredicability was also a bad thing as it made me favor an alliance with scooter even before I proposed teaming up with Serdoa. As it happened though, Serdoa and me were in prime position to divide the Ottoman empire between us, but once we fought our war, I never seriously believed we could be friends again for the remainder of the game. Serdoa was easily the most effective in the field, and might have become a serious contender if his economy hadn't suffered so much during the war. I'm certain the expertise will serve him well in other games. Well, at least as long as he remembers where he put his pants. Twinkletoes: I get the feeling that TT approached the game too much with a builder's state of mind. It's not too hard to keep an AI from attacking, but a human opponent will sniff out weakness and pounce on it. Eventually attacking one of my neighbors to expand territory was something I saw as an inevitability, and Twinkletoes was simply the easier target. If there is one thing I should comment on, it is the building of the Statue of Zeus instead of units while the soldier points of both neighbors grew and grew. The lack of defenders was a serious problem immediately once the war started, but it also forced him to agree to heavy terms almost immediately. There have been some rumblings that Twinkletoes gives in to pressure too easily. Yet even given my experiences with TT in this game and PBEM3, I still don't feel that is the case; he simply has few other options due to the lack of a military focus. I hope that the games will have provided that lesson and let him avoid that pitfall in other games. For what it's worth, his research up until the war declaration was impressive and I can certainly see him became a fearsome opponent as soon as he makes himself a less appealing target. Dazedroyalty: There really isn't too much I can say; Dazed was eliminated quite early and we never really developped diplomatic relations beyond Open borders. I haven't read his spoiler thread yet so I don't know how the specifics of the wars he fought, but a 2v1 will have been rough regardless of what happened. Hopefully he will have had better luck in his other games. Well, that's about it. I'll have a look at the spoiler threads now. There's a few things that I'm quite curious about.
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. - George Bernard Shaw
Oh! Most important thing of all, I'll let the players of the next game know if I'm going to be roleplaying a bit beforehand.
*cough*
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. - George Bernard Shaw
Serdoa Wrote:@SleepingMoogle I based that whipping assumption mostly on comparing your population with mine and the Incan cities I had visibility on. You were fairly fast with adopting HR if I remember correctly so the happy cap wouldn't have been that much of an issue. Or perhaps (much more likely) I'm overlooking something really obvious. But yes, that NAP definitely shouldn't have been signed. When I knew I had 40 turns of guaranteed peace, I basically went into full-on expansion and teching. The threat of war was definitely holding me back up until that point.
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. - George Bernard Shaw
Well, the thing is, my cities never got grown as big as yours. I had setup the first two cities not all that well due to the war with Dazedroyalty and the needs of it (or better, the need to setup the field of war beforehand so that I certainly win). And the later cities somehow got put in there, but I really expected at that point already that the lurker thread would laugh about my bad city placement - I wonder that I haven't seen anything about it.
Anyway, after that, I got HR quickly ... and completely failed to use it. I had a completely safe border with scooter and a very safe one with TT. I should have used HR more, expanded more and simply let you fight TT - knowing that I can jump in with a small amount of forces (10 HA) and still get cities out of it. Instead I simply started messing around, not doing anything really but sort of tryting to do everything at the same time. I also had thought from the beginning that I need to expand to the islands. I think I still was the last one to do it - having Imp and mostly using it to gain a Great General is not the right way to play the game. Oh, one last point which really embarasses me: I wanted to setup a hammer economy, simply using workshops instead of cottages and building wealth / research. At the same time teching to Guilds and having Knights available to stomp someone. Well, I failed completely because I realised too late that building wealth does receive bonuses from forges but the generated gold doesn't receive bonuses from markets. If you look at the tech-tree, there are no bonuses except for Forges and Bureaucracy for hammers till late in the game. But there are Libraries, Universities, Markets, Grocers and Banks. Coupled with cottages having the higher yields my strategy could not work. So, summarized: - not grown cities enough - not enough cottages built - not enough expansion - too much troop production which then never got used (or not enough)
Well I've read all the threads and it has been quite an experience.
It was good to find out just how the whole dazed scenario unfolded as I didn't meet dazed until the outcome was already certain. In terms of my own play, I think it was a big improvement on PBEM3 but still got some way to go. I think my builder side was improved markedly and I did manage to maintain a robust and competitive research which was a lot better than last time. However, while I improved on peace building, my warfare inexperience was caught out again. I became too focused on keeping pace on research that I did not whip anywhere near enough units and the time after the awareness of war with Moogle was horrendously wasted. That was very poor play and I paid for it with my shrine city. I hope that when you see my thread and the deal I made with Moogle for my survival, you will see that I did actually have a plan to get those cities back - unlike against Sandover. It relied on helping Moogle attack scooter but it was the best deal I could make at the time and it did buy me out of one big hole. Obviously I was unaware of Serdoa's impending attack after the guarantee of a safe flank, but had that not come I may have been in a stronger 4th place. Once Serdoa hit me, that was it. My lack of constant and emergency military build up cost me - as it deserved to do! I bravely ran away away and hoped there would be a major war between the three of you to stop Moogle while you ignored lil ol' me but unfortunately it never happened. Diplomacy: no comment! Now onto the other guys. scooter - Not really much to say about things between you and me, we didn't really have that much to chat about being so far away and I sensed that after your joint attack with Serdoa there would be little hope of an alliance with you. My only quibble was your anger with me over the gifting and the reference to PBEM3 in your thread in not the nicest of terms (goes for the others in the Lurker thread too!). I hope that through reading my thread you will see that the gifting had a ring of sanity to it and that it wasn't a surrender like before. I hope this will get rid of that from your mind and you will realise I was simply over my head in PBEM 3 and not out to screw anyone! You played a top game though. You saw your opportunity with Dazed and took it along with your Great Lighthouse plan. Maybe if you had expanded out to more islands faster you could've pulled a lead out, but with land so good and pressed on the mainland, I can see why you didn't as much. It would've been interesting to see how you would have reacted to an attack by Moogle and me if Serdoa hadn't got me first, but I'm sure you'd have coped a lot better than I did! Moogle - I can't really complain much about our dealings. Yes you attacked me but I was the easy target and I should've done a lot more. It was the right play at the right time. You took peace when you could've probably taken more, but you did good by me and I did try and help. The whole email thing was probably a mistake on my part. I didn't quite understand what you wanted from me and I honestly would not have missed an enemy stack if it was visible to me. You were defending me and I did what I could. I was probably in 'defeatist mode' at that time too - and only snapped out of it when I had my Sir Robin plan. You played the best game in terms of expansion and leveraged your combo possibly best of all. You built a strong position and although I made the war easy for you by being a noob - you still did what you had to do. Full credit to you for a well-deserved win. Serdoa - well this was topsy-turvy. Firstly the whole horse thing was never ever an attempt to lie or confuse you. Its so long ago I can't even remember exactly how/why I didn't notice/mention the off shore Horse - I was sincerely trying to be your friend so the whole thing is a mystery to me now. All I will say is that I did answer your question. I never lied - and you did come close with you (in my eyes) guaranteeing me a safe flank whilst actively planning to attack me. If it had been possible without a mirrored map, I would have actively looked to trade with you over Moogle as until the war, I saw you as my friend - not knowing that you seemingly hated me from a long way back for something I didn't do. I won't go over the whole email thing, its in the past and I've certainly moved on. In the end we worked it out and you let me run away so at least it ended on a positive note! Only other thing I can think of is our land-split idea instead of selling was good in my eyes, and had dazed survived might have been a bigger factor in the game. You played a good game. You were a bit of a loose cannon diplomatically but at least you backed it up with strong actions like dazed. I'd say in peace time we were relatively equal, but obviously you also bested me at war so you deserve 3rd place. dazed - I really wish you had had better luck in this game - I imagine the balance would have been a bit more interesting but it wasn't to be. I hope I get to play a game with you in the future and see how it goes. Also, I really liked this map - mirrored was a nice change and although it killed diplo more, at least noone can say it wasn't fair and balanced! Probably the best map I've come across in games so far. So thanks for that Krill! I may think of some more later but this is what I can think of now!
"You want to take my city of Troll%ng? Go ahead and try."
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