Postgame Thread

[Ichabod]

Congratulations on the win, Selrahc!

Even though Maksim seems to be away from the forums, I'd like to thanks him for the map. It was very challenging, but also rewarding, since the better strategies weren't obvious.

I'd like to thank all the players and lurkers. Special thanks to my ded-lurker Ravus Sol.

I'll probably make a more complete analysis later, but I'm pretty happy with my play here. My biggest mistake was not seeing how powerful the Infernals would be in the game. Lack of diplomacy was also a mistake. And I have to work on my mid-game skills, since I tend to stagnate after a while.

Anyway, good game, everyone!

[Selrahc]

My perspective:
After PBEMIV I was still wanting to run a summon based game. The initial plan was for angels, but after discussing things with Bob we ended up thinking about Infernals. So I came into this game thinking solely about getting Infernals quickly. And this was a good map for them. Game won in the gameplan before a turn was played? Well, I don;t think it was quite that bad.

Now, it wasn't all plain sailing for me. The awful starting conditions, the long trek to the sea and the poor land surrounding the sea added around 20 turns to the end result. In my test games, I was getting Hyborem up and running between T59 and T76. In this game it took until T89. 5 turns of sea searching, 15+ turns of working a single Ice hill before things even really got started.

But obviously everyone else was heavily stunted by the bad terrain. I was really impressed by both Ichabod and Mardoc's economies in the harsh climes. Mardoc in particular terrified me, since I was worried that he was going for Hyborem and I couldn't get a diplo line open to investigate.

I think I played the diplo pretty well. Gibbon was plausible, and people seemed to be fooled by it. The only speculation I saw about Hyborem was in the Kurio thread, and was actually derailed by the rumours about Gibbon.

I was woefully ill informed for a big portion of the game. I barely knew about the mistforms. I had poor map information, and little C&D knowledge.

I think my play as Hyborem was less good, after the summoning. Trailing around the desert the wrong way to find Dantski... Getting a good size stack wiped out by Ichabod and Dantski's defence. Potentially I should have been Infinite City Sprawling as well. In part this was due to the slow pace. I was just playing sloppily.

One thing I was very curious about. I penned a deal with Sciz for manes, but Sciz ran into odd problems fighting the Lanun, and ran out of enthusiasm for the game. He was then euthanized by Ichabod. The deal was essentially worthless to me. If I had taken the Kurios up on their offer of surrender I do wonder if I could have gotten a productive mane factory up and running.


Ichabod played very well. I think the Infernal gameplan was brokenly strong on this map, but he and Dantski did a very good job stymying me.

[Dantski]

I played a terrible game (except perhaps diplomatically?), my feelings on this map were that cottages would be virtually unworkable early on due to no 2 food tiles outside of resources. This plainly was not the case and my economy never got going (like Pitboss 2 only worse).

I was surprised even at your T89 for Hyborem, I'm not exactly super experienced with FFH2 but I didn't expect you to get there that fast and frankly didn't expect you to go that route at all.

Once you went Infernal it was all about how much population you could grab from others. I believed Ichabod's economy would allow him to pull ahead of you in tech while you were off conquering but he had to switch to military builds + civics to adequately defend against your later attack. I was hopeful that he could get 1 or maybe 2 cities with his chariot counterattack but once you were able to transport troops between cities it became extremely difficult.

Honestly I expected more of a builder game because of the Civ + leader picks with Sciz being aggressive but ultimately falling behind, how very wrong I was.

Well played Selrahc and sorry you didn't get to use all those scary units.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

So... what was the giant stack Ichabod was going to hit Selrahc's invasion with?

[Ichabod]

This is my stack in the beggining of turn 165, the last one we played. I was also being attacked in the south by Buboes.

I founded CoE in the last turn and I'd have the shrine in 3/4 turns, I think.

[Selrahc]

Did you guys notice the assault on the Lanun? I ran a quick 5t assault on them and I was a little scared that it was leaving me over stretched.

In fact did the AI Lanun have any impact on the game at all? Why did neither of you guys attack them? I'd have thought it was a pretty good move for Dantski, who could get the Lanun water food bonus if he wanted it, and didn't have to worry about defending things due to sanctuary...

Dantski, did you have a gameplan? I was getting very worried that you'd have Destroy Undead Devout Priests, or a twincasting Corlindale somewhere. Either of which would have been a nightmare to deal with.

[Dantski]

Aside from at the very end of the game I was in no position to go conquer. My economy was too bad to get to good offensive units earlier and when I did I couldn't have afforded the maintenance of the Lanun cities.

I was initially going for destroy undead mages but my research was piss poor and wasn't going to get there.

As for plans...I was going to sort of go for culture this game. That idea got abandoned rather quickly.

[NobleHelium]

Are you sure Tolerant gets you the food bonus? It's not tied to a building or anything in the cities, I don't see how that would be the case...

[Selrahc]

Are you sure Tolerant gets you the food bonus? It's not tied to a building or anything in the cities, I don't see how that would be the case...

Tied to the Lanun palace.

[NobleHelium]

Move his palace to the bottom of the map? Sounds silly to me.