[Spoilers] Ichabod's spoiler thread

[Ichabod]

I was convinced that you backstabbing me would end in total dominance of Woden, so a big props that you managed to do this well against him.

I was surprised as well. The big thing was the many combat strength bonuses I was getting. +9 from espionage at some point, +5 from Alliance and +5 from DoTF (as my air units get it).

I thought Woden would get more resistance from the other players earlier, but he was able to consolidate his gains against you very easily. That made this last war a very difficult thing.

We need to look into nuke defence and maybe mod it a bit, as nukes seem too OP in multiplayer.

I personally would have been livid at suboptimal for not supporting the emergency, to the point where I would have made peace/conceded to Woden by giving him a few cities, gone to raze the rest of England, and called it GG.

Another thing that should be look at: pillaging Aerodromes. Probably worth a ban. You can pillage them with air units, which can lead to an uncounterable scenario. You need aerodromes for air units, you need air units to counter air units; whatever hammers you spent on an air unit while your aerodrome was pillaged are lost; the pillage happens on the interturn, so you can't react to it. There's not much counterplay available.

Regarding the emergency, perhaps Suboptimal thought that I would destroy Woden if the emergency passed and considered that not passing it would keep a balance of power where he could keep in the game? In reality, considering all the nukes and the higher production that Woden has, I couldn't handle him even with the emergency passing. I received the new turn and made some analysis. My navy is all gone, my army is mostly gone. I was making a desperate attempt at taking out Fez and Porto Alegre, which I thought would make it harder for Woden to nuke my Capital. But that doesn't seem to be possible. Fez almost fell, but I made a stupid mistake of moving my melee boats away in a previous turn, which resulted in not being able to capture a 0 defense city.

Right now, I don't think I can make much more than hold my army and try to punish Woden's incursions. But even holding units back won't achieve much, as they are sitting ducks for air and nukes. Considering Woden didn't bomb my Capital yet, something tells me that he can't do it (never played with nukes in SP to know how they work). In that case, there's a chance for me to hold a bit more. Perhaps CMF (who has the largest army in the world right now, hah) will be able to do something then. Very unlikely, as he doesn't have air units, and that means certain doom at this age.

[Ichabod]

And just to put it out there, I'm not ready to concede. I think this game deserves a winning screen from one of the players. And who knows, CMF is already converted to my religion. maybe there's a win in there, somewhere. 

[williams482]

And just to put it out there, I'm not ready to concede. I think this game deserves a winning screen from one of the players. And who knows, CMF is already converted to my religion. maybe there's a win in there, somewhere. 

Well son of a bitch, I missed that! I could have been running Wars of Religion against Suboptimal, +4 strength would have really helped my armies, uhh, still fall a million miles short of doing anything that would give us any chance at victory. 

You put up one hell of a fight against Woden in the end game here, really impressive. And you pulled off a monster opening that had me feeling rather envious just watching the scores. Major hat tip for that performance. 

As for why we signed a DoF with Woden at the end, well, we didn't think we had much choice. That decent sized army we had thrown together was mostly a defensive force, with the primary objective of flooding your forces with expandible cavalry attacks if you turned on us once you were done with Kaiser (which seemed pretty likely at the time, hard to tell from your reports if that was an accurate assesment). When we signed that DoF, we had I think three artillery corps, no balloons, no planes, and no AA guns; all in all, no chance at taking Phoenician cities in the face of even minimal resistance, and frankly no chance of even holding our own lands against the troops Woden was parading through our territory. If I'd known your plans, and known how well you'd be able to execute them, I might have been more willing to take a chance on Woden not just nuking us into the stone age with one hand tied behind their back, but I didn't. Oh well. 

All in all though, great game. I hope the lack of an official win doesn't sully it too much.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Yeah, the Canadian army was pretty much a paper tiger - the one hot war we got into after we fought off the midgame (jesus, that was only the midgame) Egyptian push was against an already-nuked England and our army more or less disintegrated immediately upon contact with the enemy. An attack on Woden would have been very, very short and very, very amusing for him. We were mostly fighting tooth and claw for "Don't! Get! Eliminated!" since more or less turn 100.