[SPOILERS] Will: Thread title to be decided

[Fintourist]

You know, this is quite a comment:

My current goals in this game are:

#1: Harry does not win.
#2 (Secondary): Survive to the end with a respectable empire.

First of all as a background I think it's relevant to remember that at this time we had never declared war or threatened you with military units. We had leveraged our IMP trait and grabbed a city between us, but in the end we ended both having two cities at roughly mid-point (for us the stone city + one further south, for you the island and the one north of stone). My point is that nothing too outrageous had taken place IMO.

Anyways my point is that one can look at your decision with different lenses:
1. "Hey, this is just a random internet game and I have the freedom to play it in which way I want"
2. "Hey, there are actual human beings behind the Persian civ. Those human beings next to me have decided to commit a significant amount of their free-time for a competition over the next ~year and they are putting in the effort and would like to succeed in that game. The most fun thing for me in this game is to try make their lives as miserable as possible and troll them for the next 12 months"

Well congrats I guess, we did not achieve our goals, you did.

[WilliamLP]

While I wasn't spending hours per turn like your team, I had something invested in this game as well. As I saw it, my chances at running a significant civ were finished with the Dragon Age plant, one way or another, because it so thoroughly dominated my position and my land wasn't good enough to be competitive while conceding the center. At that point, I knew I was lost to you guys if I didn't react, and I didn't think I had a better fight against you than in the early game, while I had the advantage of AGG and the hope of inducing a dogpile. I thought I had some chance of taking the city, whether I was correct or not.

You did have the option of planting a less audacious city, and I would have been happy to play nice. Even in retrospect, I believe it was my most rational move to make my goal into stunting your growth. I.e. if you'd just been allowed to grab Stonehenge and run a rapid expanding IMP game, my position at the end would not be better than it was. I would have fallen far behind and maybe lost to Knights or Cuirs or something.

This game brings out territorial instincts. I don't feel great about it but I don't apologize either. The role I refused to play, and always will, is being a stepping stone and easily dominated neighbor. And let's face it, in a game like this you need to roll over a neighbor or two very early to be competitive. I just wasn't going to be that player for you guys.

Edit: I know the city was 7 turns from my capital, 7 turns from yours. I'm not half as good a civ player as you guys but I have a basic intuition for strategy. Being at the midpoint, plus the position of resources, means it was a play for far, far more than an equal standing in land. And because of the central position toward the map it paved the way for a domination of a much larger area to the south, ala a Go board. To me, any plant like that from any player is basically a permanent war declaration. Sorry if you disagree but that's why we all get to run our own civs.