Jkaen Wrote:I am sure Mardoc will do a better review than me
Well, here's the old college try.
Honestly, I think we lost this in the snakepick. Tech pace with two capitals was faster, but not enough faster to make up for having two civs with wildly diverging goals. We kept trying to be too nice to each other, too- instead of ruthlessly sacrificing one set of goals, we kept alternating between what Calabim wanted and what Malakim wanted. For instance, we researched Mysticism very late, to be nice to my Calabim, keeping you from having an Academy for the longest time, having only the third religion founded. Then we swapped focus and researched all religion, so I couldn't make vampires to help with defense. It probably didn't matter if we went for Priests first or Vamps first - what killed us was trying to do both at the same time.
Also, in retrospect, it was stupid of me to run a farmer's gambit in the backlines and make you do all the defense. I had way more hammers than you did, and I used them to make settlers. At the same time, you had avoid growth on and were manufacturing warriors and hunters and such with a big food surplus, because you had to.
Oh, and we completely misjudged Ichabod and Ravus. The time to build an army is *not* when their first horse archers cross the border - and we really shouldn't have stopped when we killed that first probe, either. They got more than one city killed per HA - why shouldn't they repeat that?
. I really do think that last stack would have killed us.
Ok, so that was the team-related mistakes. Personal mistakes? Well, I should have ignored the hammers I was losing on my farms and swapped to Agrarianism about 100 turns earlier. I was never very careful about my worker micro; I think I could have gotten by with 2/3 of the workers I built if I used them more carefully. Should have built a lot more cottages; Aristocracy is a nice civic, but it wasn't enough on its own. And I put too much effort into granary/smokehouse/breeding pit and not enough effort into happiness and food supplies
. And, well, once we were behind in the demos, I started mailing in my turns. In the same night, I'd spend 5 minutes on this save, and then an hour and a half fussing with my PBEMXVI save, when they were at similar levels of complexity.
Things that went right:
The map. The map was AWESOME! Perhaps just a little too big, with too many goblin forts - but it had tons of character, interesting decisions, non-standard approaches, and goblin forts would have been fine without For the Horde.. I was especially pleased by the way the strategic points and chokepoints were painful to settle - all that marshland and shallows at the river crossings, for example. I'm tempted to try to steal it for a D&D game and/or single player gaming.
The opponents - nobody dropped out except maybe kinda sorta Ravus (hope he's ok). Absences were covered; the game never went fast due to having 8 people, but it never stopped, either.
I may dump some pictures later on, if I can overcome the embarrassment.
