Finished reading the other threads; they've confirmed a few things for me:
1. Serdoa should have sent his army north against me instead of deeper into Old Harry's lands after taking Exeter.
2. I should have attacked Azza, not Serdoa, and kept cities.
3. Azza should have attacked me while I was attacking Serdoa.
4. I way under-expanded (duh).
5. I was way outclassed as an economy-player; I was right when I said Old Harry would win unless I could kill him now.
6. Old Harry did not know about my secondary attack forces.
A few things surprised me:
1. Old Harry thought I would take Barnet in our first war. I stand by my appraisal.
2. Old Harry thought he couldn't destroy the rest of my stack the turn he took peace. I'm less sure of my appraisal here.
3. Old Harry thought he'd have trouble dealing with my stack in this war. I stand by my appraisal, which was echoed (or anticipated) by Commodore's comments in Old Harry's thread.
4. Old Harry bulbed Astro a couple turns ago. I did not consider him doing that and should have checked the techs screen more carefully each turn. I don't know whether I would have thought of him potentially having a galleon in that sea already. Ironically, when I took Forest Green, one of the positives I noted mentally was that he would not be able to put boats on that sea
in future. I've already noted other ironies.
Ultimately, what this game has reaffirmed for me is that you cannot win at Civ IV unless you are of yourself the best player in the matchup. I mean, it's so obvious, but you can't win, peacefully or aggressively, unless you have the best economy, and the only way you can have the best economy is if you innately are able to micro and macro better than everyone else. Big-picture, what I tried to do in this game was make up for my inferior Civ-skill by pushing everyone else
down the (economic) ladder, instead of relying on skills I didn't have to climb up the ladder faster. It worked for a while, but in the end there are too many opponents and they are afforded too much time and one of them catches up - and then there's nothing you can do to force them back down again. Now, sometimes it is true irrational, emotional choices on the part of one or more of the players may afford an inferior player an opportunity - as it did for me, though I squandered it. But assuming everyone plays rationally, there's literally no way to change the outcome of a game with players whose relative skill levels are already established, short of randomizing the terrain so it favours them differently. There is no way to win at Civ except to be better, and you cannot be other than you are. So why play?
I mean, I know I'm overstating this, I'm just trying to express my sense of frustration (not anger, this post is being written with a cool head) at my inability to do anything to alter the course of the game once Old Harry had caught up to me (and the opportunities I shouldn't even have been granted had passed): I couldn't attack, because the defence is stronger, and I couldn't develop peacefully, because he was better at it, and I couldn't change that by, say, outside practice within the time-span of the game. I was faced with an Immovable Object with no Irresistible Force to throw at it. There is no strategy to this game other than Be Better, because if you can Be Better, you can defend it, due to the mechanics of the game. There is no way to deal with a player who is Better than you. I can only conclude that if I want to win a game, I either have to gamble 12 months on someone, probably multiple persons, doing something Really Weird, as for some reason happened repeatedly this game, and that I'll have the foresight to take advantage of it, or only choose to play against players who are demonstrably inferior, which isn't fair. Everything else is just figuring out where players stand in relation to each other, or artificial handicaps imposed by random terrain to shake up what would otherwise be predetermined matchups. (I suppose players of differing
levels of inferiority starting next to stronger players so it takes them differing amounts of time to absorb them and snowball ahead also shakes up the matchups, and is probably just about the only reason these games stay fresh - simply because we haven't run through all the possible permutations yet.) Anyway, enough of this philosophy. It was an enlightening experience, but one that, once enlightened, I don't feel inclined to repeat. Well, okay, I do a little bit, if only to correct my mistakes, but not enough to risk my sanity again
.
Man, I cannot keep myself from writing these long, depressing posts. I need to just go back to reading ...
Thank you for your concern, though.
