Nothing like the Prodigal Sons: The Odd Couple actually play as themselves.

[NobleHelium]

I checked his gold earlier and he didn't have any extra. Would need to wait until after the current turn to be sure though.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Hey, bronze medal finish! Third is respectable, with this capital [∞].

[NobleHelium]

Yeah, I don't think we can claim to be third with our current position no matter what the scoreboard says. We're definitely fifth currently.

I thought we played pretty well after the disastrous mistake. Made a lot of minor errors, quite a few due to Pitboss, and Gaspar seems to have contracted East-West Confusion Syndrome, but overall I'm happy with our play for most of the game.

[Gaspar]

So Yuri took the bait and took Credit Mobilier today, as expected. That's our first city loss. That led to this:

CR1 Cat vs Green Musket = LOSS, 2 hits on musket, collateral to others
C1 Shock HA vs Musket at 6.3 @ 66.3% = WIN (HA to 2.2/6)
Green Mace vs Green HA at 5.5 @ 94.1% = WIN (Mace to 4.2/8)
Green Mace vs Green Spear at 3.6 @ 99.9% = WIN (flawless)
Green Mace vs Green Spear at 3.5 @ 99.9% = WIN (flawless)

That worked



Two stray units from his attack:

C1 HA vs Green HA @ 68% = WIN (HA down to 0.3/6 heh)
Green HA vs Green Musketeer at 4.4 @ 88% = LOSS (Musket to 1.9)
C1 HA vs Green Musketeer at 1.9 @99.9% = WIN

So grand totals from both halves of the turn:

We lost: 3 skirms, 1 cat, 1 HA
He lost: 4 musketeers, 2 HA, 2 Spears, 1WB (killed with a galley near the islands)

Ahem.

Anyway, decent chance this is the last turn of the game. In that case, I'll do a big report next turn.

[NobleHelium]

Yeah, yuris wasn't building Taj at all. No fail gold.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

And the people have decided all our base are belong to 7. Resistance is Futile.

GG guys.

[Gaspar]

And the people have decided all our base are belong to 7. Resistance is Futile.

GG guys.

Just want to say I really appreciate you sticking with us the whole way, Boldly. I know you came in hoping to pick up some tricks and then I let the game get to me a bit and the reporting was really sluggish for the last 50t. But it was nice knowing you were here and would add a little flourish here and there.

Likewise thanks to Ceil, who came in probably hoping this thread would be to my usual standards and hung around to the end.

I'll get a big report up at some point today.

[Gaspar]

I'm just going to leave this here...

[Gaspar]

t141 - Its all over now, baby blue

Alright, so let me give a quick tour through the empire before giving final thoughts on the game.




As you can see, our treaty with Gavagai expired next turn. If Gavagai had decided not to give us a renewal this time, we'd have likely been in a difficult position with our army mostly on the French border. While I think we'd have been okay in east, where we basically left our HA/Cat stack in place, the west was a different animal. We did have Engineering at this point, so the travel back would have been more manageable, but ultimately, I can see Gavagai causing us trouble if he had wanted to.

Here's the core, one last time. I'll save the details for when I go through the cities.




Here's the islands. You can see the island our HA is on is quite big. If we had unmolested time, there's at least 4 cities there, plus the addition of silk.




The western front.




We were in pretty good position here. I think we'd have easily held the line until Cavs came on the field, I think. Engineering really was the game changer - we'd not have been able to clear out his units around Credit last turn without it. We were never advancing without some luck, but I think we could hold our gains.




The cap was largely a unit producer for in the game, with our empires lone stable. It did manage to mostly slowbuild the Oracle and produced both of our GP. While its easily the worst cap I've seen yet, it still pulled its weight, despite sharing its tiles with 3 other cities.




The Buddhist holy city never did get a shrine but it sure pushed its cultural influence. That pig tile was the scene of our biggest mistake in the game but despite no natural production whatsoever, it produced quite a few workers, settlers and whipped units.




Iran Contra was a lousy, abused city for a long time but once we got some happy it produced a LOT of units. Its now sharing its tiles with two eventually vastly superior sites, but still churning out for the endless Malinese hordes.




healthcare.gov was going to be Heroic Epic city. You can see we were going to tech Aesthetics and Literature the next two turns to make that happen. It has a settled GG, which you can see bottom right.




Seward's Folly was the first of the former Barbarian cities. With the Bananas finally unlocked this was going to be a hell of a city.




Teapot Dome was pretty insane to begin with, but even more so with the Silver pop. We hadn't managed to get any meaningful infra in there unfortunately, due to the constant state of war.




Bay of Pigs would have been the future National Epic city, if we could have ever gotten it built. Also a former barb colony.




Watergate, gorging on Colossus coast.




Chappaquiddick was getting whipped this turn, as the sign indicates.




XYZ Affair, a filler city that had a ton of riverside cottages to work. Was getting whipped this turn, off the null tiles.




Corrupt Bargain, basically Gavagai's capital.




Credit Mobilier, the former Nancy, the only of the 5 cities we captured this game that we kept. We never were going to do anything other than whip skirms in here.




Salary Grab, the eventual Moai Statues location.




Hollywood Ten, glorified staging tile. The work boat for the fish was en route. We went Monastery first to pop borders fastest - just in time, as it turned out.




McCarthyism, the former barb city that Mike razed and then replanted as Caen, NW-W of the city tile. More than anything, probably the action that chased him from the game. If you want to project power vs. a neighbor, you have to actually build units. Technicality, I know.

Ok, that's the cities. I'm going to post the end of game comments in the next post, along with demos.

[Gaspar]

The state of the world in 620 AD.

I think its clear Seven would have begun to really exert his dominance soon. I also think Goreripper was well-placed to jump to second before all was said and done. He would have been the second player with a whole landmass to himself. Contrasting that with Gavagai, who pulled the same trick on Bantams as Goreripper did to Hashoosh but still had to deal with us and Yuri shows why you can't design a map like this. I guarantee all the other players will agree with me, despite the fact that Serdoa argues it everytime he comes in here. Anyway, I think we'd have held out a very long time unless Gavagai and Yuri decided to dogpile us. So I'll say the real final standings might have been:

Seven
Goreripper
Gavagai
Yuri
Us

Its possible we could have jumped ahead of Yuri if Gavagai gave us peace long enough, but we would never have passed the top three. Here's end of game demos:



Honestly, I think we did pretty well considering the combination of our big mistake and outside factors we couldn't control. We got a very late start to expanding but by the end, were the largest Civ who didn't conquer anyone. We landed 3 wonders essentially for the price of one. And we had a still pretty solid military. If we played this game 100x, I don't think we would have won from our position. The combination of the bad capital, the close neighbor with the ubercapital and being sandwiched between 2 of the 5 strong players in the game is too much to overcome. That we covered workers with an axe because we thought Gavagai didn't have Horses - well, nobody to blame but ourselves for that one. It was a good play by him, but I still contend bad meta, but I don't want to have that argument over again. On the balance, he played a better game than us and fair play to him for that. I come out of the game with a lot of respect for his abilities - he certainly played the best of the newer players here.

Anyway, on the whole - I had a good time - it was a lot like PBEM29 for me in that respect. And I think I'll do better in my next game for the lessons I learned here - not much more you can ask for than that, is there?