[pb74 spoilers] Miguelito and Ginger bring about the end of the world

[Miguelito]

Mig, the thing (perhaps, the only important thing) where we disagree is the evaluation of our pre-war diplo situation. You say I had "no credible military threat from a single player". My perspective was that Commodore alone was close to an existential threat, given his access to Kremlin-powered slavery and what seemed like a total commitment to the purpose of bringing me down. Even Piccadilly with his stack of 70+ uber-promoted Rifles wasn't exactly trivial, especially in combination with Commodore.
You, on the other hand, were amazingly safe from my perspective. I knew about myself that I would only attack you in case of imminent launch and Pindicator given his awful geography (stretched between two continents with no strategic depth on either) could hardly dream of attacking you. The way I saw my situation was that my superior resources did not matter because they all would be tied up by Commodore anyway, while you can do whatever the hell you please with almost a full continent. This diplomatic advantage, in my mind, was way more important than all the economic advantages you listed.
I have a question I want to ask you - what was the mechanism of making the decision to dogpile me and who came up with the date of T229 specifically? I wasn't able to piece it out from spoiler threads but this is what I am curious about. Because I feel this start date was not particularly suitable for any of you (you and Pindi would have preferred to start later, Commodore - probably earlier).

So that's only my ill informed perspective - as I've admitted I played sloppy, and for example only brought a scout into your area during our war - but what I saw happening was two wars of yours against Commodore where you seemed to keep the upper hand fairly easily, judging from power graph and city trades. Combined with your accelerating (? felt like it at least) tech and MfG/GNP lead I didn't see why Commodore would came back at you and if he did, why the result would be different.

Commodore and pindicator started asking me to turn against you around t200 (? I think I reported it). I didn't answer at first, because while you seemed like the runaway I also felt entirely helpless. But yes we considered you the runaway (maybe underestimating Picc, although I still think you'd justhave molten away even a 100 rifles stack), so I started to try and imagine terms under which I could think of fighting you, and ended up sending out mutual War with Gav + 220 gold to both, which was when I expected to have finished Combustion for like two turns. So, actually earlier and more unprepared than we went in the end, because I wasn't going to declare on you during your treaty with Comm.

Waiting longer and industrializing of course would have felt nice, but Commodore's frustration was evident, so I wanted to get the dogpile running before he'd flip the table or something. And as I said, I didn't feel like we were gaining ground on you economically. 

Of course I was hoping for the attrition to happen in your waters, on multiple fronts, not to get my own islands attrited . Speaking of, were you going to go for the northern one? I think one of the last turns you positioned in order to, but we could interdict a landing unless Kamikaze?

I believe there was a pretty high chance that I would have given up when you'd hit Radio. My limited intelligence told me Commodore was fighting as unsuccessfully as myself, and while pindi did help, and his destroyers were important in defending my center, I didn't see him sending anything that would enable us to switch to offensive. So little point in getting myself nuked. Didn't / don't know if you'd have taken the treaty though, with my punishment imminent. I was also going to follow you up on nukes, but it was going to be some 5+ turns later, and without subs. Rocketry about to finish but Fission yet to go.

[Miguelito]

Also, having lived through the pb59 endgame (firing and receiving) and now having felt doom impending, I still believe tacticals on subs are overpowered and should have range 1 when fired from ships. But I couldn't get through to Charriu.

[Miguelito]

And of course it depended on you not being super angry with me and throwing your weight towards Commodore rather than me, which again might be unrealistic.
But at the same time I felt like that would have been a prettystale end to the game.

Two comments on that:
1) Our geography was such that irrespective of with whom I am most angry (and I was pissed at everyone but for different reasons) you would always have been my main target. The thing about me and Commodore was that we had a lot of strategic depth against each other. I could not reach his main production centers easily but so couldn't he. It set the stage for a long, gruelling, extremely costly war I expected to fight with Commodore one on one but also made the theater relatively unimportant. On the other hand, we only had a short island bridge directly connecting our cores. From you I felt most threat and also with you I felt most hope to end the war quickly. So it was inevitable that my strategy would revolve around hitting you the hardest, even at the expense of everyone else. It was actually a great frustration for me that you defended so resiliently because my main and best forces were always deployed against you.
2) The kind of game I really want to play is a competitive space race. The kind of game where there is a strategic balance of forces so that main powers don't attack each other and we compete in who can optimize launch date the best. I hoped for this in PB66 and I hoped for this here but it did not came to be. I understand it is very naive to expect other players to want to play the same kind of game as I do but still, it added to my overall disappointment.
When even was the last time we had a game like this? I recall one very old Pitboss where I got my ass kicked by TBS.

Your point 1) is probably your best argument for why we couldn't come out of this war winning, and hence maybe should not have had it. The plan of 1) Cripple Gav 2) Turn on pindi in just the right moment (together with Comm ideally) 3) Profit has a lot of idealized assumptions baked in. But it still seemed more promising than just watch you spaceship go up.

PB59 had a spaceship get shot down (by yours truly ), but that's not what you're talking about. PB 18 I believe had a simultaneous Finharry spaceship / TBS culture win, but it wasn't peaceful either. PB 66 probably had the worst possible geography for a peaceful modern era, or am I assessing wrong there?

Would a rennaissance / industrial start Always Peace game work out?

[Gavagai]

Yeah, I wanted to go after your northern city but pulled back when I saw you were moving your main army to intercept, together with Pindi's forces. I did not feel ready to engage it yet, either on land or at sea.
You will be interested to know, I think, that I planned to strike at Gao again just on the very next turn when the game ended. I initially abandoned it because I thought it was unholdable in the long term with Kumbi Saleh intact. I knew you can mass-produce triple-promoted units and CR3 tanks attacking from the land would just murder everything in the city. So I figured while I hold Gao you would always keep a strong garrison in Kumbi Saleh and I don't have resources to defend Gao and attack KS simultaneously.
So, my idea was that with Gao back you would hold a skeleton garrison in KS which could be taken out via the use of moral units (had three generals saved). So, that was my plan: take Gao amphibiously, and spend two GGs on burning KS. I felt it was important to get into the striking range of your core cities in preparation for nukes as I felt I would have only a few turns window during which I would enjoy a monopoly.

[Gavagai]

I thought about Always Peace game and decided I would not be interested. Even if I don't want to fight a protracted war, I can see how the very possibility of such war adds a lot of strategic depth to the game. I don't want to sacrifice that. I might be interested in playing a late-era start though.

[Gavagai]

So, about the Commodore situation. I now see that me and other players saw our rivalry in a very different light.
During our first war (the second one was a fake-war for the sake of ten turns forced NAP), I took several cities from him but then had to give every single one back in a peace deal as Commodore whipped out a monster navy and I was going to be completely steamrolled. This whole war was my most critical mistake in the game and I considered myself lucky to get out of it so easily. After that I offered Commodore all kinds of fish-for-fish deals and long-term NAPs (all of which I fully intended to hold) but have been completely ignored. Commodore was always ahead of me in ship count and ahead by far (the ratio was around 1.5. to 1 I believe). It only changed during the war when I was able to stack-wipe his fleets several times with minimal losses for myself. So, I felt as an underdog against Commodore - this was a part of the reason why the entire dogpile idea felt so brutal and unfair. On paper, of course, I was still ahead in power (though not by that much at the start of the war) but my power advantage was due to my land army which I could not effectively deploy without naval superiority and half of which was tied up by Piccadilly anyway.
Until a few turns before the dogpile started, it did not really occur to me how differently others perceived this situation. I saw the aftermath of our first war as a strategic defeat that dashed any pretense for hegemony I could have. Others, apparently, saw me as a winner of that war somehow - maybe me giving back the cities got lost in civstats.

[Qgqqqqq]

I don't see how a peaceful spaceship race can ever be in every player/contender's interest - inevitably there are some that will lose peacefully, and must turn to violence. Always Peace, as Krill always says, is more aggressive in settling/culture, and very liable for runaway situations. The only way to achieve it would be some sort of set lands / divided by astro, but that seems very uninteresting to play imo.