Postgame

[WarriorKnight]

Well, I don't know if this thread is a bit premature, but as I've read the player threads already and the tech thread suggests this game is over I'd thought I'd get this up.

I'm impressed by Mardoc's pregame analysis of our team, which is pretty much spot on with how things worked out:

nabaxo/Amelia/WarriorKnight
I'm not hugely impressed with nabaxo's performance in XIX

Took forever and a day to research Calendar, not enough workers

Amelia is erratic. Flashes of brilliance, can get locked into a plan even if it's not a good one, doesn't have the micro to back it up. Still, stick your hand into a bad spot and he'll bite it off.
WarriorKnight, though...his Elohim were pretty strong in PBEM3. Although he underestimated Thoth like everyone else, I don't expect that to repeat.

These three - it depends on how they mesh as a team. If WK ends up doing the micro for Amelia's flash of brilliance, with nabaxo helping tweak, then they'll be formidable. If nabaxo does the micro while Amelia gets stubborn about a silly plan and WK goes off and does something else, not so much. I think they're in different parts of the world, to add insult to injury.

Cardith of Kuriotates
Varn of Malakim
Valledia of Amurites

This is a power trio. They have a nice mixture of econ/other, and Kurios are excellent for a teamer, of course. I would be happy to play this trio ourselves, actually. The one thing they're a bit lacking is hammers, but of course that might be compensated by the land or a cash rush civic.

But - they're powerful in three different directions. There's not a tech on the tree they can safely ignore. I expect this to hurt their team dynamics, and potentially cause them to ride madly off in all directions. If they can decide on one to emphasize, with the others as support, then we might need to worry about them. Particularly if they end up emphasizing the Amurites. If they try to research Stirrups, Priesthood, every religion, and Sorcery all at once, then we can safely build past them and crush them at leisure.

To sum up? Flip a coin. They have all the ingredients to win, the question is whether they have the skill to execute.

I guess not.

IMO our 3 biggest mistakes:

1) Picking Varn instead of Decius. We really could've used a civ with a production boost, considering it was by far our biggest weakness. Watching the MFG of the big three (Clan, Luchuirp, Vamps) were painful. We did not use nearly enough cash rushing to keep up, getting Warfare after Sorcery, so with no real production on our team we weren't really able to do anything compared to what others were doing. In retrospect Varn didn't do anything this game that Decius couldn't have done better except for mage upgrading which Valledia does better then Varn anyway.

2) Not expanding fast enough. Somewhat of a consequence of 1), but there are also a couple of other reasons. Firstly Kurio's had some major barb troubles when trying to escort settlers to megacity locations and were not able to settle their 3rd city until after HBR (should've got BW sooner). Also Malakim should've adopted City States and REX all the land around Kurio's ASAP, not having a lot of cities crippled us late (having Decius do this instead would put us in a competitive position IMO).

3) Giving each civ to a particular player. Perhaps this is a weakness relevant to teams, but we really should've done what Mardoc suggested. (I handle most of the micro/turnplaying, Amelia comes up with wacky macro ideas which nabaxo and I determine are good or not) Instead we had 1 player play per civ, and that definitely has some consequences (Amurites were decent, Kurio's OK, Malakim not that good).

I was initially surprised that this was a fun game to lurk, consider the complete lack of posts in the lurker thread (and lurker posting in general). Considering the lategame showdown that was going on on the other side of the world I can see why, but the micro required of a team game combined with the technical issues this game had, it wasn't the most fun I had playing. I commend Hart for hosting the game and sticking with it as long as he did despite his terrible in-game position, but we should really stick to PBEM's for FfH. The long pauses never helped and once the stats page was lost it really wasn't that great.

Two things I'd suggest for future team games though, firstly players in teams need to be a bit more balanced. This is more of a concern in teams because people with similar skill levels usually team up with each other from playing normal games against each other. I realize this is hard to put into practice, but Reddit didn't really have a chance at all, and our team wasn't that much better then Reddit compared to the lineups from the other 2 teams.

The other thing is a ban for Clan and Kurio in all future team games, these 2 civs are extreme since no-one can really compete with them at what they do best, and they are balanced in the normal game by having somewhat severe disadvantages that don't apply if you have teammates making up for it (v8 luchuirp too maybe, but not in the current version). Obviously we didn't play Kurio's anywhere near their potential, but Clan certainly did.

Fun game overall though, willing to play another team game again at some point if the 2 points above are addressed.

[Amelia]

Just posting to say sorry that i dropped out suddenly, I didn't expect my new job to suck everything out from me. But anyways, I agree mostly with what WK said (given that he did say it out in the thread).

I expected that dynamic as well, which was why i opted for a team game where people could point out the flaw in my plans. With WK covering a bit of my micro, I definitely improved in this game, but too little, and far too late.

Edit: We did in the end realize we would not get all the techs we needed, so we focused on mounted/arcane units instead, throwing disciples away. Which brings back to the main problem, why did we pick Varn in the first place?

The combo was sound though: Fireballs + Maelstrom to soften the cities, extremely fast centaurs to swoop in and end them. Then Clan throws in 20+ units in each city and the combo goes up in smokes...

The other issue that came up was that our team was completely incapable of playing the summon game, thanks to the summon bug. We experimented a bit with fireballs / hosts, and they would disappear at the end of our turn. That was when we realized "damn we need those skeletons NOW", but too late =( By the time Govannon came out it was over.

[DaveV]

...players in teams need to be a bit more balanced.

That's the biggest problem with team games, I think. I agree that people who have played together are most likely to team up, which can lead to a disparity in skill level. However, I think team spirit is the most important thing in keeping the game going, and that's hard to achieve if you just throw top player A, mid-level player B, and newbie C together onto a team.

Thanks to Hart for continuing to play all three civs on his team well beyond the point where it was hopeless. Congrats to Team 1 for epic abuse of the game mechanics (this is sincerely meant as a compliment; it was an amazing performance!). And thanks to Team 4 for not hanging us out to dry with Arcane Lacuna. I was still having fun with this game, but that's no reason to keep playing if no one else was.

[nabaxo]

It was kind of fun while it lasted. I learned a lot, but for now I'll just be content lurking for a long while.

[Mardoc]

I apologize for my role in the game ending, but I just ran out of the time it required. Huge map, in the spellcasting war era, with teams, is a huge number of decisions to make every turn. And we were to the point where any error could result in a loss. I think we were in the driver's seat; if no one made any mistakes, we could eventually have ground out a win with our superior production. But either Team Clown or Team Wizard could have dealt us a mortal blow if we were careless or unlucky, and we were in position to punish any of your mistakes too.

I think the lesson for me is no more team games, not unless I can find a great deal of spare time to devote to them, partners with similar time, and perfect schedule match. If you're doing it right, every single decision takes a lot of analysis time, communication time, and then finally execution time. Toward the end, a turn easily took most of a Saturday to play. Splitting the work required all of us to be present and active, and also all on the same page with plans.

It didn't help much that all of our team plays mostly by gut and mental plans, not written ones. We could each have a logical plan, but either someone spent the time to write down that plan in detail, or we did really strange things - workers wandering back and forth, armies doing the same, lots of incomplete projects. The most common comment when we were still trying to split the workload was 'Huh, do you have any idea what Thoth/Ellimist is thinking? I can't figure out what these workers are here for'. There usually was an intelligent reason, but it took too much time to figure out. For that brief month or so when all three of us were able to log in every night and work together, it was a blast, but that was too hard to maintain. In the end Thoth took over, which worked for a while, but I'm sure it burned him out.

For the game itself - Clan was definitely the workhorse for our civ. The Expansive Warrens cities set up the demographics, and once you have good demos, you can convert that into anything. The main surprise I had was that none of the rest of you went for Sailing. Our island cities' trade routes were super-awesome, and the main thing that converted our foodhammer lead into a GNP lead as well. Each overseas city was worth something like 40 commerce from the instant it was founded, between its own trade routes and its bonus to the rest of our cities.

The other civs - well, Calabim are certainly strong, but we could have done well with anyone once we had the Clan. Elohim were consciously chosen as a civ that could handle early tech and then follow someone else's plan. We were lucky in that the map was so big, though, as everyone else had a faster start. If we didn't have the time to really exploit the Warrens and dig out from our tech hole, it wouldn't have worked.