[SPOILERS] Oxy and suttree save the day, again!

[spacetyrantxenu]

You can't let the game end yet. You know you want to destroy something first.

[WilliamLP]

You mean I don't get to read about a cuirassier attack? Or see that crazy directed graph web of coordinated military moves in action?

Oh well, great game guys. A real tour de force of planning and micro, for sure. I think that if someone were serious about studying diplo game play, there is a lot to learn here about how you established a winning position and knew it, long before the rest of the world knew you were in this position. (It probably helped to have the Care Bears decoy where they expanded like a weed at first but apparently couldn't sustain it.)

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I'm also sad to see this one end before the fireworks. I didn't follow the game closely, but I've watched you guys the last ~40 turns or so and I'm impressed. Great planning. You make a good team.

[B4ndit]

Thanks for the game and congratulations. Without espionage cooperation nobody had any chances to challenge you. I am not sure if even my teaming up with Bisons could make difference in long term. It would be hard to match your expansion while Bisons would be busy defending from DMOC...

[Oxyphenbutazone]

End of Game Stuff:




I though this would be lost to the annals of history, but here it is: suttree whosit'd our galley in the southern sea, forgetting to cancel borders before sending troops in. As you can see, the city would have fallen regardless.




Our primary cuir stack in Arki's territory




Our primary one-mover stack in Arki's territory




Tertiary one-mover stack in Arki territory. Kala would have also fallen this turn.




Our overall military




This was most of Arki's military. This would have been a short war.




Demos. First in GNP at breakeven despite having a 40 units in enemy territory and half our cities whipped down to size 4 for cuirs. In the next 10 turns, we would have regrown all our current cities, and added 15 more. Unless DMOC had 50 cataphracts coming our way, I don't see how anyone else could have won, or even come particularly close.




Best commerce city, but poor food and production




Monster HE city. We actually had to drop some of its mines to avoid excess overflow.




Solid capital, considering it was also our best moai spot(that's usually a pretty bad sign). Had a decent mixture of hammers and commerce. We were starting to build settlers to settle the lush nothern islands. That coupled with chemistry research and our lack of NAP with bisons means that even if bisons didn't fall hopelessly behind us, we would have just sent a fleet to raze his coastal cities and pillage his nets. Again, how could anyone but us have won?




F1. You can see the infrastructure builds and quickly growing cities that would aid in our economic regrowth.




Score graph. You can see Bison's early "alarming" lead in this category, before our take over. It's also pretty obvious where we started heavily whipping cuirs.




GNP. We were leading this for a really long time until our whipping temporarily dropped us to the same level as bison.




MFG. You can pretty easily chart the various GA's here.




CY. Observe our dramatic drop after we hired 50 specialists and then later when we whipped 50 pop points.




The result of this was a pretty dramatic power build-up. Arki wasn't very close to us.

[suttree]

I DIDN'T WHOSIT THE GALLEY - IT WAS A GAMBIT!

I did take pictures of the other cities too, but nothing that the last mapstitch doesn't show.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I've missed the whosit/galley reference, where is that from?

Great game, and thanks for the wrap-up/summary report. I don't think anyone else had a realistic shot either, despite Bison's contention to the contrary. This war would in all likelihood have sealed the deal and without suffering really any significant military setbacks, a successful dogpile would have been difficult at best.

What are your thoughts on the diplomatic aspect of the game? In the end, it appears it wasn't diplomacy that caused the game to fizzle out, but rather power gaming tendencies that gummed up the works. This is my view as a very casually observing outsider, though, so it may not actually have been the case.

[NobleHelium]

In PB2, Whosit forgot to declare war before moving in galleys to unload his praetorians.

[spacetyrantxenu]

In PB2, Whosit forgot to declare war before moving in galleys to unload his praetorians.

He just had the great misfortune of doing it in the by far most widely read thread on this site, and apparently it got turned into a verb.

[classical_hero]

Good game you guys. I see my help was useful in you getting the HE much sooner. After the terrible start I had, I knew I was no chance of winning, so I did my best to just suck up to other teams.