PBEM29g - The Post Game Thread

[spacetyrantxenu]

All whining about my behavior in this game goes here.

GG Sian, regardless of anything I may have said in my thread, you played better than I did and beat me fairly under the rules and conditions of the game.

[Sian]

If i should point out the 1 thing that helped me win more than anything else, I'd say Ziggurats ... they saved me some 5-6g per turn per city, and being quite cheap and early i was able to get them built in my cities fast, often even as the first build in a city ... for comparison GLH only gave me 4c per turn per city, while at the same time giving me a headache diplomaticly, since it caused me to get trade embargoed leaving me only able to have internal TR's ... if held against what foreign trade routes without GLH would have given, the net profit of GLH is probably even lower, as in some 2-3c per turn per city

That, and from what i can see from my graphs, and the fact that noone else seemed to focus on getting Courthouses, first getting the first one down at the late ~560AD

[spacetyrantxenu]

If I remember correctly I went for courthouses as soon as it was feasible. Dazed and I helped each other limp to Currency, I was pretty close and he loaned me some cash to get there, then I loaned him cash to get to it, then I went straight for Code of Law to build court houses. I don't think I had OR at that point (maybe I did?), but I was pretty heavy with the whip at times before I had cottages all over the place. I don't think I was so much late getting court houses up as you were just so early with the zigs. ORG + zigs on a toroidal map was a nice boost for you, and you went with spamming them out early as you should have done. Judging from the graphs Dazed went heavy with court houses as soon as I did (right after we both got Currency):



Only the kitties never got around to building many court houses, and I wondered about that. Surely it must have hurt their economy quite a bit paying all that extra maintenance the other three teams weren't paying.

[dazedroyalty]

I htink there is no doubt that early and cheap courthouses made a HUGE difference in this game. BEing the only IND player also helped but really didn't matter because the Courthouses let Sian get to wonders faster so he won them with ease.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

If i should point out the 1 thing that helped me win more than anything else, I'd say Ziggurats ... they saved me some 5-6g per turn per city, and being quite cheap and early i was able to get them built in my cities fast, often even as the first build in a city ... for comparison GLH only gave me 4c per turn per city, while at the same time giving me a headache diplomaticly, since it caused me to get trade embargoed leaving me only able to have internal TR's ... if held against what foreign trade routes without GLH would have given, the net profit of GLH is probably even lower, as in some 2-3c per turn per city

That, and from what i can see from my graphs, and the fact that noone else seemed to focus on getting Courthouses, first getting the first one down at the late ~560AD

I pretty much agree with this. Roosevelt turned out to be one of the best leaders possible for this map. Lots of water for GLH possibilities (managing the diplo is another issue), Zigs + ORG to manage the maintenance earlier and more effectively than any other option (certainly better than possible by teams in this game), and IND to give your economy a shot in the arm as needed. EXP for Mao was limited by how quickly we could get cities to pay for themselves. We were (IIRC) 1T late on GLH, that would have made a difference for us.

The only way this game would have ended differently would have been to erase Sian's early lead with a dogpile. GG Sian, see you around for the next one. Guess the same goes for you too, Xenu. :neenernee

[Catwalk]

Naughty naughty xenu, no wonder we felt we had a hard time navigating diplomatically after the worker steal I'm flattered you thought that highly of our strength, but I think it cost us all the game that you played on two horses instead of honestly negotiating plans against Sian. That said, Sian definitely deserved the victory for strong play and utilizing his leader excellently. I felt we did okay, but we never quite managed to take full advantage of succesfully landing the Phi + Pyramids + MoM combo.

Our aggressive silver plant was one of our bigger mistakes, but it didn't end up costing us much because of Sian and xenu's generousity in negotiations. We did some really bad dotmapping early on, missing out on a juicy second city and consequently planting a horrible 4th city that never matured into anything useful.

I had fun with this, but being on a team ultimately took way more time than planned. slowcheetah was an excellent team mate, and the kitty team definitely had good energies I will likely join a game sometime after summer, for now I've resigned myself to messing about with werewolf games.

[slowcheetah]

Actually our 4th city (Jaw Hurting) was a reasonable earner in the end. It had some good production for early game military and was used for that purpose right up until the midgame.

Besides I think Nospirits settled the same spot in the vets. It was our second city that was truly terribly placed in the end I think.

[spacetyrantxenu]

@Catwalk, which incident are you referring to? Is it when I grabbed land after the incomplete land negotiation or something else? (Link please...this game took so long to play out I may have to reread my own thread to remember all the naughtry things I did!).

[Catwalk]

Naughty naughty dazed too! I think your threat assessment was off, at least the conclusion of the game thinks so

cheetah, it wasn't so much the location as it was its proximity to our other cities. It didn't add many tiles that weren't already being claimed by other cities. But yeah, the 2nd city was the big mistake. I don't think we made a bad decision to race for early exploration, landing the Magellan bonus was a big boon. Did we have a warrior available for exploration around that time? We did have a warrior in our queue somewhere, we definitely should have moved it up. Important lesson for next game! I think that mistake was mainly mine, I'm too much of a Scrooge McDuck when it comes to spending resources on risk minimization.

xenu, I referred to the worker steal. Turns out neither you or dazed were committed to taking down Sian, so our diplomatic assessment was catastrophic. I was not planning on getting us into a 1v1 war with Sian at the time, I felt confident that either Sian would back down or the two of you would help take down the runaway. I shall not be so trusting in future games

[spacetyrantxenu]

I felt like I was committed and had been trying to build power as fast as I could without completely whipping myself into the ground. Don't forget that my power remained low and I didn't have enough units on hand to strike him because I had been gifting most of what I was building to your team for the previous several turns. Before that I had been light on military trying to catch up infrastructure builds (IIRC). One problem I had was that I never teched up the top of the tree where I could get into Nationalism and draft away a lot of spare population I had. I whipped a bit off those nasty coast tiles, but if I had been able to draft (even if only muskets) it would have gone a long way toward being able to do something credible against Sian. As it was, I had ZERO collateral to hit with, as I had tried to specialize my attack force with knights (wherever I had built stables) or muskets for the paltry PRO bonus. In the end I needed to be able to field a credible army of my own and failed on that account. That was the reason I couldn't move against Sian on your TMC border with him. I just didn't have the troops.