[SPOILERS - PBEM17] Kyan Does Dallas. The Orange Sensation.

[darrelljs]

However, I forted three destroyers into range from the north, which made the sortie possible.

Well aren't I sheepish...I was wondering why you hadn't been bringing naval support since I had so many tiles to blockade; low and behold you did . With the great eye focused entirely on Constantinople, I had no aerial reconnaissance in my south STILL.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

With the great eye focused entirely on Constantinople, I had no aerial reconnaissance in my south STILL.

I'll point out this was a worthwhile trade for us, but I can't help but think I could have accomplished the goal AND defended my tentacle if I had been a bit more patient.

Darrell

[oledavy]

I'll point out this was a worthwhile trade for us, but I can't help but think I could have accomplished the goal AND defended my tentacle if I had been a bit more patient.

Darrell

Probably, but you're right in that it was a worthwhile trade. It's not like you guys couldn't take a few losses.

With the great eye focused entirely on Constantinople, I had no aerial reconnaissance in my south STILL.

[oledavy]

We didn't have any game long mutual support deals, so attacking me would not have been a backstab at all.

Just felt a little backstabbish at the time.

I already had a game long agreement with nospace though, so I would have been forced to decline . Yes, I know a broke a deal with them before but that was a one time mistake I don't mean to repeat .

Ah, didn't really expect you to accept that deal. Still considered it worth a shot, thought you might get a laugh out of the Old Spice remix if nothing else.

Dave,

This thread was amazing, you did a fantastic job with it . I think you played exceptionally well in many aspects, you just had some game strategy hiccups. Given this was your first one of these, that's pretty understandable. Hopefully we'll get a chance to go at it again sometime in the near future!

Darrell

Thanks

[spacemanmf]

Wow, great end-of-game report. I was secretly hoping you would post the turn log but didn't want to ask outright... =)

And it must have been a miscommunication with Darrell. I thought he said he took out that transport as well as the Thebes one. Oops. I didn't have visibility over there other than the screenshot from the start of Darrell's turn.

[pindicator]

Word of advice Pindicator, don't name cities after yourself - they get burned

Ain't it the truth!

Maybe someone should test this theory further and name all their cities after me; then we can see if they all get razed.

[spacemanmf]

And it must have been a miscommunication with Darrell. I thought he said he took out that transport as well as the Thebes one. Oops. I didn't have visibility over there other than the screenshot from the start of Darrell's turn.

Darrell: PI I can't reach

Ah, I was told. Double oops. So I could have killed 4 units there, plus novice pointed out that I could have taken out those 4 battleships for better than evens odds overall. I'd worked out I'd killed 37 units, so it could have been 45. And Darrell took out 19 he said. So 64 in total! Shock and awe! Lovely sea of red, I must say.

Your timeline probably isn't far off. I had 11 marines / mech infs aboard boats that could reach VE Day next turn so I had plenty of reinforcements. Plus airlifts were very useful. We were approaching another wave of drafts and whips (gotta love the Cristo Redentor action!).

So I suspect less than 10 turns, but 10 turns is probably a pretty good guess since you were proving ever more resourceful.

[oledavy]

[SIZE="4"]What I Did Wrong[/SIZE]

During the course of the game, I made a slew of empire management mistakes. I expect most these have been apparent to the lurkers for a long time, so this list is mostly for myself to avoid these errors in the future. If I missed something or someone has something they'd like to comment further on, I would welcome the input

Not Using Hereditary Rule Effectively
For my first couple dozen turns playing the game, I had no more than one MP per city. I didn't start stacking units for HR happiness until around the t100 mark. This was a huge oversight on my part, but at the time I didn't really understand the concept. I avoided it because I didn't think it was a hammer efficient investment. Consequently, all my cities were consistently smaller than those of my opponents.

Misuse of the Bureaucracy Capital
Tied into my ineffective use of HR was my failure to develop a strong bureaucracy capital. Jerusalem was always a couple pop smaller than everyone else's capitals. Due to my early Globe and nationalism, I remained in nationalism and was in bureaucracy for a significantly shorter time than the other players, and did not leverage it. Additionally, Jerusalem was never completely cottaged and never got a monastery. Failures like this contributed to me eventually falling behind in tech.

Not Ever Using Organized Religion
I was never in OR this game; that's a lot of lost hammers and a huge lost snowball from getting the infrastructure up earlier. This was partly from just not having a religion spread around for awhile, and by the time I was ready to switch civics, being in war mode. Then I didn't have a way to make a anarchy-free switch after the golden age.

Ineffective Use of Specialists
I already hit on this a little in my thread, from ~t130 to ~t155, I was not running a single specialist, and this really hurt when I needed to make a switch into peacetime civics in the postwar world. The specialists themselves weren't important as a financial civ, it was the great people that I needed desperately for GA's; why I needed to beg Shoot for Rosalind Franklin.

Ineffective Use of Great People
The great people I did have, I didn't leverage particularly well. I built three academies in addition to the one in my capital. While academies were not the best use of the great people, it might not have been a terrible decision if the cities in question were all totally cottaged. However, they were not. Constantinople was my IW city for crying out loud

Misuse of the 2-Person Golden Age
I set off a third golden age impulsively after my Taj + Music artist golden age, with the idea of getting to communism and physics faster. I should have saved this golden age as there was no pressing need to use it here and it would have made getting out of war civics more quickly possible. I didn't even get to communism at this point anyway.

Workshop Economy
This got a lot of attention in the lurker thread. When I first jumped into the game; I looked at the map, noticed the lack of hills and good production, and thought: WORKSHOPS! This, in and of itself, was not a bad idea. However, my implementation was horrible. I began building workshops before even getting guilds or chemistry and did not give them the priority they needed. The state property switch came WAY late. That being said, it was more of a hybrid economy than a straight out spam, and wasn't the wholesale WORKSHOPS EVERYWHERE! some lurkers seemed to characterize it as. At my peak on the eve of World War II, I was working about 20 workshops on my home continent compared to 60+ cottages. Still, that's enough of a difference when compared to Darrell's completely cottages lands to partially blame for my subsequent decline in GNP. Lastly building workshops when you're financial Probably not the best idea.

Delaying Communism and Steam Power
Not much to say here. Originally I was gearing for an early communism, then kinda got sidetracked. It made my already questionable decision to build workshops even worse. Steam power also should have been a bigger priority considering the power of dikes. (Seriously, dikes are insanely powerful)

Building a Navy
This has already been discussed to death so I'll only put a short rehash here. Never ever ever ever be the navy builder in an alliance. I spent 2,000 hammers in a navy then gave half of it to Shoot in a one-sided deal. Ground forces just have so much more utility.

Ineffective Whipping
I had not concept of the idea of whipping cycles until late this game, and consequently, early on was whipping on impulse, more or less. Combined with my lack of HR units, this meant my cities were consistently smaller than my rivals, and were getting less of the powerful food to hammers conversion for infrastructure.

Delaying Oxford and Universities
Before this game, I never realized just how huge Oxford University could be. The thing that made the biggest impression on me during the mid game was Darrell's GNP spike from Oxford and PP, which was the highest GNP amount for a long time. I didn't prioritize education appropriately, or plan to get Oxford up in a timely manner, which was a dramatic mistake considering the map.

Not Getting Enough Gold Buildings Up
The mobilization for the war with Rego meant I was seriously behind on the infrastructure curve for the rest of the game, and consequently began to fall farther and farther behind on tech. While I got tons of libraries up, I never got a like number of gold buildings built. Until the very end, many of my cities didn't even have markets. Consequently, for much of the game I was working at approximately a 1=3 gold to beaker conversion. Right before the NAP cancellation, I had gotten it down to 1=2, but at this point the game was decided and I was tens of thousands of beakers behind in tech.

Little City Specialization
One consequence of coming into the game and taking over a pre-existing civ was that I didn't have the chance to found each of my cities with a specific purpose in mind and grow them to that end. It might seem odd compared to my OCD planning for cities in PB6, but I never attempted to really specialize each one in this game, I just couldn't be bothered. I never really groomed my cities to work cohesively together.

Most of my wartime mistakes are well-reported and I addressed at the time, so I won't go back over them here. I'll just repeat my three maxims for modern war:

1. It's the air force, stupid.
2. Don't sign an NAP with someone ahead of you in the turn order.
3. It's the air force, stupid.

Given all these errors, I think it was a little remarkable I stayed somewhat competitive as long as I did. How did I do so? Well, I did make a few good moves

[SIZE="4"]What I Did Right[/SIZE]

Stealing the Taj Majal
Darrell, for the record, I was intending to tech to astronomy. Then I noticed that I could tech to nationalism quickly and steal the Taj instead. :rolleyes: With a great engineer about to come off the line, it just seems like a good idea, and it was. The combination of it and the music GA gave me twelve basically free turns of golden age, more than enough to keep me competitive for awhile despite my poor micro.

Building the Anti-NoSpace (then Anti-Rego) Coalition
With the threads opened and seeing the antipathy towards Kyan and his pop lead thanks to the HG, I feel like firmly establishing myself in a three-civ alliance was an even better idea in hindsight. I feel like my early diplomacy was on the whole very good, allowing me to pull stunts like yank the Music GA that should have been Rego's while still maintaining my commitments to Darrell and Shoot. My mistake here I think was not keeping Darrell closer and forestalling the signing of the Indian-Egyptian MDP which effectively clinched the game.

Researching Physics
Without airships, I would have made extremely little progress during the opening phases of World War II. The decision to nab the tech and churn out a slew of airships made my offensives possible and prevented the war from deteriorating into a costly failure. Thanks to airships, my extremely small army was actually able to take territory at the outset. I think the biggest lesson I drew from this game is just how powerful and useful airships are, especially when paired with such a dominant UU as the East Indiamen.

Early Globe
While I was late to Oxford, I was the first to complete the Globe Theater. This decision effectively allowed me to prosecute my war with Rego and later helped me to hold out during World War III. While my economy did suffer from not running bureaucracy; prior to and during the Second World War I drafted ~35 units for free from the city, representing almost half of the ground forces I deployed during the war. Later on, I netted 15 more units out of the city during the final conflict. When all was said and done, I drafted about 4,500 hammers worth of units out of thin air courtesy of the Globe Theater.

Starting World War II
Some people may debate me on this - and the war was definitely not the smashing success I envisioned - but I do firmly believe the territory seized during the Second World War was 100% what allowed me to remain somewhat competitive and pose any sort of threat to the Covenant in the late game. When I came into the game and saw the roster (Darrelljs and Rego who I knew from the Apolyton Demogame and PB2), I realized just how out of my league I was, and resolved to start a war in order to level the playing field. This didn't exactly work as planned

I've already compared the Second World War to MNG's destruction in PBEM19, with me playing the part of Seven and Shoot of Commodore. I thought it might propel me into a game winning lead with enough land. However, there were several key differences between the two wars.

1. The MNG dogpile came a tech age earlier, meaning Seven had a lot more time to bring the land they conquered into play for the late game than I did Old Peru.
2. Rego put up much stiffer resistance than MNG did, meaning I had to invest many more hammers to achieve the same result.
3. We attacked in an age when the defender had the advantage with drafted rifles and could make war very costly.

By fighting on as stoically as he did, Rego put me seriously behind the GNP curve with upkeep costs and continued military builds to make up the losses I was suffering. Immedietly after the conclusion of World War II, my GNP was in the tank and I was falling behind on tech. However, despite all this, right before I began the final mobilization, my GNP was almost at Darrell's level, who had much more infrastructure than me. The only problem was he was already a half-dozen techs ahead. However, when I had my epiphany, changed horses mid-stream (another bad move), and switched over to mobilization and workshop mode, I truly got scary. If you go back and look at the graphs, I was vastly outstripping Darrell and NoSpace in hammers. And keep in mind, this was without CS, Police State, and with just a handful or factories and power plants. My monster MFG was powered completely by dikes and 2/3/0 workshop tiles. Darrell and NoSpace, meanwhile, had already built factories and power plants in almost all their cities. Had war not interrupted my industrial revolution, I would have maintained my advantage in this field well into the brewing conflict. In less than ten turns I built two dozen drydocks and nearly 50 warships, most of this not assisted by my GA. Had I possessed the tech to back it up, the war would have been significantly bloodier for NoSpace and Darrell. I already have postulated a bit on what might have happened had I waited another dozen turns to cancel NAPs. I feel pretty I would have still lost the war, but inflicted significantly more damage on the NoSpace and Darrell. What might have been will be relegated to the dustbin of 'what if' history now. Judging by their progress towards space, I may not have even been able to stop their victory attempts just a dozen turns later. Or perhaps they would have not put the Space Race on hold and just put the pedal to the metal to launch the ships. Or maybe I would have pulled off a double capital razing to recall the ships We'll never know.

This post is running on 2,000 words, so I should probably wrap this up

[SIZE="4"]Conclusion[/SIZE]

I came into this game realizing I was at a disadvantage, and tried to overcome it through war. This plan more or less failed, and combined with my slew of micro mistakes, put me severely behind on tech. As a result, in the late game where I had enough MFG to do some damage, I didn't have the technology to leverage it, and made a lot of tactical errors to boot. In a NTT FFA, the old maxim that going to war only puts you behind. While I tried my best to hamper Darrell and NoSpace's teching through war during while I was so engaged, I ultimately failed and they jumped out ahead. Their decision to enter into an MDP made the game unwinnable by conventional means.

[spacemanmf]

Just a couple of quick comments 'cos it's getting late here.

Your MFG was indeed scary. Your power graph too - it went through the roof. Obviously the unit gifting helped, but that was not a major part of it. I genuinely thought that it would be very bloody on our side. I fully expected you to counter heavily in World War III. I was very nervous of where your transports/EIs were and what was on them. It was interesting to read your opening strategy in your thread. Given your superior empire, it would have been better, I think, to sacrifice some of your cities in order to take some of ours out. But of course it's easy to say that now.

On the space race, I think novice had worked out the date that we would have launched. I've not looked back but it would have been interesting to see how close it would have been.

Based on Shoot's comments, he may well have joined in had it been 10 turns later. That would have been nasty. The only thing on our side was the tech edge.

[spacemanmf]

And the MDP was irrelevant in some ways. If it wasn't in place and you'd have declared on one of us, the other would have won by space. You had to declare on both of us, unless you damaged/heavily threatened one and got them to join you in taking out the other (which I think you did mention somewhere). I'm not sure how viable that was, though.

We were both fearful of you and Shoot carrying on with what you had done before. I'm glad you passed us over as the initial target too. =)