Did the attack on the Rangers & Noldo capitals take the FP by suprise? You guys had a lot of troops up at Mt. Gram at the time. [I’m still suprised that it all worked.]
You did a nice job of moving in quickly when we were out of position. That is for certain.
I was really bummed that Sibroc missed the double kill at Gundabad. He tried twice to assassinate and came up short.
Big swing early on was when Aragorn was cursed. I had Trevorr in place to assassinate Murazor and Aragorn died before he could hand off his stealth cloak. I still probably would have failed, but it was fun trying!
I also enjoyed stealing Celedhring’s staff at Osgiliath.
“Surprise”…? We ‘failed’ in that theatre from the get-go. Never got what was required to clear the area. No surprises, unfortunately…
Well played Dark Servants, you gave us a very good lesson from the start.
Glorfindel failing to threaten Goblin Gate 3 times in a row (despite an artefact boosted command rank over 80) was disappointing and embarrassing ;), Gildor getting the drop on Lairathain, getting his toys and clipping Gothmog afterwards was good and I was looking forward to having a shot at Celedhring and Akhorahil this turn. But generally the hobnail boot was on the FP neck from the start and never relented.
Paul - Noldo
Goblin Gate, forgot about that one… It was painful reading Paul’s reports every 2 weeks for a bit there…
Dem “goblins” don take to kyldy to elves.
Well focused on KS621 thanks! 
It seems that in most games Goblin Gate takes several attempts to threaten. I’ve certainly been on wrong end of that more than once.
Mt. Gundabad was a capital-city on turn 1, which is daunting for early-game agents. When Sibroc showed late in the game it had 100 loyalty. (I can’t remember if Sibroc tried any agent activity there earlier in the game?) But the WK characters were already occupied getting eaten by vampires, or stabbed by Lossoth, etc…
Our original plan was to simply ‘hold’ on to what we had around Osgiliath and focus our resources on the Sinda Capital (always a gamble), Mt. Gram (new strategy), and the Rhun Sea (always worth the effort). The NG/SG waves of attacks through Osgiliath came very-very close to breaking us open. We would have had to stop our momentum elsewhere to defend Mordor. Each turn we were terrified that a Rohan army would arrive in Osgiliath and tip the scales.
In the NW, our original intent was to simply stop the * 1st * FP attack on Mt. Gram, thus buying a few more turns of life for Mt. Gundabad before Aragorn rolls in. We never intended to defend it much after that 1st FP wave. But as it turned out, we did much better than expected in the opening turns - - so we shifted focus to keep flowing resources into Mt. Gram.
The suprise challenge in the FK capital ruined a market sell order…caused the FK bankruptsy. taxes 107%. (bastards!) And that was during the FK breakout into Gondor, too.
And as mentioned before, the big hit on the RE came REALLY close.
On the RE we just did not have an army available to throw at the walls. Too bad for us.
Sibtoc tried to assassinate for 2 turns at the end. But your doormen did not like his fake ID. He was only an A65 at the end, but a +2250 sword will make one brave.
How did you guys manage to have a sickness squad on turn 4? That was just another moment where the FP just could not compete.
Dendra (DogL) started out with Curses.
Maben (DragL) started with Sickness
Anglach (WK) started with Sickness
Murazor (WK) learned Weakness turn 1 and Sickness on turn 2.
Kinda stinks having both Dendra and Murazor both tied-up since the beginning of the game…but it paid off. (as it often does)
Did Dendra Dwar also start with Reveal? He Revealed the Sinda on t2.
Yep. Spell-wise, Dendra hit the turn-0 jackpot. As a team - - the DS were really lacking in arty locate spells; and never really improved much on that. Thus we failed to track several agents that ended up tagging us. But we started with 2 Sickness, 1 Curse and 1 Reveal PC, which is not too shabby. We decided to play to that strength and make use of it from the get-go. [To be fair, we had some luck, too. Many of those spell ranks were low and not guaranteed. For example, it took 2 or 3 attempts to finally reveal Maethelburg.]
I never got round to congratulating the DS on an excellent victory in this game. I played the Northmen and spent most of the game recovering from my capital loss early on after the RE ambush. We had actually planned to attack RE the next turn, seems that we were either a turn too late or a few points away from achieving quite a few things in this game from what I’ve just read.
We predicted the Sinda attack but could do little to stop it, we predicted the RE attack but were pretty powerless to stop that as well, I remember saying on the group as well “if they have had some lucky rolls on starting spells then Aragorn is dead” lol! You got the early momentum from a very aggressive opening and put us on the back foot from the start. The 3-2 neutral advantage we had only made up for the loss of the Northmen as a military power and then we lost the Woodmen, from that point we were really fighting a lost cause.
So what is the final outcome of the RoW encounter in Game 228? You had to beat the Balrog to get it or was there another encounter underneath that?
Anyway, it was my first venture into 2950 since the original Game 2 many years ago and was great fun. I hope to pit my wits either with or against all of the players in Game 228 in the future.
Alan Gowler
Northmen 228