Congrats to my fellow Dark Servants. I was playing the IK/LR combo. This was a fun and interesting gunboat as I tend to find all gunboat different from one game to the next – think this is reason why i like this format better then the regular games now.
I managed to help hold the pass till the last couple of turns, SG and NG decided to bring there armies over just as I sent Din and my agents to harass the Sinda and reveal his pops. If SG or NG would have sent there armies to the IK – I had dragons on two armies and one of those armies had two dragons, got stuck following through mordor to finally catch up with the SG on 3423. Sorry about that FK and Dk Lts – but if FK would have moved forward to 3124 to hold them up for a turn – I would have caught them.
Dog Lord/QA was always one step ahead of me around Sea of Rhun so, started to concentrate on Iron hills and dwarves in Mountains. On last turn had almost 5k in LR Heavy Calvary troops heading towards Mirkwood. Could have used a curse arty as I had 2 mages in high 70’s and 4 in low 80’s
SG – I had Estelmo with arty 4 doubled for like last 10 turns or so – wish you would have run across one of my agents instead of keep running across my emmies.
I have to give BIG KUDO’s to the WK and Rhudaur players for taking out the Cardolan and Arthedain. – Way to go. Anyway – who was playing who?
Again – congrats to the Dark servants and also to the freeps for putting up a good fight and another good game.
Kevin (Thavius) and I were the WK/Dark Lt’s duo. He just got back from a vacation and I was waiting for him to post for us since he’ll provide more details.
Kevin played WK and I had the Dark Lt’s. Our decision from setup was to focus on surviving in the NW. When we saw the Dragon Lord and Corsairs out early it was looking pretty grim, though the WK was still completely intact. We knew we had to even things up by trying to put someone out of the game. Then out of the blue, Arthedain’s armies didn’t move and we discovered he’d bankrupted. We immediately targetted Cardolan and put that nation out in two-three turns of character actions. At that point we figured the NW would become our playground, but the Dunlendings were relentless and must have used the might of both nations primarily to focus on the NW. The Dwarves also sent army after army to the NW and the Noldo was very active with agents to very good effect and later with armies as well.
We had the tools to elminate FP nations (SM, Agents, Emis), but we could never focus on one nation for more than a turn or two at a time after Cardolan. The FP expended an inordinate amount of resources on the NW and I don’t think that it could have resulted in a victory even if they had succeeded in driving us out. They had a better chance if they had ignored us for the most part and tried to knock out some DS nations earlier in the game.
Anyway, I’m sure Kevin will post more when he’s caught up. He played the WK extremely well in this game and was responsible for our duo’s strategy.
Something tells me that the Corasirs player just dropped after the Dragon lord got knocked out – I tried to save the back-up dragon lord capital – Fought and got my starting HC wiped out by the Eothraim but the freeps sent to many armies into the rear of Mordor – the Eothraim, Northman and dwarves all went in. I had the IK help hold the pass for a long time with Din’s help – was right behind CL in kills. I think the Dog Lord and myself would have been fighting over Mirkwood – I had over 5k in HC rolling that way and another 3k in regular troops and was revealing the Sinda pops, even got arty 44 off Ohtar. Had a decent IK/LR agent company going with 6 agents in 70’s or higher and Din and lomelinde over 100 with arties. Just needed a curse arty and would have gotten two curse companies going as had about 7 mages all near 80’s or higher.
Kevin did an Excellent job with the WK, my hat and vote goes to him as best player in this game.
It was a good game. We slugged it out in the NW and won. I had some goodnideas for how to run the WK and they worked well.
I knew that once the Corsair/DL left the game I had to even things up right away. We decided to eliminate Cardolan. We did it with emissaries taking his capital and his backup capital. We used the sickness squad to eliminate the pesky blocking army.
I was amazed at the resources the Dun threw at us. We knew that NG had very little left to throw at Mordor. We must have destroyed somewhere around 10,000 Dun HC over the course of the game. We also eliminated the Duns mages to take away his intel. We shut down the Dun agent game as well.
The Dwarf was also all in on the NW. Army after Dwarf army moved north. The Dwarf ended up doing very little. The Noldo destroyed 1806 but i killed the army and created a camp the same turn. I then rebuilt the pop center back to a city. I had taken a chance early on and improved 1806 and 1907 to a MT and a city. Bother were destroyed but I rebuilt 1806.
I was never in trouble the entire game. I had revenues as high as +28000 At one time. It was difficult to buy enough so the Noldo didn’t get the gold. The Noldo gave me the most trouble with his agents.
We were never able to concentatr on any one particular nation after we put Cardolan out. We did decide to go after the Dwarf and revealed his capital and killed an army commander and doubled several characters. We had paid the Noldo capital a visit and cursed Glorfindel and assassinated a couple of other characters. We doubled 2 other Noldo characters that let us know what was going on with the Noldo. We were just preparing to give a lot of attention to the Noldo when the game ended. We had 11 emissaries that were 70+ rank. They were all going to be a Noldo pop centers this coming turn. We had 19 developing emissaries between the 2 nations. We had taken all but one of the Dwarf towns in te west and would have taken the last - it was rebellious. The Noldo was in for a rough ride.
I had finally been able to move a strong army south against the Dun. 1600 HC st/st in a 100 morale army with a dragon (would have been added this turn). I had planned to capture Dun pop centers around 1917 and set up camp.
One of the keys to playing the WK is a horde of emissaries. I did not lose one pop center the entire game to low loyalty.
In the end we knew with the amount of resources that had been used against that we were winning the game. The FP can not win unless they beat Mordor. The NW is a side show. However, since the FP choose to throw so many resources against the NW, and fail, that they could not win.
I was hoping for about another 5-8 turns though. It would yave been nice to visit some payback to the Noldo.
