I know I asked this 5 turns ago, but really… how much longer?
We’ve taken Rhun. We own Mirkwood. We’ve taken all of North and South Gondor. We’re rolling over Lorien. We’re knocking on the door to the Gap of Rohan. We’re well established in Eriador.
We have CLEAR agent superiority. We have emi superiority. We have economic superiority. We have dragons. We have control of the board. We’ve taken your curse squad down a notch. We’re revealing your hidden pops one after another.
You’ve been great opponents, and it’s been an enjoyable game.
But seriously… How much longer?
The FP no longer have the ability to defend themselves, let alone mount any kind of counter offensive ANYWHERE…
Okay, okay… your emissaries have picked up a pop here and there… but you can’t hold anything you take.
You will have to judge… I suspect you believe this simply becuase you haven’t yet felt the full weight of our emi’s as we’ve been lax in their use to this point… Using them to improve camps to major towns, only to find those Major Towns way behind the front lines as our armies sweep across the board faster than we expected.
A quick character search in Palantir reveals we have 32 emissaries ranked 60 and higher… 42 ranked 50 and higher…
In comparison we “only” have 24 Agents above 60… 35 above 50. Of course, stealth doesn’t show in that.
Us too… We’ve long had an internal debate over who was going to take Bree… It started as a joke about GT10 when FP capitals were dropping to us right and left. Got slightly more serious about GT15 as we were poised to swarm over Mirkwood and set our sights on Imladris.
Now that we have well over 3K heavy cav in and around Eriador… The race is truely on! Wanting to know how much longer the game will last is as much about figuring out if we should go straight for Bree to settle the long running debate over who is going to take it, or if we have time to pick off all the other pops on the way in.
Well, more and more of the FP are falling; we’re through the Gap, and own Imladris, and even if a few Northmen bandit gangs are burning camps (because they can’t hit anything larger) in our rear, it’s not going to make a difference.
We’ve got hard evidence that at least four of your twelve nations are out. All of ours are still in play, and most of your capitals have either agents or armies on top of them.
Some of us are looking forward to a good old-fashioned bug hunt…
For some reason they seem to enjoy seeing turn results with things like Saruman’s death, and the fall of major towns. Since we’re doing the killing and capturing, it doesn’t bother me much. I’ve the feeling that we’re down to their better players.
somebody took 13k in cash from me at 1817, the duns capitol. since i’m the long rider, i view this with mixed emotions. sad, that i lost the gold. happy i own the duns capitol.
dear good guys, where are you located, so you can be killed?
Couple more FP nations out… 3 more capitals falling this turn… Too few targets to hit with too many assets…
Are we really going to have to take each and every one of your major towns and cities? You’re going to make us play the next 3 turns to finish you off once and for all???
pay within the mechanics of the game… not so much.
Turn 27 and we own… EVERY SINGLE AREA OF THE BOARD. There is NO WHERE in Middle Earth that we don’t have commanding force.
Next time you joining a grudge game, make sure that you tell the opposition that you’ll play to the very last major town instead of just dropping once you’ve lost the ability to defend yourselves.
10 turns to roll the East. 10 more turns to roll Mirkwood and the Gondors. 8 more turns to take the Gap, Dunland and everything between the misties and the western seas.
There is a certain etiquette to this game, and an essential part of it is not dragging it out pointlessly. One Ring attempts are very tough and require character superiority. Trying when the Huns are rampaging across the map is a fools errand. If that was your goal you should have done it, oh, 15 turns ago when you might have had the character power to make it stick. Do you honestly think that there won’t be a mile-high stack of dark servant characters in Barad-dur while our armies finish scouring the map of your pop centers?
This turn every capital of your surviving nations will fall, barring supersecret offmap refuges. You’ve been losing nations at a rate of several a turn, and we have armies in the Havens. I understand why you might be tempted to go for the Ring, but the odds of it working are mighty small - especially with all of those capitals to supply. You can’t count on a single nation surviving the turn even if they do get the ring.
At this point I will never run a game against any member of your team again knowingly. I would never drag out a game to force other people to shell out cash month after month in the face of a certain outcome. I’m disappointed, more than anything else, because I do enjoy a challenge and this game wasn’t one. I suspect that your folks are acting this way out of spite because of some message board comments, which is too bad. If I was in your shoes I would have taken the high rather than the low road - done the right thing and moved on, been the “better team” and left with honor instead of being driven off the map kicking and screaming. Too bad that’s not the choice you made.
Memo to self: agree on tourney rules (2:1 edge on nations surviving ends the game) before any grudge match.
I am thankful that you made the decision never to play against us anymore, that saves me the effort to do the same. I am sorry to say that your arrogance prevents me from giving you the credit your skill would deserve. There have been times when we have been close to drop as a team, and not doing it might to a certain extent have been inspired by your behaviour on the board. In more than 10 years of playing I have never encountered such a bunch of -excuse my language- smart… like you. Let me admit that I deem myself to be a quite well respected member of this community. Now I begin to understand why some of you are not.
I’d like to add that a good reason to continue a lost game is learning about the mechanics. I had little knowledge about ring victory in a 2950 game which turned out to be quite different from 1650 - so take this as an explanation and enjoy your bitter victory.
Even within our team, we had asked some people to tone down the rhetoric that was being used on the board. Calling you cockroaches on GT15 was certainly premature, and was likely somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I will join Marc in insisting all future grudge games be started with the understanding that they end as soon as it is 2:1 nation ratio… In reality, however, that would have only shortened this game by a few turns. You did do a failry good job of keeping nations alive as we swept Rhun, Iron Hills and Mirkwood. It wasn’t until the last 7 turns where we blew through the gap, took all of Dunland, and overran Eriador that you lost the ability to keep nations alive.
Still, by turn 20 it was clear your situation was hopeless. You’d lost the ability to defend yourselves. There is a gentleman’s agreement in this game to drop once you’ve lost the ability to defend yourself. You’re desire to play on cost our team a collective $600+. This is a significant sum of money for a game which is no longer the least bit challenging, and this is the reason the gentleman’s agreement exists.
I find no honor in pointlessly and needlessly draining the opposition of $600 in a game you have no chance of winning.
under normal circumstances I would agree to the last point. People who know me will tell you that I never have drawn out a game longer than necessary. In the WOTR 223 game that preceeded this one, our team as DS had a superiority that was, I dare to say, a bit greater than yours in 238. There was the usual bit of taunting and an athmosphere of good humor about this game - nothing of the aggressiveness you guys brought into 238. When we thought the time had come, I wrote a polite mail to the remaining FP, asked them to concede and the game ended with turn 23.
What you did instead can be seen in this thread and the thread before. If you expect a gentlemens agreement to be kept, act like gentlemen. So write off your 600 bucks to your lack of social skills, learn from it and don’t complain.
Methinks you’re painting an entire team with a rather broad brush. My particular post-mortem of this game would go something like this.
At the beginning the free side gambled on a character strategy, focusing on agents, emmys, and artifact chasing. This is a viable tactic in normal 2950, but in this particular scenario - with the huge starting free population base - something closer to 1650 tactics (armies, armies, and more armies) is a much stronger route to go. You had some initial successes in arties, etc. - both from your emphasis on such and our lack of any LA/LAT mages in the early going. We chose a more military route, focusing on delaying the inevitable in the north, rolling Rhun, and drawing your forces into battle around Osgiliath while we focused on gutting the Gondors by land and sea. The military plan worked like a charm. A few tactical military pointers for future games:
Naval combat is different from land combat; attack strength is greater than defence strength. That means the optimal naval strategy is to trade small navies of yours for large navies of your opponent. When the Gondors merged their fleets into one big warship group it was a gift from above for the Corsairs; I could trade a portion of my warships for all of yours and have plenty left over.
Work on tactics. The stand and defend order can be handy; armies sitting on allied pops don’t engage when a foe captures the pop center; nations like Rohan should be building cavalry, not infantry; etc. Don’t be afraid to make tactical retreats and switch to delaying tactics on some fronts; not dropping the Anduin bridges was a huge mistake, and clever army moves could have slowed the conquest of SG to a crawl.
Offense trumps defence. You can’t win this game if you let your opponent choose where the battles are. This is the most important reason why we won; we basically chose where the action would be for almost the whole game.
On the economic front, market manipulation was the key for us. WOTR is like 1650 in that respect; managing the market is critical. There are tools to keep a market down, most obviously by keeping your gold reserves low, not selling if you can avoid it, and dumping things in the market that look attractive for a buyout. We didn’t have the impression that your team made an organized effort to blunt our repeated market games, and if you had done so it would have made a huge difference. Basically, we couldn’t have supported those gigantic armies.
On the character front it appeared to us that you did much better than in the military game, but in the end the free agents and emmys had much less impact than they could have. I’ve found that agents and emmys are only truly effective when they are integrated with one another and armies and used to set the tempo. For example: you sent agents to Corsairland AFTER the Corsairs pillaged SG and the QA/Dark Lts. swarmed over the bridges and gutted NG/SG. That barn door was already open; you’d have been better served using the agents on an active front, or picking a target where you could leverage agent hits with emmy followup. Similarly, the isolated InfOthrs you did had little impact because you didn’t follow up with army hires.
Overall I had the impression that you had some individual members with talent and experience, but the components simply did not click together well.
as an “aggressive poster” in this thread, thanks for the input. when a player signs off with “challenged by few, rivaled by none” and has a difficult game, then you’d better expect some “ribbing.” its your money, play how you want. we clearly have differing views on honor and sportsmanship, which this discuss will not change.
mormegil: good luck in all things outside uk 238.
