Game 35 Gunboat Ends Well for the Free

General
#1

Unfortunately for me, I"m not a Free… :frowning:

Picked up a group that was made available and very quickly determined why - WK and Rhu were both going to die. Well…at least the game will cost 1/3 as much~! So I ran the Cloud Lord from Turn 11 through the present end game - Turn 21 has run and the DS have voted to quit (I didn’t…).

Salvaged Murazor, Angulion, a couple artifacts and brought all the Cloudie agents back home. Put an emis squad together and eliminated the Harad with them…!! And now slaughtered a bunch of NG, SG and Dun characters who had crept to the foot of the mountains next to my capital.

It certainly didn’t look good for the DS as a whole. Alas, I was just learning DivNatForces and was going to go nation by nation and Rule the WORLD~!

C’est la vie.

Cheers,

Cloudie Brad

#2

Wow - didn’t even know you were in this one Brad! Thanks for picking up the drop.

Congrats to all on a very fun game. This was my first foray into Gunboat, and my first 1650 game since last millennium and it was a blast. I played the Woodmen/Dwarves/Sinda, very poorly I must admit, but alls well that ends well. Hats off to the Dragon Lord / Dog Lord / Dark Lts player across the aisle for a white knuckle ride. And to everyone for the fierce competition - great game!

I’d be happy to trade PDF’s or chat about the game with anyone who is curious. I’d love to hear who was playing which positions and how their games unfolded.

The early game was very rough on me character-wise. I’d forgotten how deadly the character encounters are in the Misties and Mirkwood. Around turn 5 I sent my best Sinda agent to Gundabad to blow the shiny new Castle - but was eaten by a dragon, dropping my artifacts in the dirt. So much for sneaking in and out eh. 5 turns later, after picking the arties back up, my 2nd best Sinda agent flat out died trying to kidnap Duran at Sarn Goriwing. Died and handed him both the Sinda agent artifacts in the process. I was able to steal them back, and eventually even kidnapped Duran, but geeze I spent 16 turns just losing and regaining my own artifacts while killing off all my best agents. Not too slick.

Militarily I did much better - Woodmen and Dwarves were really tenacious in bottling up the WK City/Castle at Gundabad, never once letting him out until Arthedain/Cardolan showed up with double huge armies to capture it. Sinda and Dwarves mostly pushed back and bottled up the DogLord at Morannon until the Duns arrived to put the hit on it pretty much forcing him out. Dragon Lord did slip around me to burn the Sinda Towns in Mirkwood with Duran and a dragon, but other than some Woodmen villages that’s all the popcens I lost.

Eventually my agent game started to crank up. Killed Tormog in challenge, nailed Borhan and Ghuustruck. Whacked Duran and Celedhring. Was tracking Carrog. Never seemed like the Dragon Lord really got his agent game rolling. I had 23 agents in the field by game end.

I’d like to especially call out our Noldo/Cardolan/Arthedain player for kicking so much ass in the west and rolling all the way into Mordor via Gundabad. Nice work eh. Also our SG/Duns/Harad player was super solid - thanks for the gold shipments when I needed them. Made all the difference to the Woodmen. Not sure about our NG/Northmen/Eothraim - seems like he plowed ahead forcefully, but sure could have used a diplo or two to know what was going on.

Other than that, wish I’d made time to share the Dwarven conjure mounts artifact (the other one was divine allegiance forces or some such…) so apologies to my allies, and certainly wish I’d done a better job protecting and training my early agents. But after so many years away from 1650 I’m cutting myself a bit of slack. :slight_smile:

Cheers all, great game!

Adam

#3

Hi Clint (player) here

Played the Noldo/Card/Arthedain combo and lots of fun… Had some huge armies at the end and managed to get some trashing in Mordor as well. Took ages to get Tinclulin so curse squad was late but otherwise went pretty much to plan.

Clint

#4

Map

file:///C:/Users/Clint/Dropbox/Clint/PBM/Game%20035%20Old/game35t22.jpeg

#5

I had a suspicion you were running it! Nicely played. Very comforting to have both the WK and Rhudaur eliminated.

I did have a tough call on whether or not to march the Dwarves in force up to Gundabad. If I’d been able to sabotage the castle I had a chance of taking it out as is, but given my agent failure it was only a matter of time before he recruited a dragon and plowed through Buhr Fram. I wasn’t sure if you would come over the top or not, but by the time I arrived you were there in force. Belt and suspenders never hurt I suppose. :slight_smile: He poured a lot of resources into Gundabad, so blocking him there cost him dearly.

Anyway, it turned out all right after all once Druan picked up his dragon at Sarn Goriwing and I needed the extra troops in the 'hood.

LMK if you’d like to swap PDF’s. I’m always looking to learn something new and it’d be fun to see your blow-by-blow. Plus you can have a chuckle at all my rookie 1650 “smoove-moves”.

Cheers!

Adam

#6

Darrel S and I played the SG/Harad/Dun trio. We played a slow scorched earth fall back with Harad while from time to time sending some SG into Corsair turf to keep them tied up in Harad as opposed to harassing others elsewhere.

About 5 turns ago, we started phoning it in, as it was just a matter of time for the remaining DS to collapse. As a consequence, we had a spelling error on the MT hand-off that would have kept Harad in the game. Though, Brad flipping the northern Harad MT’s compounded our error, knocking Harad out.

We eventually landed some heavy duty troops from North Harad and SG at Osgiliath, and pushed the west pass. We were adjacent to CL capital with back-up commanders, guards and emissaries, when the white flag was raised.

One of Corsair’s last moves would have been devastating if my fleet of 26 war ships was not still at the SG capital.

Thanks to our teammates who sent diplos. Clint, whatever happened to that force you sent via sea to the Corsair homeland? Did they manage to land or get intercepted at sea.

All in all, a fun game.

Mike Bel…

#7

I was coming for SG next~!

#8

Just traded PDF’s with Jeremy who was playing Corsairs/LR/QA. So cool to see the other parts of the map after all the mystery! :slight_smile:

#9

Since Jeremy sent me his PDF’s I can actually answer this.

Cirdan commanding 36 warships an 18 transports made landfall at 2236 on turn 9 where he met Sangahyando in command of 16 warships. Winning the naval battle he tried to sail out, but was caught by Lord Faltur of the Corsairs in the bay at 2237 on turn 10 - the same turn Dunsul landed next door with his wrecking crew at 2337. By this point though Cirdan only had 5 warships & 18 transports remaining from the first battle while Faltur was packing 16 warships. Cirdan went down with the ships as a shipwright should. Faltur sailed out with 2 warships remaining.

Not sure what was on those 18 Noldo transports. You’d have to ask Clint as they never made it ashore.

Cheers,

Adam