Well, that was a pretty close description of what happened. 
Let me take a crack at it.
This was one of the most brutal FA games I’ve ever seen. Right off the bat the FP and DS went for the throat, with us DS having two big advantages: first we had better position in the south, and second the neutrals leapt up to help us dissect the FP.
Soon we’d killed off 3 FP nations and had consolidated all of Harad and Khand. SK and 3 other neutrals were quite friendly by this point and it looked like the game was in the bag.
By turn 8 it was extremely bleak for the FP, but by this time the neutrals started helping them against us which slowed down their collapse. At first we had no idea what was going on as all this was going on behind our backs.
Little did we know, the neutrals had alligned very early on and were just playing FP off vs DS with the intent of staying neutral and winning the game themselves. Several, ahem, less than fully truthful conversations were shared while neutrals massed troops and planned their assault.
By turn 11 we’d belatedly figured it out, and sure enough, on turn 12 all bloody hell broke loose with 9 united neutrals, including both kingdoms, taking on 8 DS weakened by war and the remnants of 2 FP nations. It looked like our doom on horseback had arrived.
At this point we contacted the FP out of desperation which were down to one player, the most tenacious player I’ve met, Richard Mehl, and invited him to join us to defeat the dastardly neutrals. He happilly signed aboard, picked up the pieces of several nations and fought on with us. One DS player was so incensed that we’d allied ourselves with the FP he quit the team, but it was our only hope of survival and the right thing to do.
Between turns 12 and 20 we mostly got our asses kicked all over the map losing everything north of Mordor besides a tiny island in the Misties. But of course, being nasty, pissed off DS, we took a severe toll on SK, bagging half his characters and eventually overrunning his position out of spite.
But in general the Neutral weight was too much and we fought defensively, losing over a dozen Major Towns, and never taking Ernie Hakey out in Mordor (Good defense Ernie!).
Despite the literally tens of thousands of HC they threw at us however, they just couldn’t crack the nut and not a single DS position was eliminated. Many capitals were lost, but we kept all our positions alive and in the game – one player fighting on for 14 turns without a single commander.
Players quit, but we kept picking up positions until we were left with a team of 4 DS players running 8 DS positions, and 1 FP player running 2 positions.
Meanwhile Richard fought a brilliant guerilla war in Mirkwood, slowly building his economy back up and putting together two great character nations out of the leavings of 8 wrecked FP positions. He just wouldn’t give up either and like in whack-a-mole, no matter how many times they smashed him down, he kept popping back up.
By turn 30 the situation had shifted. We had slowly built up significant superiority in agents and artifacts, while the Neutrals had steadilly pounded us to crap in Khand, threatening to overrun it entirely. A few big turns of character kills however and our enemies started giving up.
You had us on the fence in Khand – if you’d pushed on through you might have won. But as it was, I think we just out lasted the enemy.
From turn 12 on we had always planned for a strategic site victory. In fact, our DS team had that as the aim from the very beginning of the game. When we realized we were fighting a neutral team, we worried that you would just shuffle strategic sites and seize victory as soon as we started to win. But it seems you didn’t think of it, or communication broke down, or pride got in the way. Not sure which. But whatever the case, we all decided that Richard should be the one to get the strategic site victory as a way of saying thanks for joining the DS. We had finally dropped a position on turn 36, making our team 7 DS and 2 FP, so rightfully it should have been a DS victory, but, Richard had played so fiercely, actually leading our combined team most the way, that it seemed like the honorable thing to do to give him the victory. So, no sneakiness involved – we helped him take all the strategic sites and win the game for all of us.
38 turns was a brutal ride in FA 40. We felt backstabbed when all the neutrals jumped us. But that wore off in time, and we held no hard feelings. Nevertheless, as you say, ticking all of us off did decide the game afterall, as none of us would have played so hard, and fought so long if you hadn’t given us a reason to really want to win in the end.
Anyway, that’s how things looked from our side of the fence.
Good game to all. Thanks for the tough fight. And we’ll see you on the battlefields of Middle Earth!
Adam
Playing the Trodzo
FA 40
