Well this is the long awaited post-game-discussion-thread of game 136, started by one of the losers, who is still eager to hear how it came to this bitter end ;o)
I was Arthedain and Harad, i.e. only Arthedain after turn 20… This game was quite a frustrating experience. Harad never had much chances, I am quite proud to have made it so far without an inch of support from southern gondor. I should have invested all the money in fortifications instead of buying expensive resources to hire hc, then I maybe would have held out some more. I hired armies whereever I could but Corsairs nevertheless outrecruited me, and then there was QA, but he never really did much harm. The characters were crap anyway so I decided to let go and not save the nation, Arthedain could have hardly afforded that. Arthedain started off quickly but the mistake I made was going for Rhudaur because all others were going for him, too, even Dunland. We wiped him very quickly but WK had some time to build up. The combination with BS makes a very strong duo. When I hit him with my full force he already had dragons, a curses group and agents. I managed to slip past his defences with 3500 hc and burned his capital but that was the only major thing I did. He played very good and had tons of luck while I had none. Not one single lucky turn…Character wise I could do **** against him, my best agent had 70 at game end, I lost all others before they reached effective ranks. I relocated my capital as soon as I could afford but it did not help much. I had some good emis but as there were armies everywhere in Angmar, they could not do much. Finally I decided to send them to Mordor but it was too late. Still I led the FP VP list for some time and that says a lot about us - I wonder what my allies did. Never got much support except for some gold. Was there a FP curses squad or did FP agents do any harm ? Who claimed the major artefacts? I think we totally lost in the character war and that led to the defeat. I dropped after turn 33 when Clint told me that the game was practically over, but if I had known that there would be one more turn I would have sent in orders, of course. Not that it would have changed much in the final standings. Congratulations to your victory!
Bernd
PS contact me if you want my last pdf