Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Looks really strange on the army graphs, Pangaea's line flatlines while others still grow or shrink. But at least I got all my recruits and summons, to the last yumbral. Anyway there have been strange events all the time, my scout reports haven't been reliably delivered ever since R'lyeh cast the Eye.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Thanks for the breakdown on numbers. Very informative.
And the ideas are good also.

Personally I would have liked for the game to run totally vanilla and default settings for the first game so that we could get some real answers on all of that.

I suppose I could. But Im probably going to end up waiting until enough of these have run to make it worth doing one at the other end of that scale. Full chaos mode.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I'm having a good time. I'm glad i joined, but i'm not sure that i will play the next one- i'm anti-diplomacy and it's not optional in this one. The interaction of the ages is definatly one of the highlights for me.

I expected faster attrition, i'm thinking that having lots of neighbors made people cautious about quick strikes.

This is not a surprise, i felt water was the place to be and was absolutely shocked when i saw the draft results- i think me (MA Oceania) and Dreamlands were the only water nations that did not get a bonus! What i now understand though is that the amphibious nations are extra cool. Being able to hide from land powers in the water and from water powers on the land is a major strategic benefit.

I'm thinkin' it will be a three way between R'lyeh and their vassals ("The Warsaw Pact"), the Big Alliance ("NATO") and Ermor ("Red China"), but that's pretty speculative- my little Seagulls of Death have been busy, but it's a big map and my info is, of course, incomplete.

It bugs me too, but i still think it's nessicary to prevent utter chaos.

I think "points at turn x" is a fine way of playing in a general sence, but 60 is too short and for a game this big i'd perfectly happy to just play to turn X and call it a wrap.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Actually the early age has much better bless rushers so I thought they would do better. Its really more about diplomacy though than capabilities.

The map is definitely water friendly - but we'll see how much that translates into late game.

It's turning into WWI with large webs of alliances/pacts.

Yep I like your suggested model better - but the current setting is better than the normal setting.

I personally think that too many MP games over-saturate with gem sites, so I'm fine with the recommended average.

I think that 60 turns is way to low - but I could see 120 turns as possibility. Perhaps I'll see if we can get everyone to agree on a set end time for this one.

Eh - simple provinces work for me. Its all about conquest - everything else is just a tool to get you there.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

My biggest surprise was how average (with a few exceptions) the typical bless rush nations have done. Lanka is doing very, very well but otherwise most of the heims are either eliminated or about average in the graphs.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

It's been a lot of fun and I've been involved with a fair chunk of diplomacy as well. I concur with Tyrant about being in the water too. My lack of MP experience making me desire to hide beneath the waves combined with MA R'Lyeh being my favorite nation, made my first choice pretty easy.

Personally I like low-average site frequency and don't mind the difficult research, although in my SP games I tend to leave it at normal.

The gigantic map means that a large chunk of it is not visible to me, so all these massive power bloc struggles have not touched my borders yet. I am witnessing a lot of conflict to my north, but the long fight between the more southerly land powers near me is over with EA Abysia being defeated.

I'll be looking forward to joining more of these monster games in the future, especially with nation selection like this.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Well, there has been a quite strong tendency to gang up on rushers. We're watching our neighbours on intensity that would put old women in small villages to shame. Can't say anything about proper bless nations since we don't have any up here in NE continent (except EA Oceania, but that isn't discussed in polite circles), but at least Midgård's rush proved to be quite fatal when he was ganged up quite badly.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I had a few thoughts about what happened, my main one being that being jammed into a corner on a map this size is a ridiculously huge advantage. Man was able to attack me without fear of an opportunistic strike from behind, or the sides, because he was stuck in the corner bordering only 3 nations, with no nation at his back. Whereas Midgard was touching no less than 8 nations.

I would recommend that in the future the map be wrap around if at all possible. I'm actually really disappointed the automatic map generator doesn't have a nice way of making wrap around maps.

Also, I'm still very new at this game, and I had a terrible pretender/scales choice, even if the strategy I went with was sound. I really didn't spend as much time as I wanted creating my pretender for this game.

Jazzepi

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I would love to run one on a tower map (tall and thin, only room for an enemy on each side of you). But it would need to be wrapped top-to-bottom, and the game cant handle that without blowing up

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I am pleasingly suprised by my pretender's performance. Only 99 more kills to a round thousand http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Having an SC was really really useful in early game. Does not matter that much anymore of course, now that really powerful magic is starting to appear.