[Micah]

Both of the top 2 teams have no wish to continue this game. The map is too large and the game has gone on too long for any sort of reasonable resolution.

At this point in the game gem income and provinces have been pretty much completely decoupled because of the prevalence of gem generating items, so raiding and even taking over land and forts wholesale does almost no economic damage to the losing side, while saddling the attacker with the horrendous penalties associated with going second in a late game situation. The amount of micromanagement is off the scale, and my nation will shortly be running into hard limits such as the size of the lab constraining forging.

I'm currently up to making 14 clams a turn, and I'm sitting on 170 of the things already. I have been steadily empowering a new clammer every turn for a while now (I took a short break just now to get a third wish caster.) In another 15 turns or so I would be adding 30 clams a turn to my stocks and using the rest of my lab slots to outfit a seraph and a tart every turn, and turning the rest of my pearls into abominations, while burning at least 4 wishes for gems every turn (I'll have the clams to do that in another 7 turns at this rate, without additional clammers). I don't even have a clue what I'd do with the rest of my gem stocks (100 F/E and 70N after clam costs just from wishes). I really have no interest in trying to manage the sheer amount of things that I'd have to summon every turn just to keep my gem stocks from exploding. I actually had to tell QM not to give me any blood stone forgers since I was worried about my lab limits, and clams are better.

That being said, I don't really have any illusions about being able to take on the whole world at once, but given the current diplomatic relations we have I don't think that would have come to pass. Midgard's team is still a lot nastier looking on the charts, and given that no one has mentioned that they were PLANNING on attacking us in the next few turns I think we would have been able to play the diplomacy game well enough to prevent a massive ganging. My claim to a probable win was just based on what likely would have happened if the game did play out to the bitter end, since I think we would have had about a 75% chance of taking a win here with Midgard's team out of the running. Obviously now that I've come out and made our case we'd be subject to a massive ganging, but as I mentioned, this game is pretty much dead in the water already. I've played enough games at this point to have a pretty good sense of when they're pretty well decided, and I think this one is close enough to that point to ask for a concession given the issues with a lot of staling.

Psi - We went through this concession dance in the last team game we were both in. If I recall correctly you didn't manage a single victory against me from the time I asked to call the game until the end. You certainly have more to work with this time around, so you'd likely do a lot better, but as far as track records go I think I have the edge here on making accurate predictions about game state.

This post brought to you by the absurdities of gem generating items and stacking forge bonuses.