Well, I'm OK with proclaiming this over. I am preoccupied with IRL stuff lately (though it should be over in few days) and frankly I already missed even the smallest of chance I had anyway.
Considering this was a new experience for most of us, in retrospective I think we all learned something from this game. Diplomacy is key
Ulm literally conquered around himself like mad rabid dog and got away with it with no rough edges
While Dominions isn't a game where you are instantly screwed if your opponent is a little bigger than you, this time, it went out of control and we are hands down powerless to do anything even if we combined into super collaborative effort. Reminds me of a certain well known WW2 dictator who did just this and the other powers, scared sh*tless, did nothing against it
Not to mention I was kinda unlucky from the very start. My starting area is exclusively mountainous, practically every province is a border mountain and few swamps here and there. Thing is, it's very incompatible with my pretender design. Ariasa is a Production 3 scaled pretender with very little income scales. I usually had a cash overflow as Tien Chi, when playing this nation you often see Order scales because of their PD generating dominion but I went for something different this time. Didn't pay off
Every province of mine produces sooo many resources, but no hard cash to back it up
The situation got better as I conquered Atlantis, water provinces are good gold, but, I had a very slow start that crippled me in the expansion phase.
I still think a "rematch" is a good idea. I wouldn't call it exactly a rematch since it points to having some kind of teams, but I would certainly welcome another game with you guys, since I enjoyed it. We did face a lot of unfortunate drawbacks, but those are rough edges we learn from. Our next game shall be smoother, since we'll be having two admins from the very start, and we also know to avoid rolling back turns (I suspect that strange behavior when you "win" a lost battle for example, are possibly results from this) and so on. But I certainly enjoyed the role playing layer of our game and shall expand on it more, possibly :P
Upgrading to newer CBM is a no-brainer I think, the real questions we need to resolve are:
- The player roster. We might want to send PM's to our deceased brothers and inform them of this. I just checked Heinrich's profile and he still seems to be dead, but we might even want to expand our player base and have an even more epic game :P
- The era. I don't exactly care that much, but it does affect nation choices and such. Do we want to roll MA again? Personally, I dislike LA, not enough magic for me Naturally, I love EA the most. But as I said before, I don't care that much about this to be bothered by LA too much. Still, I vote for EA for even more magical power!
- Map. Plains of Rusty Nails was good, but I would welcome a change anyway Game settings depend on the map choice and number of players, I think. If we go for a bigger map, it may be a good idea to have slower research or something. By skimming through the map browser at llama's, I throw in Map for Old Kings, Riverlands, Cradle of Dominion or Westeros (strange that one)
Oh, before I forget, here Ulm, have
a fanfare!