New AAR available

[Cainehill]

Frankly, if you have R'lyeh in the game (or Atlantis), I think you have to presume they're building clams. In addition, the guys gem income was IMO low. Two games I have going on that map where I'm holding less than 1/3, possibly less than 1/4 of the provinces, I have gem incomes of 120-130 a turn, not counting blood, and it's well before turn 84 where he reports having 85 gems as income.

R'lyeh could have had more than that, _not_ counting the income from clams, by using Voice of Apsu, Voice of Tiamat, Akashics, Astral Probing, etc.

(Edit: Looking at the maps, it seems unlikely R'lyeh had 85 "real" gem income a turn, and to be fair, I guess it is difficult for Ulm to do all that well. Then again - he had sages and wizards, so he had full access to site searching spells for everything.)

As Arralen said - different settings could've made for a very different game. 23 independent provinces per player was also high by my standards - 10-16 has always seemed better to me.

And finally, everyone let R'lyeh muddle along for much of the game, as it seems that they went to turn 60 before attacking or being attacked. Not real wise to do that.

[Turin]

wether clam hoarding is broken or not, can be discussed to no end.
fact is it rewards the boring turtle up for the win strategy.
It feels kind of stupid that you can have far more provinces, but a lot lower income, because you spent your gems on fighting and not on hoarding.

A game with constant fighting is interesting, a game where turtling and hoarding is rewarded not so much.

[Huzurdaddi]

Claming is broken on large maps. Smaller maps where the fighting is furious then it's not a big deal.

If you are playing on Faerun or on the world map then if anyone spends a few turns by themselves and applies themselves to the creation of gem generators then they have a *really* good chance to win the game.

This game also showed many who played it the awesome power of properly constructed SC's and they did not like it one bit. Understandable, IMO.

I do think that constructing good SC's is one of the ways the good player differentiate themselves from the ... uhm ... less good. However they really do seem to have awesome ROI in some cases. I'm not sure I like that. It's vexing to me.

[ioticus]

Huzurdaddi said:
However they really do seem to have awesome ROI in some cases. I'm not sure I like that. It's vexing to me.

What's ROI mean?

[Huzurdaddi]

ROI == Return On Investment.

[Huzurdaddi]

Oh and the AAR is *awesome*, btw. A real joy to read.

[IKerensky]

Well, frankly the AAR is interesting, even if the premise are somewhat surprising... Especially the comment about how a STRONG level of Indies 6(!) will make people need 3 to 4 turns before starting expansion... Oo

6 is pretty standard for me, I sometimes even go up to 9 just for the sake of it. Only thing that can slow my expansion at level 6 is sometimes a huge band of knight or special troups or underwater hordes of flying...

Only reason to wait for turn 3 to expand is to get a nice Prophet ( like a Div 5 )... else..