Creating a new MP game-Musical chairs

[deccan]

Hmm, if Panther is right then Frosted must be running 2.12...

Anyway, now that it's running again, us hot nations can get around to dispelling that nasty illwinter. Right Panther? Panther?

[The Panther]

Not me, as I won't Last much longer. Tough luck for all you players left behind.

Mictlan seems a decent race, but it sure takes a long time to do the turns with all the blood hunters, SDRs, the unrest clearing, the sacrifices, artifacts, clams, summons, blood slaves for battle mages, etc, etc, etc. And etc too.

I also had the most horrible starting position I have ever been stuck with, so my play in this game is not a true test of Mictlan. I might try it again sometime when I am in fewer games so I can concentrate on it a bit more.

[Frosted Flake]

I have the masterpassword and at the players request looked at his turn result

[The Panther]

Now that the game is just about over, I was wondering what people think about it. Starting next to Ermor and being completely surrounded by my 4 much-too-near-neighbors-on-a huge-map within 20 turns did me in. Also, starting next to Ermor with his 10 dominion destroyed too many of my provinces along that border. Mictlan takes about 20 turns just to begin to turn back the dominion tide against a normal 6 dominion race. Against AE Ermor, it is just that much longer to achieve. I suppose I should have suicided on Ermor about turn 20 or so to even things out for everybody else. Though I did not do that, as everyone knows by now.

But I will say one thing for sure. I got to see what Ermor did by virtue of being his neighbor and my many scouts all over the map. And he did well with his great starting position. I was his only neighbor and we have been at peace the whole game. He even swooped down south early and destroyed Arco easily. That was when I had a good idea who was going to win this game.

At no point in this game could I have put a dent into Ermor. Mictlan is a very weak nation through about the first 50 turns or so. It is only good late game and only if it can collect a lot of bloodhunting provinces, which I could not because of my incredibly lousy starting position.

Though, one thing I was very proud of was that I had all 6 ice devils plus 1 arch devil before the war with Caelum started. I now have 3 IDs and 2 ADs. Or is it 4 IDs?

Also, Ermor could have easily wiped me out at any time over the past 20 turns or so. But I sure had a lot more fun fighting Caelum instead of dying quickly to Ermor! Especially killing the 26 mammoths a few turns ago. That was very nice indeed. Of course, Caelum would have eventually killed me anyway with all his far-too-cheap mages if the game were not ending so soon and Ermor were not invading Caelum now.

My opinion? Ermor played well and deserves the win. Plus, I will be glad to see the game end, as I was in a hopeless position starting on day 1.

[deccan]

I agree that the game is over for practical purposes, since Ermor can win at will. But since Jotunheim could still have surprises in store, I'll hold off my end game wrap up until it becomes official.

The Panther said:
Though, one thing I was very proud of was that I had all 6 ice devils plus 1 arch devil before the war with Caelum started. I now have 3 IDs and 2 ADs. Or is it 4 IDs?

I had the remaining three ADs. I actually wasted two castings of Bind AD. Grrr. I never tried for ID since I never managed to get a Warlock with a 1W random and eventually spent most of my water gems empowering one to make quickness items.

I'm surprised Jotun didn't have any IDs since he obviously had the caster(s) and blood slaves to get them.

[deccan]

Heh, looks to me like several people have already decided that Ermor has won and plan on staling...

[deccan]

Game over. Time to free up the slot, Frosted. Good job, Anatoli. Guess this disqualifies you from joining any more newbie games.

I'll type out my wrap up later.

[anatoli11]

I wanted to thank everyone for the well played game: I was lucky at the beginning and went the right directions for initial expansion.

I had two great battles with Jotun: The first one I won, but it was really close. My air elementals got into his leader area and carried the battle... The second one he just spanked my killer army (although the purgitory spell had thinned my ranks a bit)...

Apology to Deccan - I was casting arouse hunger, call of the winds, etc. to try and get some freebe VPs and ended up attacking you although we had a NAP.

In some ways I'm glad this game is over because although I am usually a quick turn player, my Last few turns were taking almost three hours per due to the number of armies and vast numbers of undead - be forewarned if you are going to play AG on a big map.

Again, many thanks to you excellent players and a great game. If I would have realized that I could get this much enjoyment in MP, I would have started a long time ago...

[deccan]

Well, unlike anatoli, I'm not happy with the way I played this game at all. I started off with probably the richest patch of provinces on the map, which explained why I had more money than anyone else throughout the game. And I didn't have any really close neighbors, except for Vanheim.

But I made some really dumb mistakes.

First, I killed off my starting slayer by instinctively setting him to retreat, and then forgetting that, set him to assassinate an indy prvince. Doh! I learned the hard way that retreating from assassination combats means automatic death.

Second, I tried using my Scorpion King pretender as an SC naked. Luckily, he only got away with an affliction.

But most importantly, I never quite grasped until very late that this was a VP game and did not castle many of my VP provinces and I didn't realize that the VP limit was 15 points, which was really very easily reached.

Early in the game, I met Vanheim (Frosted Flake) and he joked about allying together against Jotunheim (who was allied with Caelum). I also gave gifts to neighbors like Ermor, Atlantis, Vanheim etc. so that I didn't get involved in any early wars. But as the game progressed, Vanheim got tied up in a war against Man which stopped his expansion, while I ended up being boxed in between the two big powers, Jotunheim and Ermor.

Since I was the third big power, I obviously wanted Ermor and Jotunheim to fight each other, so that I could pounce on either one as the opportunity arose. But I sensed that Jotunheim was reluctant to turn his back on me, so I backstabbed Vanheim (I told him that we never had a formal NAP and gave him a one turn notice as a courtesy). I did it to make Jotunheim feel better about turning his back on me, to expand without getting in the way of the war between Jotunheim and Ermor and for the two VP Vanheim capital.

What I didn't expect was for Ermor to steamroller Jotunheim the way it did. It didn't take me long to take Vanheim's capital (I would have taken it faster if I had used my devil army, but I was afraid Frosted would come out of his castle with a Staff of Storms to ground the devils and thunderstrike them so I only used a couple of Archdevils instead), but by then, with the slowness of the 1-move Abysian Infantries, I couldn't really move my forces to attack Ermor. Also, I realized that attacking Ermor really didn't make much sense. Since this is a VP game and the VP limit was set so low, it was much more rewarding to take VPs from the weaker nations, like Vanheim and Man, than to try and take them from Ermor.

Also, I'd like to point out to everyone who's wondering why I didn't do more to stop Ermor, I had two 1-VP provinces near my border with Ermor and those provinces were uncastled. Ermor could easily have taken those two provinces and won the game four or five turns earlier if Anatoli had chosen to ignore our NAP.

Ah well, if the game had been set up with a higher VP limit, I would have had fun mass casting "Flames from the Sky" on Ermorian hordes, but as it is, I never really got to fight any really big battles or do anything really cool (I was considering casting "Second Sun" in response to Jotunheim's "Illwinter" but decided to save the gems for mass casting "Flames from the Sky". Jotunheim was begging me to cast Flames near the end, but I was one turn away from researching it when the game ended.

All in all, I made many, many mistakes in this game, but learned a lot from doing them.