Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]

[blazin961]

Originally Posted by TheDemon

Post-mortem:

It was a good game. Congrats to Calahan and Dr P. Also much much thanks to the admins!

TheDemon summed up our perspective on the game rather well.

I thought we did decent even with our 8 point team. I think it was a huge mistake looking back not going blood.

The map was generally good though the movement restrictions were a blessing and a curse. Great for the beginning of the game but such a huge pain near the end. It basically encouraged being able to summon up armies rather than actually move armies.

My biggest disappointment was the lack of any large decent battle for myself before the end of the game.

Otherwise if you guys ever do this type of game in the future, you might want to consider anon diplomacy through dom messages only. It would have certainly made the middle/ end games more interesting in that weaker teams could have teamed up on the leaders. I feel that for the most part people were too frightened to do anything of the sort in this game.

I'm taking a dom break for a while but I've enjoyed my first and only sharpnel forums game. Hopefully ill returned sometime soon and play another with you guys either here or in goon games.

[Calahan]

Thanks to everyone who played in this game. No thanks to those who attempted to screw it by bailing. I would be very interested to know exactly who played which nation (I was Jotunheim, Dr.P was Abysia for confirmation of our roles). Major thanks as well to our admins IronHawk and Blackguard, without who the game wouldn't have happened. Thanks as well to Zeldor for putting the game together, and a final thanks to Dr.P for putting up with me for 6 months

I will probably write up some sort of AAR when I get chance, but free time over the festive period will be a bit unknown (so it might not appear until the New Year)

Originally Posted by Zeldor

Well, congrats to Cal & DrP.

There is at least one "but" though - Ironhawk should have never allowed you to take 11 pointers and you should have never accepted it. No matter how good you are and how well you played, it can be said that you won because you had better team than other competitors.

Well the big flaw in that argument is that is suggests the teams were accurately scored to start with, which I personally don't think they were. Several nations should likely have been shifted a point or two up or down. Plus there could easily have been standard points added for certain factors. Any blood nation should likely have got +1. Same applies to any Forge Lord nation, as they are a must have in a team game (and likely worth ~15-20 gems per turn once mid game kicks in).

For what it's worth I reckon the Bogarus + Utgard team was the best pairing by some way, and they were actually our first choice (I'd be interested to know how we lost out on the tie-break actually). They were easily a 13-14 point team IMO, since Bogarus being a 3 was an absolute joke, and 7 would have been closer to the mark. Since they had the killer combo of blood + best research + Forge Lord = kick arse nation that'll allow all the Artefacts by turn 25 at good discounts, plus have the weakest "early rush victim" part of their game removed. And I still don't think there is a 1 point difference between Utgard + Jotunheim on a 1-10 scale. On a 1-20 scale maybe, but not 1-10.


Plus another big problem for me in focusing on our 11 point team total is that it gives an excuse for the real reason we won, which was generally poor play by most of our neighbours. I'll likely go into this when I do an AAR, but our potentially tough early war became easy when Yomi stupidly just let me walk into their cap for nothing, while LA Abysia decided on bizarre research goals that didn't help in the slightest in stopping my forces. (whereas other goals would have caused problems)

Add to this that during the potentially vulnerable early turns of our first war, Pythium and TC both had chances to attack and make things complicated, but both decided to keep to themselves and wait to die (like a lot of players in the game). But it should have been obvious to both that whoever won the Yomi/Jotun war was soon going to be targeting them. So as I say, focusing on a minor issue like an 11 point team is just diverting attention from the real reasons we won / problems that existed in the game.


Anyway, thanks again to all who played and did the work for the game. Best wishes to you for a fun and happy Christmas and New Year

[Zeldor]

Calahan:

That's what I meant - you should have not picked them, to avoid talk like that. And now you even admit they were worth 13+ points, not 11... I'm not trying to take anything from your victory [as I totally agree about poor play by many nations], I'm just pointing that you should have picked different nations, at least one

[Samhain]

Just to set the record straight, I took over Bandar Log for militarist around turn 11. The train wreck that followed was all me. Thanks all for the good game, especially our admins IronHawk and Blackguard.

[TheDemon]

Big thank you to Zeldor for setting the game up, and huge thank you to Ironhawk and Blackguard who kept this game going through all its lulls and difficulties, subbing for missing players is above and beyond the call of duty.

Originally Posted by blazin961

I'm taking a dom break for a while but I've enjoyed my first and only sharpnel forums game. Hopefully ill returned sometime soon and play another with you guys either here or in goon games.

Blazin fails to mention that he came into this game as a newbie having only played for about a month, he played nothing like a newbie, and he leaves the game as a bitter vet who needs a dom3 break

Oh and our 8-pointer was our 1st choice yeah we might have shot ourselves in the foot there. But I think our result proves our team was competitively strong. We probably should have put our "powerhouse" choice first: LA Marignon + EA Sauro. THAT'S a 13-point team right there. Our picks were:

1. EA Arco + EA C'tis
2. LA Bogarus + EA Helheim
3. LA Marignon + EA Sauro

Originally Posted by Calahan

Plus another big problem for me in focusing on our 11 point team total is that it gives an excuse for the real reason we won, which was generally poor play by most of our neighbours.

I think if anyone actually had a problem with the 11 point teams, they would have raised a stink when the game started. Talking in hypotheticals about it now is stupid. You won the game fair and square, and no one disagreed with the rule that allowed 11 point teams.

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by Zeldor

Calahan:

That's what I meant - you should have not picked them, to avoid talk like that. And now you even admit they were worth 13+ points, not 11... I'm not trying to take anything from your victory [as I totally agree about poor play by many nations], I'm just pointing that you should have picked different nations, at least one

Hhhmmm, I guess you could look at it like that, in that we should have chosen ourselves not to pick a high points pairing. (although not convinced the nations we picked actually gelled together that well, but individually they were good). But there were 2 problems with that.

1 - As I said, I didn't think the team scorings were accurate, which meant there were already teams picked that were well over 10 points IMO. I guess me and Dr.P could have voluntarily handicapped ourselves, but tbh that subject didn't even come up.

2 - This was the main problem. We had Pretenders and game plans sorted for our 3 team picks, but when all got rejected, we were basically back to square one with the game due to start in under 24h (which is the time IH gave us to select a new pairing IIRC).

So there was no way we could come up with two new Pretenders for two new nations, and a whole new game plan in that timeframe. A timeframe horribly reduced for me and Dr.P due to time-zone differences. So we simply picked, I think, the only pairing that allowed us to follow a similar plan to what we were going to do had we got Utgard + Bogarus.


So if you expect a team that gets all of its nation choices rejected to stay competitive without getting 11 points, then you need to change the selection process, and/or allow anyone who ends up in that position a lot more time to select a brand new team, and come up with new plans and builds. Because expecting that to happen in 24 hours just isn't going to happen (although of course the short time frame might just have been IH's decision to get the game going, which I can perfectly understand)

[Executor]

Hehehe, DrP? Shame on you for lying to me...

[Squirrelloid]

TBH, the game was interesting up until EA Ctis/Arco attacked us, since at that point we were seriously considering action against Jotun/Aby once we finished off some of our opposition. But getting jumped by someone who should have been going after jotun/aby instead took away any hope we'd be able to help take down the leader.

Attacking a major power who is not the leader in a RAND game is *always* a bad idea. I learned this the hard way in LandRAND, i wouldve thought other people might have gotten the message from Zeldors ranting in that thread...

Edit: Was that actually Baalz playing LA Ulm? Because Maerlande and I thought the Ulm player was utterly n00bish all game. This can't be right...

[TheDemon]

So I thought I'd take a gander back at the pre-game talk.

DrP is up to his usual mischief here. In retrospective I'm actually not sure how much of this is tongue in cheek and how much is serious:

Originally Posted by DrPraetorious

Lessee, we got a lot of love for monkey summons:
LA Patala / LA Marig (8) - weak in death (summons fix that)
LA Ulm / Bandar Log (10) - weak in fire *and* air
However, neither of these teams is going to survive long enough to use them. Just because you *can* make a team to hand blood slaves over for monkey summons, doesn't mean you *should*.

It worked pretty well for Patala/Marig. Ulm/BL were a bit of a trainwreck though.

Three very lopsided teams:
Lanka / EA Agartha (10) - weak in ASTRAL! Oh, the hillarity.
MA Man / EA Mict (10) - weak in earth.
Saur / Machaka (10) - weak in air
Their assymetry will be their downfall. Except Lanka / EA Agartha which spent all their points for the privelege of having "victim" stenciled on their head in magic marker, which they can't see because they don't have astral.

I think this assessment was fairly close, but in all honesty I didn't see much of Sauro/Machaka.

Just plain mysterious:
EA Arco / EA C'tis (8) - This is not the 8 bid I would've expected. Must've really wanted this combo.... for SIRRUSH! That's the evil plan. Weak in blood.
MA Arco / Kailasa (9) - I agree that Kailasa is a bargain at 4, but why not make a good team? Will probably put Arco in the middle thinking that elephants will help somehow. Weak in blood, air and death.
MA TC / MA Marig (9) - Weak in death and blood. Plans to somehow conquer the world with crossbowmen.
MA Aby / MA Jot (11) - has 11 points to spend and *still* weak in earth and air. That's an achievement.
Probably one of these randomly generated pairings will luck out and win. Or all four teams will be in smoking ruins by turn 20.

Let's ignore the obvious misinformation about Aby/Jotun, and instead laugh that three of the four teams here ended up in the top 3 or 4 (Kailasa was exchanged for LA C'tis).

Finally, we come to the actually good teams:
MA Pythium / Shinuyama (11) Now *that* is what you spend 11 points on. Weak only in blood, powerful military for quick early expansion, plenty of research potential.
EA Yomi / LA Abysia (10) Weak in air and water. Strong in crushing you. With a strong researcher like LA Abysia backing them up, double-bless Dai Oni become fearsome indeed.
LA Utgard / LA Bogarus (9) Weak only in earth. How the hell did Bogarus get priced at 3 in a team game? My prediction - will put Bogarus towards the plains, just to totally blow our minds; also, to kill us all with thunderstrike communions while Utgard heads for demon lords or something without interference.

Oh DrP... All 3 of the "actually good" teams... folded quickly.



Baalz is more serious:

Originally Posted by Baalz

Patala/LA Mari - I'm not so sure blood slaves are being pushed to the monkey summons here. Patala makes an awesome forge ***** and fallen angels are just as cost efficient as any of the monkey summons – particularly with a nice bless. Could be Patala focuses on const while mari focusses on blood initially, then it may make sense for Patala to pick up the conj summons. Monkey blood summons will come out eventually, but I think fallen angels are the faster payout here which is something to consider with a seemingly weak early game.

Off the mark there.

Bandar/LA Ulm - This one does seem more likely to focus on the monkey blood summons, but theres also some interesting rushes that could be leveraged with these game settings with the monkey astral summons and Ulm's forge bonus. I don't think I agree this one is weak early, LA Ulm with high resources and hard research should be pretty intimidating early on if played right.

Baalz surprisingly honest with his own team asessment.

EA Arco/EA C'tis – Arco takes magic-3/sloth-3 and rainbow, tossing in skull mentors to get a really retarded initial research while c’tis takes care of the early heavy lifting. Not sure where that research is headed but there’s probably a plan for something nasty, maybe a global they’ve planned around.

Baalz nails our gameplan fairly precisely.

MA Aby/MA Jotun – Strong early, mid and late games. They probably are hoping to leverage whichever temperature extreme is most damaging to their opponents with Aby clobbering the anti/thug stuff using heavy infantry/evo while Jotun does what it does.

Sees the Aby/Jotun team for what they are.

Yomi/LA Aby – Obvious strengths, but Yomi may have an uphill fight on this one. Lots of good archer nations matched with good anti-thug options. Also, overall team seems likely to have a rough time with banish spam/demon counters.

Utgard/Bogarus – Terrifying late game, but a real danger of not living that long. If they’re given enough breathing room this would probably be the strongest pairing but I imagine they’ll have a hard time keeping out of early fighting and depending on who they come up against that may be pretty difficult.

And he's right about two teams that had trouble staying alive.

[DrPraetorious]

Originally Posted by Executor

Hehehe, DrP? Shame on you for lying to me...

I didn't lie! I just said that I *wasn't Jotunheim*, and that I wouldn't give you any other clues.

I was Abysia, duh.