donsig
Low level intermediary
Here's a very brief summary of my perspective of the game. It was a long game and I'm not sure I remember all the highs and lows but here goes:

It would be interesting to hear what others, both on the Council and off, remember about the game.
- We opted from the start to try for a space victory.
- We learned very early that we were on a continent by ourselves and that each team had identically shaped landmasses. (We had an early ship named Chamsuri that survived the treacherous seas for a long time.)
- We had no way of know what resources were on each continent but we suspected each team would lack a resource.
- Being on an island and wanting to build a spaceship we began building the Great Lighthouse as a defensive measure. I think we missed out by two turns.
- Since BABE built the Great Lighthouse we braced ourselves for an invasion by them.
- BABE did come but all we had to do was block the coast.
- We determined that we would be isolated at some point as we reached for the stars. We needed large cities and were worried about happiness so we decided to build the Sistine Chapel. We went through a period of intense micro-management. (Well, any MM is intense to me.)
- BABE tried to invade us early so they were not a potential ally. IIRC we thought GONG was going for a cultural victory and for some reason they were never high on our list of potential allies. We were always worried about SABER who had the combination of Chamnix and the scientific trait. That put FREE at the top of our friends list. We hammered out a deal with FREE to split the research and advance an age. Our idea was to remain allied with FREE until the last age when the two of us would race for space.
- My memory is a bit fuzzy at this point. BABE and GONG all but disappear being swallowed up by SABER and FREE respectively. We fell out with FREE and ended up in a research partnership with SABER.
- Our Early Warning System (EWS) was our main defense. It was a system of airbases and jets that we used to recon our entire coast. We keep a vigil for rival transports and abandoned any threatened coastal cities.
- We were concerned about rubber. We didn't have any and we needed it not only for military units but for one of our spaceship parts. (The casing?) I think we were in a phony war with FREE when we seized a one tile island off old GONG that had rubber.
- We had secured a no nuke treaty with SABER. We weren't 100% sure they'd adhere to it if they knew we were about to win. We decided we needed an insurance policy and cut a deal with FREE to give them all the spaceship techs. We thought that we'd have a better chance of winning if we gave SABER a second target.
- At some point I became turn player again and put together a plan for finishing the spaceship. We didn't really have a problem with the research and we finished nine parts, including the one requiring rubber. We still needed the engine and we had three cities piling shields towards that end.
- By this time SABER was pounding us with their stealth bombers and we really had no defense. We plugged along and then the nukes started falling.
- After FREE's spaceship was destroyed we decide to move our capital further inland to safeguard our ship.
- SABER finally landed (a measly half dozen armor!) and as turn player I almost missed them since they blended in so well with the radioactive goo that covered our land. We rushed units to try to defend our capital and we even used our own nukes to take out the SABER units we could see. They nuked and bombed our defenders and took our undefended capital. We were less than forty shields away from completing the last part we needed to launch.

It would be interesting to hear what others, both on the Council and off, remember about the game.