It was a fun game, here's a little summary from my perspective, now that I've just gotten up
WARNING: this will be long. But it did give me an idea for a new PBEM, so good for us!
Game started with a small Hub map, 4 human players:
Warlord - Maya - west side
Phisportsfan - Inca - north side
Knoedel - Sumer (of course) - south side
Nighthawk - Russia - east side
Early goings, not much happened. Inca founded the first religion (Christianity - choose religions was on, my favorite option) but Russia founded 4 of the next 5 in the early days. My plan was the cultural victory and expanding into the hub asap to keep the focus there while my culture cities in the back just spammed culture.
Well St. Pete was founded as my gateway city and ended up being the biggest non-culture-bombed culture city on the planet, founding Islam, which I ran the whole game and spammed and 1 other religion. Knoedel even said it was a nice city towards the end, which made me proud
Anyway - I'm walking my archer-settler over to the hub to settle a nice border city and what do I see but Sumerian culture sitting there. I didnt get the spot I wanted, but moved 1N and got up on a tundra hill, losing a little production but basically the same city as I was hoping for. Immediately a culture clash with Knoedel as we were 3 squares apart. I spam ancient and classical era culture buildings (with 4 religions, thats a lot!) and the whole game was slowly winning the culture war there, although progress was slow. I did quickly take "Knoedel's Marble" and he never got it back the whole game
Anyway, with that city founded, Knoedel and I were bickering like an old married couple since he controlled the rest of the hub... I rex out most of the rest of my area, although I told Knoedel - there were gems that I never got just outside the reach of my capital, so frustrating. City planning was admitedly poor on my part, too spread out. I blame it on too many beers and paying too much attention to the hub with Knoedel.
We didn't go to war though, military buildup stopped and I managed to get Knoedel to give me gold in exchange for open borders
Another minor victory. Anyway, one thing I learned is that the city governor SUCKS. Always hit the "food" icon along with something else, because I didnt do that and my cities all got capped out at like size 6-7-8 or so. Very efficient small cities, but there was room for plenty of growth and for hundreds of turns the governor didnt grow them. Of course I didnt notice. I hate the governor, thats why I like PBEM.
Well as we are growing and rexing and whatnot, Warlord started running away with it. He founded a city near the hub and culture bombed it to push Knoedel back and threaten to flip his city culturally. The main thing for me was he was running away in tech, he had just gotten civil service and if he had hooked up his iron would have been pumping maces while the rest of us had swords and elephants. We all saw that and decided he had to be taken down, otherwise we would lose. He looked at it as the PBEMers ganging up on him, but from my perspective there was no other choice, he was going to crush us all if we didnt stop him. Thats the problem with a FFA.
Anyway, we came up with a plan that Knoedel and I would go right at his spoke of the hub, while Phisports would pretend to be on Warlords side and be a backup wave if and when we needed it, turning on him in the end. The first wave consisted of Knoedel cats and swords, Russian swords and horse archers. My swords and horse archers ended up being the crackers, Knoedels forces took the city (bad planning on my part.) Well our combined first wave took his culture-bomb hub city, and his counter attack was... well, surprisingly small. He quit shortly after that saying we teamed up on him and the game started falling apart. However things are never as bad as they seem, he shouldn't have quit. He was basically warring with Knoedel alone, because I stopped producing units and was focusing on the AP and wonder spam in my culture cities. The war was going well enough, and I had Knoedel between me and Warlord and Knoedel had a stack left, so I decided to try and focus back on my victory condition and take advantage of my ally. Inca had a stack of elephants roaming the hub and was at war with everyone, but didnt actually attack anything and wasn't needed vs Warlord.
Anyway - with my stack gone and the fact that I stopped producing units left me terribly weak when Warlord quit. I expected him to stick around at least a little bit, and I would send a unit here and there to the front while I blew up culture. I was hoping he would keep Knoedel occupied for a while, but he left and KNoedel didnt care about the AI.
Meanwhile Inca had called me (hes my real life friend
) and had to go to bed since it was about 4 hours later, 1am my time. Ultimately what it came down to was triangle diplomacy never works, someone would team up with the other to take out the third, and most likely it was me bc I was the weakest militarily after my plan fell apart when Warlord left. Since Inca was going to bed and I wasn't he made peace with everyone and decided to quit and leave it to Knoedel and I. Of course I had no military, so I essentially pleaded for peace, telling him that he'd have no one to play with and talk to if he took me out right away
Knoedel ended up making peace but didnt go after the AI (not sure why) and we just built for a little and talked about the game. By that point I had the AP, but like he said, it was obvious what I was doing and he spread Islam all over his cities, which were twice my size because of the stupid governor. I was the AP leader, but couldnt pass anything, we were essentially blocked. At that point I realized the city governor error and started growing cities, but even when maxed out we went from 2/3, 1/3 to 50/50 with votes.
I continued with the culture and wonder spamming, but was light years away from the victory condition. Knoedel was running a nice espionage economy against me and could see everything I was doing. I knew I couldnt keep up with military so at that point it was me playing out the string. Clearly Knoedel would have taken me out whenever he wanted.
I begrudgingly call knoedel the winner, even though the AI Maya was still the tech leader and had guns when he left. We can't have a Noble level AI win
Good job by Knoedel, tons of errors on my part, basically when Warlord gave up on fighting it screwed my plans and that was that.
It did give me a fun idea for a PBEM game though - Hub map, always war, but cultural city flips are allowed. Thinking about starting that after my vacation...