Thanks, kcd!
Well, I've been following the conclusion of several of the other games and it seems in the end we just beat 4 teams (not counting the russians...). Amazingly it seems we're only among few teams that managed to get the St Petersbug site, by many the same spot is referred to as "Bombay".

Some praise begot us for that, although of course we lamentably lost it.
Actually, I think Maple Sporks also took the central site ... but lost it to a Gandhi counterattack later (hence the surprising dip in their score in the midgame). Can't find the link right now.
Look at Maple Sporks' game. Those guys deserve an award for high battle spirtit. They settled bombay alike spot as Leningrad ( =p ) but but lost it to Gandhi declaration (They could have saved it, though... bad handling of war but managed in the end).
A high battle spirit indeed! And give us that award!

(@bestsss if you're reading this, what do you mean by bad handling of the war? The one were we lost St Pete, or the later game conquest of the rest of the world? I agree that either could've gone better...)
Anyway, in retrospect and looking over other games I still think we did pretty decent, but probably we played it way too much as if it were a regular SG instead of a SGOTM where every turn counts. Our research went way deeper than necessary, MW managed to conquer the world with galleons and knights... We played it very save counting on tanks and an oil-based navy. Good for a SG, maybe not for SGOTM! Well, we were newbs to the format.
Also apart from a short emergency spell we didn't use slavery at all. I think that cost us a truckload of turns in the end. We did rushbuy some nukes, but whipping would timing wise probably have been much more effective. Also we didn't really consider going for communism and the Kremlin. Okay, we did prioritize capturing the Kremlin for our rushbuying efforts, but then the dice were cast already. Of the 60 or 70 nukes we built I think we built them all but give or take 10 in the old fashioned way. So probably slavery would have speeded up things a lot, I guess we were just too blinded by our marvelous NE/NP capital with its 20 odd hired specialists and hence didn't want to move out of caste. The extra hammer from all the workshops of course counted as well, but again, slavery would probably have brought much more hammers, also as we were feeding our empire on Sushi (few teams went for that).
Maybe, maybe, maybe had we not lost St Pete (we saw that coming too late) and had we been whipping our empire to the ground we might have been close to the bronze medal... But of course most teams with knowledge in hindsight might have done better.

However, Murky Waters and Xteam seem to have been in a class of their own, both amazing games, along which all the rest seem to pale in comparison.
At least we gain a gold medal for highest culture!

Although by the same token Chokonuts get the gold medal for highest score and Geezers for biggest power and we can't say that any of us were close to the real medals...


Well, you got to look for a consolation prize where there isn't any...