Alrighty. What a wacky game! My read is that things derailed very quickly this game in ways that they
probably won't in the alternate histories. I am not necessarily saying that Gandhi and Victoria weren't at all likely to advance - I honestly don't know about that one - but if they are, it's probably not in this manner. I don't feel like we got a very good look at the normal map dynamics at all here since everybody pretty much ignored the map and just did their own thing!
So I still have no idea how good my reads posted earlier were. One place I do think I made a mistake, though, was in overall overestimating the comparative amount of land that the southern positions could get. They might still be advantaged, but once we got to the game proper here, I realized that this is a noticeably smaller map than the one I was comparing it to. That means that the effects of imbalance of land quantity aren't as pronounced since the southern civs aren't as likely to grow huge. (Either that or the failure to expand by those civs has thoroughly scrambled my brain.)
I'll skip seeding watch this time since Saxo already covered that. My only additional comments are: It's a miracle that Stalin is, at this moment, Pool One, given it has been FIVE YEARS since he has scored so much as a single point; and Victoria is still nowhere close to a seeded position.
Overall, this was a game of incompetence. Which made it highly entertaining early on! Although once Ragnar was falling apart, things got pretty pedestrian aside from a couple of nuclear stomps. It didn't help that I was watching it late last night, and wanted to go to bed but also wanted to have finished watching the game
. Anyway, though, a bunch of these leaders put out pretty embarrassing performances, and those were what really set the course of the game.
We'll start with the most obvious,
Stalin. After watching this, his super early war declaration thanks to that nearby copper was probably at the very early end of the scale of when he'd declare war... but I wouldn't be surprised if, in general, stifling his expansion to go to war is a fairly likely outcome. Napoleon was definitely a surprising target, and in alternate histories I suspect that (due to capital proximity if nothing else) Joao and Roosevelt are more likely targets. Anyway, the actual attack was much more successful than it had any right to be... but it was still a bad move overall, the captured cities only sort of replacing the ones that Stalin could have just founded peacefully anyway, the overall effect one of stagnating and stifling his expansion. I think this move is only worth it if Stalin is able to actually run over somebody completely, and how likely is that really? And even if it does happen, does his central position with good expansion prospects make it really worth it to begin with? I wouldn't be shocked if early aggression or lack thereof is the biggest factor in Stalin's success or failure in the alternate histories.
In any case, the actual game here from Stalin was just appalling. He ignored all of that nearby empty or barb-controlled territory for an early war whose ultimate benefits were questionable at best. He NEVER made a move for any of that territory the entire game! Only four self-founded cities and none from the barbs! That alone is a huge indictment on his performance. Then once he was finally out of that war, he never bothered to try and build back his position or do anything smart, instead choosing to attack the two biggest nations on the map with his next two wars.
He was lucky to have Napoleon as a meatshield against Gandhi, and then the attack on Roosevelt was just pure suicide. People were saying that he was possessed by the spirit of Ragnar, and it really did feel like it this game, as it was entirely about poorly chosen wars of aggression that knocked him out of contention. Absolute abortion of a match and as I said before, it's amazing that he's somehow not guaranteed to lose Pool One despite four straight 0 point seasons now. I still don't think that the picks of Stalin to win were necessarily bad - we still have no idea how we would have performed if he'd actually settled like a normal person like those people were no doubt expecting!
Napoleon at least has an excuse, in the early attack from Stalin that would have stifled his game at best. That said.... he shouldn't have lost any cities to Stalin at all, and he
certainly shouldn't have lost his second city! That was some appallingly poor city defense in those sieges, and Napoleon let himself be crippled here. Again, this early attack and crippling really set this game out of whack since it allowed Gandhi and Roosevelt to get extra land around Napoleon's starting position and made him an easy conquest later. Speaking of which, maybe it was understandable given the situation at the time, but attacking Gandhi, only to get completely rolled over by him, is as embarrassing as it gets in these games!
Joao also completely threw away his chances here for no reason. This one feels like a big oddity to me: stopping at five cities, to plot a war that he never actually declared? J-man isn't a big warmonger so this is probably an outlier. That left a huge void between him and Stalin that Vicky would somehow end up filling, in another big consequence. I think Joao can still be a major competitor when he actually plays the game and settles this area, and still don't think picking him was a bad idea, but for this game in particular he essentially stopped playing at about Turn 50 and that went about as well as you'd expect. He is very lucky to be going to the WC.
Perhaps the most damning performance, though, was
Roosevelt's. He actually played a strong early game - in fact, another part of the early game that felt weird to me was the fact that he was able to squeeze out a million cities all over the place. At the end of the landgrab phase he was clearly the biggest civ, and it felt to me that he should be a lock for a top two spot. However, he totally failed to capitalize - attacking Napoleon but failing to capture any cities was a huge blunder that killed his momentum in this one. Once he made all those war preparations, suicided a million units, and got nothing to show for it, he'd been toppled and was forced to play catch-up. Gandhi and Vicky dogpiling his conquests of Stalin and Ragnar was more a bit of bad luck, but by that point he was forced to play catch-up since they'd played better up to that point, and so he was left helpless in the end, when he
should have been the one dictating the game! A weak performance from a weak AI despite a strong opening. And then of course there was his late-game suicide attack...
That left three AIs that played decently here.
Ragnar was obviously the worst of the three as his opening was too slow and left him out of room to recover. I actually don't know that his idea to attack Joao was all that terrible! Vicky had longbows by the time he would have been ready to attack her and so that would have likely been a losing prospect. Stalin would probably have been a smarter target but this one wasn't bad. At any rate Ragnar didn't totally bungle his attacks and did expand normally before them, so in that light he was wildly successful compared to much of the field. He lost too much territory that should have been his to Vicky, though, and again his overall early game was too slow for this match. He would have needed Stalin and Napoleon to be capable of putting more pressure on the others to have a chance, and that didn't happen here. Overall I think I may have overestimated his chances, simply because he's likely to always have something of a hard time dealing with Vicky. At any rate, my fantasy bid certainly didn't work out. (I can never get any leaders to the Wildcard!)
And then there were the two success stories. It's hard to gauge with
Victoria, given she pretty much had everything line up perfectly for her in this game, but I feel like I also underestimated her strength on this map. I was pretty skeptical of her long-term chances in the early game, given she just kind of stopped building settlers way too early and ended up with a core of just six cities despite all of the madness taking place elsewhere - in particular, she certainly shouldn't have let Roosevelt grab that Chicago site! But it didn't seem to matter as she just raced ahead in tech and never looked back. Unless her expansion manages to be far worse in the alternate histories, I think she should be a legit competitor even if she often faces stiffer resistance. In any case, though, for this game, her racing out ahead in tech, and eventually happily snapping up all the land that Stalin and Joao never settled, was enough to make her utterly unstoppable on this map and a very deserving winner. My fantasy bid based on her capital paid off! (You will also notice that after Ragnar's failure this week, I have updated my fantasy branding to reflect my actually successful leaders.) As for her playoff position... at least the clams match Fishing tech, but otherwise it's not too special. We'll see who her western neighbor ends up being; that could decide a lot. I do think Churchill now has strong odds to reach the Championship for a third straight season, as he'll now be pretty sheltered...
Lastly,
Gandhi had a game that was simultaneously a success and a failure. Culture surprisingly didn't work out for him at all, since Vicky undermined everything with her tech dominance and so he was left a bit in the dust. But we did get Gandhi on the warpath this game, and it was especially fun to see him turn the tables and knock out Napoleon. Gandhi expanded well, fought well, and econ'd respectably this game to definitely earn his position; he easily outplayed everybody except Vicky and would likely have won easily had she not been doing her thing. I think it's fun to have him going back to the playoffs yet again. I think it is worth noting, though, that early aggression played out basically as well for him as it could have here: Stalin and Napoleon crippled each other before attacking him, while Joao did precisely nothing. I get the feeling that most repeat playthroughs aren't going to be nearly as smooth sailing! As for the playoffs, Gandhi might actually be in for another rough start. His position is pretty central, and the neighbor to his east is very likely to be a warmonger who will want to go after him before Fred and Ramesses to his north. Heck, Ramesses might well want a piece of him too! So I'm not sold on his odds of making another championship.
Finally, notes on the playoff round. We have a lot of high (or at least high-ish) peaceweights there! (Especially with the Wildcard's balance increasingly favoring them.) I think this is the first time that I've ever started thinking that I'd like to see some more
low peaceweights there to add balance... And I've done a bit of a 180 on my stance towards the size of the Wildcard field, since Sullla mentioned he'll likely split it into two games if it goes above twelve participants. I'd much rather see it kept as a single game, so I hope the next two games will be destructive enough that we won't have to go there...
