Strat Forum PBEM 3: Game Report

[Arrian]

Hills + walls + forification = 9 defense for musketmen. Ouch. Still, with a large number of Siphai & French Cavalry, I'm surprised Dave was able to hold.

-Arrian

[Dominae]

Very interesting to see a western player's perspective. It's amazing how much MP play is defined by your assumptions of other players' intentions.


Dominae

[Rhothaerill]

I find this whole thread very interesting. In most AAR's there is only one player's viewpoint (since the AI doesn't have a viewpoint ), but in this we have the viewpoints of several players. I like it!

[vmxa1]

It would be interesting to see what would have happen if you had not switched to Demo at that time. A bunch more Calv could have put some pressure on.

[Rhothaerill]

Now we just need to see NorMe's AAR and hear from DaveMcW on his strategy.

[jshelr]

A couple of points:

(1) Clearly, the remarks above about Dave's willingness to sell tech cheaply and the advantage to him are correct. We've done a good thing in the Balanced game to introduce the no tech whoring agreement.

(2) I think Dave demonstrated the value of early war in PBEM and also that the combination of RR and cavs introduce a short window of turns that dramatically favour the offense. I don't think either of these demonstrations change the general rule that defense is strong most of the time and he actually demonstrated that as well with his walls plus muskets defense. Build those frontier cities on hills.

(3) I would be interested in knowing about relative build levels. China had banks and some universities in the first ring and was near the FP with markets in the second ring. Both China and Carthage had a golden age left in thier future, by the way.

Also, I'm thinking as hard as I can about it, but I remain clueless as to how Dave could outresearch the combined team of China and Carthage even if his economy and land area was twice as big? The four-turn tech limit prevents land size from being translated into victory through research. And if we got infantry and arty in time, landing an expeditionary force on our continent would have been non-trivial. (Not that I would bet against Dave winning!)

[vondrack]

A truly enlightening thread to read. Being a less then frequent visitor to the Strat forum, I am glad I clicked on it during one of my scarce detours from the demogame forums.

to everybody involved. Both for interesting AARs and for the efforts spent on putting this thread together.