All,
I think LT57 was a successful 2 team game full of intense farming and a few epic battles. I would first like to thank @Hans_Lemurson for intense documentation of the action in the above site. If you're super interested go read and enjoy! Otherwise here's an abridged version from my side.
We all started in a pretty concentrated cluster of islands. Illkachu and Hans at the center, with Yknot eventually next to Ste, Jwrober/Zoe near Xandr/ghamath. Besides these fronts, there was a only a handful of shared islands. kamblr and kevin, cgalik and bamskamp. (Part way through the game Louis replaced Illkachu, but he remained on our team and we enjoyed him observing on occasion as well in-game.)
I'm going purely off of memory here, so lots could be wrong.
Yknot, the newest player to the game ended up next to ste, a LT vet. Ste in the end had the best starting placement in the game and took full advantage. But after he settled all his land and top in land area, he come in and stole another island from Yknot in just a few turns. Hans came to the rescue with a boat load of v phalanx to pause the invasion until ste built up enough knights to easily knock out the last city on the island. Ste gained confidence with this and not too long after did a landing on a Hans' nearby island which included multiple empty cities. But Hans' had several units all hiding in one city and massacred ste's landing party. This gave Hans great confidence that he could farm away in peace. Only to find that ste came back with tons of knights and almost took the whole island in 2 turns. I advised Hans to rush migrants/settlers and burn the cities you can't keep, only to find that Knights don't kill population in this ruleset. Oops. Ste took 2 cities and only burned one. But Hans held one city on the island and got gunpowder the next turn so stopped the invasion. Ste had 2 cities and soon planted another. Ste #1 in most demographics at this point. Neither had democracy yet, so there was some intense diplomatic battles to prevent inciting. Ste pumped it full of migrants and the cost soon got too high. Hans got to demo first so then no longer needed the diplos, which allowed him to do a one way trireme+diplo incite attack on smaller city, but the RNG was not in our favor and both 40% chances failed. Soon ste was in democracy. Meanwhile Hans built up a catapult army... but not good against musks... Hans/ste did some squabbling over some hills/forest tiles with musks hoping to wear ste's units down... because...
Jwrober rushed to Frigates and built a small navy... sailed them quietly half way around the world and we pulled off a Frigate attack + musk invasion of a separate ste island. Taking two cities with not too many losses as we killed cities with archers, warriors that hadn't been upgraded to musks yet. We stalled here as they sailed in reinforcements. (But I wonder if we could have kept going...) But this gave louis a city where he pumped triremes. Several turns later on a nearby island with shallows we were able to do a 4 team dragoon/musk attack and take the whole small island in 1 turn. It was our team's highest moment. ste was no longer #1 and was on his heels. But this was near our weakest player Yknot, which made it tough to keep moving forward as was so far from Louis and Zoe. So this was as far as we ever pushed here.
Meanwhile back at the start for me, I did a loop around my island with longboat+settler to find nothing! I had the choice to come home to refuel or keep moving forward never to return... I moved forward and found land! Xandr's land!
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_e_sad.gif)
So I could either dump my settler on xandr's empty mountain and make him kill it... or drop off on the pole! So I "saved" my settler and dropped him off on the pole. I could go along the coast of the pole... but knew roughly what was there... or go to jwrober... or split the middle of the pole and see what was on the other side! Thus started a 30 turn journey through the center of the pole!
So meanwhile I still had found zero islands to settle to start. I missed a shallow tile by 1 nearby my homeland, that hans later found and settled. I tried again this time going farther out to find land! Hooray! I settled it and sent another longboat and settler... only to find I had company... bamskamp. I settled my second city.. and had trireme inside the city. But made my worst mistake of the game... I brought trireme out to kill xandr's longboat that was being used by bamskamp and got a kill and upgrade! But that left my city empty... which bams had a trireme+horse nearby and burned the city, and trireme (which I had rehomed) vanished. :_(. I would never have the upperhand again against bams. If I had this city it would have opened up a lot more options to me. But later I discovered bams had been settling these several islands for several turns, so had many more cities than me nearby.
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_e_sad.gif)
I founded one more dangerous city by a river next to bams, and spent tons of resources in the region. Luckily Hans' found one small island for me and I squeezed in 3 cities here. Ste was even seen supporting with horses, so I knew I had no great chance. All this war put me behind on homeland and I was a bottom third nation with little land and no hopes of catching great farmers like kevin551 and xandr. I dedicated the rest of the game to turtling up, farming and sending gold to teammates.
On the other side of the world, kamblr settled many islands right away with no battles. He also snuck a city next to kevin and caused him to take it out with dragoons later. Kamblr farmed very well, leading our team to Republic and Democracy and provided a lot of gold later in our team attack.
On another side of the world jwrober and zoe grab an island or two and settled it. Jwrober had only minor incidences against xandr. Xandr was top military building like 40 horses as we could see from demographics. This made him a terrible attack target, so jwrober went and raided ste with Frigates.
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
But this left Jwrober's homeland with a lot of resources sucked from it.... Xandr farmed brilliantly and was the first in the game to Marines. In this ruleset, Marines had to be built fresh, not upgraded from other units. Xandr teamed up with ghamath with an impressive marines+cavalry+canons+destroyers attack on jwrober taking his cap in a single turn.
At this point we had watch ste build up a massive amount of units, and kevin be number one in demographics as he is the best farmer I know and had no interruptions and no visitors. Even with us taking 2.5 islands from ste he had more land than any of us... we knew we had lost as even the one front we were winning on ste was still looking good. And bams took my cities on our shared island already, so we were winning really on zero fronts. We had several great nations and econ, but low production and military.
But we choose to do one last Grand Attack...
And Louis and Hans got Marines at the same time.... We left the other team guessing where we were going to attack... we could try and take back jwrober's land, but wasn't of great gain to us, and we had already (internally) conceded our fate... so we decided like xandr went after jwrober who had helped go after ste... we would go after ghamath who helped attack jwrober.
Zoe build a fleet of ships and got Engineering, we upgraded them and attacked ghamath and successfully took most of his home island including his cap. It was a ton of fun and a successful team attack.
However, the next turn Louis' land (as expected) got invaded and 4 cities taken but not cap as enemy ran out of ships. We could have mounted a counter attack and save his cap and battle it out and probably win on his homeland.... but we had our fun, and decided to "Lay down our own king" (like in chess) and resign and shake hands.
Our opponents played great and earned a well deserved victory. I think we easily could have drawn it out (50 turns?) as it was probably like 55%/45% split, but we decided against it for a variety of reasons. Part me loves to fight to the last hidden partisan... but part of me also wants to actually help improve the game with writing a few patches.
Much thanks to kevin for leading a great team and putting up with me and my crap. hehe Kevin's won 2 out of 3 in the series so I have to face it that he might be better than me.
Much thanks to wieder for admin'ing (and moderating me and kevin's arguments lol) and playing for a few turns here and there for Kevin's team.
Much thanks to Ilkkachu who wrote the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) patch that fixed the migrant trick. It tested out wonderfully all game. Great job, Ilkkachu!
Last but not least, double thanks to louis94 who told me he was not going to play in this team game (for Real Life reasons) only to step in when Ilkkachu stepped out. He also managed to admin the other games, upgrade the website in the meantime. Louis94, MVP of LT for sure.
Thanks for the game!
-cgalik