marsman57 wrote:Boring result because Peanut didn't know the rules. Bleh. I'd have told him much earlier if I had realized.
As marsman knows well, I was under the same mistake until Fall 1909 (I asked attitudes exactly how he was interpreting the "game ends when the last zombie is eliminated" rule, and he corrected me!) Until that point I had believed I was very likely to win, as I cleared away the remaining zombies, taking a number of SCs; I had rapidly to switch from my zombie-destroy mode back to my earlier zombie-proliferate mode, trying to point them at Peanut who was clearly going to be favourite in a full-length game. But by now they'd frown tired of doing what I wanted, and the only effect was to hamper Zadaron!
However, before going any further well done the survivors - pretty much the ones who understood the Zombies. And particularly well done attitudes, who picked up the very tricky Zombie rules amazingly quickly.
I only joined this at the beginning of 1902 (and if I'd realised the victory conditions I probably wouldn't have joined then - part of the reason I didn't originally was because I didn't like them at all.) I didn't check the map (just wanted to test myself against the Zombies, having helped create them and GMd the first game) and was glad to get a Turkish base, but stunned to find that I had no fleet (playing Zombies, in turkey, no fleet???) The result was that I had to sit and defend for two years until I could get a fleet into action because of the Zombie in Sevastapol and dark blue threatening me from the Aegean. Once I got the fleet the game became interesting. I was certain I could handle the Zombies and thought I could probably do it better than anybody else. The only tricky bit would be the other players! And that came sooner than I expected. asudevil, the new owner of dark blue, and I had reached an accord, which suited me fine - I had my eyes on Moscow and St Petersburg, using the zombies to get me there (which was going to be interesting since Xildur had invented the strategy of building only fleets in StP south, invisible to the Moscow fleet (poor rule that one!)) But that was scuppered when asudevil decided to attract the Zombie out of Warsaw into Galicia, with the effect both of threatening my new holding in Sevastapol and at the same time taking pressure off Moscow. asudevil had to go!
He was hampered by a couple of Zombies in Austria, as well as the one just arrived in Galicia. I approached Pharaoh of nerds who was based in Tunis with outposts towards Italy with the suggestion that if he would work on the Trieste area (with zombies around there) and make life even more difficult for asudevil, then I would invade from the south-east. I owe you an apology for that one Pharaoh - it was clear to me that if you said Yes it would be suicide!! I couldn't believe my luck when you did!
asudevil didn't last long and Austria and the Balkans were flooded with Zombies. As I saw it I would be slowly picking them off and gaining all of those territories once I was ready to move. Eventually Xildur was pushed out of Russia south of StP and I began mopping up. As I said, at that point I believed I was going to win; the only difficulty would be finishing off a couple of Zombies in Italy, but I felt I could do that without too much trouble.
Then attitudes dropped his bombshell. By that time I had cleared all the Zombies from close to the German border and Peanut was becoming a very clear threat. I put out bait to tempt the Zombies over there but they didn't bite. Eventually Peanut reached 13/14 and was growing steadily, and it was time to batten down the hatches. Zadaron agreed quickly to head for stalemate, although it wasn't easy - there were still Zombies around and we had far more fleets than we needed, with a shortage of armies to hold the German border. There were gains to be made, but it was going to take time. We knew the timetable was extremely tight but believed we could just do it.
It's a long time since I went for that stalemate line from the east, and the problems are very different than they are from the other side. And that was coupled with having to design a line in the Med which I've never seen before. None of the online stalemate resources I usually go to was much help, but I found the section in Richard Sharp's book describing a basic one - which actually appears to me to be flawed (another illusion gone!) and gave me a few minutes' panic towards the end. But we made it. Great game.
A couple of points about game design, where I'd value the opinion of other players (and attitudes.) Firstly the victory conditions. If I hadn't been proliferating Zombies fairly early then the game would have turned into a standard game of Build Anywhere Classic by the mid-game. Frankly, I've no desire whatsoever to be left playing that, unranked, through the Forum (I'm bored stiff with Classic at the best of times!) The regular Zombie victory conditions -end the moment the last Zombie leaves the board - were designed by Malevolence to fit the Zombies perfectly.
The other point concerns the power of the Zombies. There is the issue of sea boundaries, which we are trying to address, but we don't know how successfully. But marsman commented to me at one point during the game that he felt they were under-powered. I'm not convinced about that - they were never intended to be likely winners of a game unless the players were particularly inept; their function was to provide a different and serious test. I'm not sure that any changes need to be made to achieve that, but I'd like to hear what others think - I may open a Development thread around that in due course.But once again, a thoroughly enjoyable game. Thanks everybody.