NightEmerald my co-hydra head! I think an unfortunate problem of the inexperienced + experienced hydra duo is that the experienced head is necessarily a bit more “involved”, and there is a presumption that they speak for the unit as a whole. Regardless, I hope you thoroughly enjoyed your first Diplomacy Experience!
Dead by Daylight even though I went for your throat immediately, I still do feel bad that you were the first one to go out. Your opening play was fine; I think you were just the victim of my extremely aggressive play, and unfortunately the fleet build sealed the E-F alliance against you (I don’t think it was as an egregious mistake as some point out, though) Even if you’re the first one gone, I hope that you enjoyed playing with us, and I’m glad you stuck around for more games!
bluedoom My lie to you was easily my most objective and clear-cut mistake, and I do apologize for that. It achieved nothing but built up your hopes of taking Ven only to dash them, leaving you in the unfortunate position of being wide open to a Turkish Stab. You’re a great guy, and in a different timeline I could have seen a scenario where I joined forces with you, which would have been cool.
Lechen just by the nature of the map, we never directly interacted from a tactics standpoint until the end of the game. However, our inability to do anything to each other meant that we were ideal to share info with each other, and it was a pleasure to chat with you from across Europe. I’m glad that you went from the early-game punching bag to one of the last countries to be eliminated, and that I made a new friend out of this game.
Aura Guardian AG, I think you were the best tactician on the board, with LN a close second. Outside of the aforementioned DMZ, I really began to interact more with you when LN was still a majority naval power and I needed to find a way to crack open Germany. This was unintentionally thwarted by bluedoom, and I found myself an (unlikely) ally to you. Unfortunately you were stabbed by Turkey, but them’s the breaks sometimes.
Blazade outside of unnecessarily lying to BD, I genuinely feel bad for your late-game experience here. As you’ve said, it certainly is not a fun experience to be systematically picked apart by the rest of the game board, and this is only compounded by the fact that two one-center vassals survived as long as you did. I think you were worried that many players would unnecessarily trash your gameplay decisions, which is valid; however, it seems that the general sentiment among the rest of the board is that this is not the case. At least, I certainly don’t think you’re a bad player; I think the vast majority of your decisions made sense, and I would have probably done similar actions in your shoes. I will say, though, that if you followed my plan that one turn I actually would have helped you destroy Italy to go for an E-F-T tie.
LonelyNess where do I begin...I'll just let people read the E-F chat on their own time, but it was an absolute pleasure to take over Europe together. You're really fun to play with, and I thoroughly enjoyed sharing pet pictures, rehashing old users, or talking about gameplay strategy. Once I decided on you as an ally, I decided to take a page out of Cold War-era nuclear policy and threatened to throw the entire game suiciding into you if I were stabbed. Regardless, the kind words that I gave you for my 1k post earlier in this thread were true and were actually not a ruse to stave off a stab lmao. The same cannot be said for some of my interactions with you, though. I did intentionally try to seem a little less competent than I otherwise would be in order to reduce my threat level in your eyes. I'm not sure if either method was effective, but it was a thing.