First of all, I want to repeat my congratulations to Turkey. Your play was very astute, both diplomatically and tactically. My feelings about the replacement France's behavior in no way diminishes my respect and admiration for you as a player. I hope to meet with you again across the board some time -- and I will do my very best to pay you back for this one! ;)
Next, about that French replacement. I feel that GM Bob's comments were right on the money. The function of a mercy replacement is to help a stalled game get moving again. You didn't do that; instead, you merely interfered with the game and corrupted its outcome. I consider your actions rude and irresponsible at best. I don't understand why you even bothered to take the position. Did you get some perverse enjoyment out of taking a dynamic and lively game and in a few short strokes spoiling it for the rest of us? What diplomatic skill did THAT take? "Please, Turkey, I want you to win; I'll wreck England's defenses and let you walk into Tunis and Spain, and you can just grab Warsaw!" Your assertion that you would have been "squished" no matter what you did was absurd. There was plenty of play left in the French position; if you had cared to put the least bit of effort into it, you could well have shared in a draw. There was no guarantee, of course, but you were *vital* to my ability to hold the line against Turkey, and I saw no way that I could attack you without collapsing that line and giving Turkey the game. Your response of, "Ha-ha! You shouldn't have blindly trusted me!" was also absurd. I had no alternative, and it wouldn't have made any difference if I HADN'T trusted you. Let's say I read your mind and found out *exactly* what your moves were going to be. You supported Turkey's attack on Spain with Gas and Mar, and you moved NAf-WMe. Ok, so I use WMe and MAO to support Spain -- oops, WMe is cut! All right, then I use MAO to support Spain, and Bur to cut Mar -- oops, now Mun doesn't have enough support and falls to Turkey's attack! Ok, smart guy; why don't YOU tell me what orders I should have issued? And yes, Russia could have defended War this year, but that would have only delayed the inevitable. Turkey could bring up reinforcements to take War and hold Mos, and Russia and I were both out position to do anything about it. And you're still behind my lines wreaking havoc on my position, offering Turkey plenty of opportunity to get his 18th center in my territory even if he can't manage to pick up War. So don't tell me that trusting you was a failure on my part; my only hope was to co-opt you into a draw, and you refused so much as to *consider* that possibility.
When I take a mercy position, I play it rationally. That means that I do my best to secure an optimal result for the position I've taken. Usually, there's no chance for a win (though I have heard of someone coming back from 2 centers to win), but if there's a possibility that I can be a key part of a draw, then I'll work for that. And that, IMHO, is what you should have done. Instead, you took the lazy way out, and threw the game to the strongest player on the board. Your actions were akin to walking along a beach, spotting an intricate sand castle that obviously took many hours of effort to build, and stomping it flat with the parting shot, "Hey, it sucks, but that's life!" There was no rationality to your play at all; you entered the game with the sole goal of throwing it to Turkey, with no feel for the history of the game or concern for the time and effort we had poured into it. Frankly, I hope I never again see you in a game I'm playing or GMing, because I think you acted in a manner that was utterly contrary to the spirit of the game.
I notice that you were too cowardly to stick around for the EOGs, and that the game is set to NoReveal, so I hope Bob will forward a copy of this statement to you. I think you need to reconsider your approach before you pick up another mercy position, and realize that it is a commitment to play the best game you can, not just to end it as soon as you can manage to do so. If you had worked out some deal with Turkey and Russia to eliminate me and share a draw (or if you had tried and fell victim to a stab that gave Turkey the win anyway), I wouldn't have been in the least upset about your behavior; I would have applauded your good play, as I did for Turkey in my opening paragraph.
Now, on to the actual EOG....
Initially, I was leaning toward peaceful relations with France and Germany (i.e., I was looking to set up the Western Triple -- which isn't really that great an idea for England to drive [it works much better when Germany asks for it, and when it's in response to the clear threat of a Juggernaut in the south], but I was too optimistic), but if I had to come to blows with one of them, I would have preferred to attack France with Germany as my ally. That would have allowed me quick access to the Med, and enabled me to set up a nice solid position from which to go for a win. Actually, in retrospect, I probably should have gone for an outright EG vs. F in the first place. Oh, well! Anyway, then Germany made some diplomatic blunders that set me and practically everyone else in the game on edge against him, and I because of that, I went for a long time with the EFR alliance. First, he broadcast his spy packet, claiming that it was mine and that I had shared it with him. Initially, I was quite thoroughly confused; I thought that perhaps Bob had made an error and sent him my packet, somehow letting him know it was mine (I don't know; maybe a misspelled "ENDPRESS" followed by the "PRESS TO E"). The reason that I thought that this might have happened was that I really *was* spying on France. Later, I realized that the explanation was much simpler; he was also spying on France and sent his own packet. It wouldn't have mattered whether I had spied on France or not; he could still use that ploy against me. If I denied that I was spying on France, it wouldn't mean anything, and if I had posted my own spy packet to try to prove it (in the event it hadn't been France's messages), I would risk annoying the real target of my espionage and he could always claim I got it from someone else, anyway. His other blunders were insisting on Belgium and denying Sweden to Russia. He made no effort to negotiate about Belgium; he just insisted that it was his, and that was that. So, of course, I opposed him. Bouncing Russia in Sweden has to be at about the top of the list of no-nos for the German player; it gets him entangled with a very annoyed bear to his east and leaves him distracted from his natural centers in the west. Finally, given his overall rude and obnoxious behavior, it wasn't hard to get a number of people annoyed enough with him to help wipe him out. Russia did give me a brief start with his stab for Norway, but we managed to patch up that little misunderstanding.
Meanwhile, Austria and Italy were busy getting zorched in the south, and we four survivors were figuring out our alliances. I kind of went back and forth on this one. First, I thought it would be best for me to go with ERT, then Russia persuaded me to go with EFR after all. Then France insisted on building that fleet in Bre, and wouldn't back down. To top it off, he built A Par as well, instead of at least building F Mar; he claimed not to see the need for additional fleets in the Med. To me, neither F Bre nor A Par did anything to help the anti-Turkish effort, so I figured he was up to something. So, I reluctantly went along with ERT. Even at that, I was prepared to change back to EFR after bloodying France's nose for a bit, but system problems I was having got in my way. I had made overtures to France to realign to EFR, and didn't get a response before leaving work, so I sent off anti-French orders. When I got online in the evening, I got the response from France agreeing to the realignment, and sent in anti-Turkish orders. But I didn't notice that my anti-French orders hadn't registered yet. They were sitting in an outgoing mail queue at work, and when they went out, they did so *after* my anti-Turkish orders registered. So, I came in the next morning, and found that France's position was wrecked, and though I tried to convince France that it wasn't intentional, it just didn't work (I can't say I blame him; I doubt I would have believed me in his shoes, either). So, ERT continued. I encouraged Russia to try to get back Sev, hoping to get the two of them embroiled in a dispute that I could take advantage of. Well, it worked as far as it went, but I wasn't really able to take that much advantage of it. I would have preferred EFR to be up and running at that point, because I think I could have stabbed France while his attention was on Turkey, and maybe claimed my 18 centers that way. But, c'est la guerre. Now that I'm more experienced with the vagaries of my work system (we recently switched to MS Exchange -- bleah!), I change my password whenever I see this situation coming (that came in handily a couple of days ago, when I needed to resign a replacement who jumped into a game I'm mastering; I sent it out from work, realized that it hadn't got through, sent it again from home and changed the password so the work message wouldn't come through and resign the original player who signed back on once the replacement was out). But at the time, I hadn't been burned and hadn't considered the consequences of having the messages arrive in the wrong order.
My solo bid was a miscalculation. I thought that Turkey and Russia wouldn't be able to put aside their differences quickly enough to present an adequate defense, and when Russia said he was withdrawing from Berlin (on the grounds that I needed the center more than he did), I assumed the fleet would go back to Prussia (DUH!). So, I asked the original France point blank to help me on a solo bid, and he agreed. Basically, I offered a) the possibility of making a difference in the game (in a situation in which he really was headed out the door) and b) that I would see to it that he had a center left by the time I won (if I did). The latter, I was planning to renege on if (and only if) it became necessary. My plan involved a) holding Tunis, and hopefully pushing Turkey's fleets in the Med back a bit (so I could have a shot at taking an Italian center or giving it to France, allowing me to keep the bargain of leaving him as a survivor in my solo), b) taking Scandinavia and St. Petersburg, and c) taking the rest of France and holding on to Germany. Ambitious, but if Turkey and Russia hadn't put up such a good defense and France continued to help me, I really thought it was doable. I figured there was a small risk that I'd end up throwing the game to Turkey, but that more likely, I'd have to settle for a 4-way draw instead of a 3-way. It was a risk I was prepared to accept.
Then Bozo the Clown came in and arbitrarily smashed everything to little bits. Sigh.... Losing per se doesn't bother me (I've lost count of the number of times *that's* happened); it's the way it happened that really stinks. I disagree with Turkey's assessment that the replacement didn't really throw the game that badly; as long as I didn't attack him myself, France could hold Marseilles and I could hold Spain and Tunis indefinitely. A Gas S A Mar, F MAO S F WMe, F NAf S F Tun. No way for you to make any progress at all. The north was trickier, but I think Russia and I could have contained you there (or, if I played my cards right, I might have been able to help you eliminate him without letting you get to 18). But when the replacement France actively helped you, everything collapsed like a house of cards, and there was nothing I could do about it, Bozo's assertions to the contrary. A sad postscript to an otherwise dynamic and exciting game, which I enjoyed greatly.
-Mike Lease, aka Lord Castleberry
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