From: Allan Bell To: "Alan Poulter" , "Matthew Taylor" , "Ian Schofield" , "James Jones " , "Gordon Bliss" , "NE - Nathan Wagner" , "Chris Fawcett" , "Mike Wrazen" , "Bryan Jackson" Hi, Sorry this is late. I guess it is a good idea to make a comment on the game we have spent the past half year playing. Firstly, I should thank Alan for his efforts in GM'ing this game. His experience in GM'ing other games shows through. Putting up with a bunch of very competitive players is a feat in itself. I should also like to thank Matthew for dropping out as this gave me the opportunity to get in on the game. ...and of course Chris and Nathan for their participation. The game got heated at times but I suppose that shows we are all playing serious. This was my first ftf game of ATH in a long while. It coincided with my work on a program to simulate ATH so it was of special interest. As a side benefit it was particularly useful to get rulings on certain rules of the games and to have pointed out to me the ones I had been mis-reading all this time. :-0 As we were playing to the official victory conditions it was always going to be hard for the Southwest. The Southwest has a distinct disadvantage in terms of lack of metal sites (1) and lack of plants (4). This is too small a base to get to Social State 2 as SS2 would require production of around 30 cps in turn 9 & 10 (assuming some have been saved away). To make 30 cps you need 6 metal and 18 capacity per turn. With a sector state of 1 for most of the game the Southwest is limited to 4 metal. This is major limitation and no other player has a similar limitation. This forces the SW player to be more aggressive and outward looking. The two ways around this lack of metal is trade and expansion. Trade is tricky because you know that the other players can simply embargo you if you look like making SS2. During the game I was successful in getting metal but I had to stockpile large quantities as a buffer against a future embargo. The other way is expansion. The SW should be able to grab the Tennessee site by Turn 2 or 3. This gives another metal site and two plants. I was very vocal about my need for this area early in the game. If someone else had grabbed it I would have fought for it or at least plebiscited it so often that the other player would have paid a big penalty. Without Tennessee I was ruined. The problem with expansion was that I also gained a lot of extra people and this makes it harder to get to SS2. By turn 6 or 7 I pretty well knew I could not make SS2. Actually I was reasonably close, and worked and reworked the forecast but having to build the extra plant was the killer. Without that I might have made it. So by Turn 7 I was preparing for the big area expansion. My concern was that the Midwest was better placed in terms of the potential size of his economy. If I started the race too early and he had realised it he would have caught me and passed me. The other problem was that I wasn't sure which other players might make SS2. In Turn 8 I was calculating that the MW couldn't have done it but the NE and the FW could do it. The problem was how could I stop them. That was when I decided to build the army. So even though the army was used against the MW it was actually built to stop the NE and/or FW. The rationale was that if I built an army then they would build one too and I could pull enough out of their economy to stop them getting to SS2. The irony was that I worked out that if I took areas off, say, the NE then he could ignore it and get to SS2 with, say, 3 areas and still win! That seemed bizarre: that losing a war actually makes it easier to get to SS2 because your stockpiled CPs go further with a lower population. But as it turned out neither the FW nor the NE made it to SS2 by turn 9 so it was clear that we were all going to lose and it would be a race between myself and the MW for the largest economy. So in turn 9 I attacked two of Chris' areas. In each case I was at +4 - I thought I was at +5 but neglected to read the entire rule :-( Two 5's was not particularly good rolling. I had considered taking out his two fuel areas. That would have done a lot of harm to his economy but he had plenty of fuel stockpiled and the NE looked like he had enough to trade him for the final turn. Nonetheless this can be a very effective military hit. Kind of like the bombing of the ball-bearing plants in WWII. In Turn 9 I had made a deal with Alan that i would trade him some food in exchange for him using his stockpiled corruption chits against Chris. I was looking at plebisciting some of Chris's areas and if I could reduce his income he would be vulnerable. Alan wrote SW rather than MW. Either it was a dumb error or I had been back-stabbed. Alan pleaded dumb error. Alan also rolls a 6 for maximum damage. I thought it was just because I told him that the chits were pretty useless and a poor use of his money. The Gods wanted to prove me wrong. So in Turn 10 he offered to trade me some money & cps in exchange for some food. The money would replace the ones lost due to the corruption chits and I would be back to square one but not as well off as i would have been if he had done it right the first time. This proved to be just enough to grab two areas off the MW in the last round. That and the army knocking off his capital was enough to win the game. Losing two units of my army also helped give me back another 2 VPs. Plebisciting other players areas is VERY useful. Especially as you don't have to give them 5CPs nor a transport unit. It can be a cheap way to grab areas. It was interesting how the money was pretty useless through the game but suddenly was very valuable at the end. I suspect the final turn moves will be interesting in Alabama as R&D is a very useful way to spend your money. Money is worth a lot more in alabama then it was in ATH1. I think it would have been possible for all of us to get to SS2 if we had integrated our economies with each other. For example my metal sector was very inefficient compared to Chris'. But as it is a wargame and we all want to win then we know that we can't reliably do this. Possibly two players could integrate their economies and help them each get to SS2 but I doubt it as there would always be a falling out in Turn 9. So the VP conditions suck. The other crazy thing about the VPs is the 15 bonus to the FW. I cannot believe this was playtested. My guess is that they started using VP conditions as in Alabama and then changed them to the current state. Otherwise the FW would win nearly every time. We actually traded more than I thought we would. ATH can be a four player solitaire game. This is one of its failings. Hopefully the Alabama VP rules might force more interaction and fighting among the players. After all it is a wargame. I think the military side of ATH can be quite good. I was hardly on a war economy but if I put 6-8 divisions into the field then it would start stretching my economy. If the other player did the same then our economies could be falling apart while we strived for some military advantage. Anyway, this is long enough. Good game. Thanks everyone for participating.