Pong Report

Summary My report for Pong 10 is going to be very brief. In short, I had a bad start and made speculative choices that turned out very poorly, mostly due to bad luck. As a result, I never really established myself, fell behind quickly, and was dominated and then mostly wiped out. The game was interesting and fun, but I constantly struggled and barely survived to the end. Two crucial mistakes were made in the very first session. First I decided to rush religion via Stonehenge when I discovered stone in my capital. This was a colossal mistake because it blocked one of the only grassland regions near the city, essentially prevented the city from growing, and the city continually starved at a paltry 4 population until the Industrial Era. Terrible. The second mistake was really just bad luck. My opening exploration was west, south, and east. Unfortunately just two or three turns after turn 10 passed (and the chance to mulligan), Netherlands (Zar) and I discovered each other and tha...

Session 1 -Turn 1 - 4000 BC I won Pong4 as Norway and didn’t feel like going Viking again yet. Kongo is a very strong civ and can do very well in MP, and Sweden is extremely good at the diplomacy game, which is one of the highlights of playing a large MP game with 8 people, but in the end, I decided to play Spain because the map is a Continents map – so there will be large oceans to deal with and Spain gets earlier naval armadas – and because I noticed that few of the drafted leaders had a religious focus, so I felt confident that I could have a strong religion game if I picked them. After 3 mulligans, the game finally got started officially. My start was a weird position at the foot of a mountain chain. I climbed the nearby hill to get the ultra-strong plains-hill bonus. The first thing I noticed was a ton of wheat in the area but also a couple of floodplains that would make them dangerous to settle near. I decided to focus on a chop-economy for early, explosive growth t...