Good old IrfanView. Each time I get a new system I neglect to install it, but it inevitably proves invaluable.
I did not keep notes as I played, mostly because I had no good idea on how to organise it sensibly. But here's at least my progress with some annotations:
Here's some random observations from looking at both our save files:
It looks like I had a good couple thousand+ headway in industrial capacity, even accounting for the two cities you've lost. It meant I >could< sacrifice some thousands to build the road through the mostly low, but extensive mountains. The late city gains must have hurt you here.
The infantry designs on my side, apart from being somewhat better structurally (much better in case of machineguns - I rolled 123 right off the bat), must have enjoyed the linear techs since much earlier. I went for applied science earlier, and with better budget than I normally would, because the rng gave me the sensei card from the fate pack, and the guy was too good to leave idling. Hence the high unit stats all around.
You seem to have sunk quite a bit of BPs into staff council tasks that I completely ignored. I only founded that council sometime during the final dozen turns or so, and was using them almost purely for stratagems - since I had enough to go around, each turn I'd start by giving my troops attack stratagems, and end it by switching them all to defence.
I don't know, it's possible customising formations and operationalising new ones could have paid off in the long run, but - as with everything else - time proved not to be on your side.
My cabinet was super happy all the time, yours less so. It's the first game I saw them this elated, too. This must have relatively drained some BPs from your council tasks.
I found artillery to be mostly useless unless massed - individual battalions or even a couple did not seem to do much of any damage. This seems to apply to your rockets/missiles too.
But a couple divisions of 300mm howitzers targetting a single hex were enough to punch through even your high-tech, entrenched defences. They were doing the main job in making my breakthroughs. I wonder how it would look like had you invested in numerous counter batteries rather than the battledress infantry.
The planes you've built were effective, but IMO easily countered. Sure, good flak guns are expensive as hell (1000 industry and metal per battalion here), but I only ever needed a few to cover all crucial points. And the shit fighters I built seem to have started to make short work of your better planes. Again, it looks like numbers matter a lot here - 30 planes = meh, 90 = death.
It also looks like I was churning out new SHQs much, much more rapidly. If I'm seeing this right, your final save has 4 brigades (maybe another 4 were lost in the sieges?). I had 20-ish. Around 15 when the fighting started, I think. This focus on manpower would explain the headstart with conquests. Certainly with land area.
What was your bottleneck here? Food, maybe? (I wonder how much the food bonus from meritocracy bootstrapped my army - I never once >had< to build a farm to feed the troops during the game).
The constant offensives were draining my fuel reserves something fierce. This final-turn assault alone resulted in -6k after production. At this rate I'd be looking at the bottom of the barrel in maybe three-four turns. Maybe a bit longer with extra oil drills. You holding the line for that much longer could have resulted in me losing the initiative for the foreseeable future.
And of course the water bonanza did not hurt me (but I don't think it mattered that much in the end).
All in all, it does look like you were caught fighting maybe a dozen turns before you were ready. That such a small delay in catching up can have such large consequences raises questions on how to best balance these matches. I'm thinking, more than two players might be necessary for a balanced game so that diplomacy acts as an equaliser (but then again, that'd be a slooow PBEM).
- Overall, your pre-game concern that one of us would lose from uneven minor regime distribution was valid. You just plain had more and easier access to expansion than I did. I'm not sure there's really any good way to fix this short of having an extremely flat planet that's totally covered with minors or any other sort of planet that basically has no minors.
I don't know, maybe keeping majors around would have worked better? In that they are a bit harder to take in stride.
- IDK how you managed to do as well as you did with that terrible Supreme Command Council director you had. Yours looked at least as bad as the one I started with, and I spent the first 2-3 turns getting rid of mine... and I was still starved for PP the whole game despite a high Democracy profile. Not getting rid of my Econ director was also a big mistake; had I gotten Heavy Industry sooner, the additional Heavy Battledress units that would have translated to would have made a very large impact. Having said that, the RNG would have likely been different and I'd probably not have gotten HBd...
I... have completely forgotten how terribad he is. And I was struggling with low PP until the late game. Not least because of me wasting those on unification attempts. Had I realised he's to blame I'd fire him on the spot. I even had a CapV administrator from some scrap card idling as an advisor. And there I was praying for the democracy bonuses to finally trigger for half of the game. Doh.
And I think I didn't want to play propose client because of what I saw as a high chance of critical failure lowering relations and making the whole thing even harder to achieve. And as you may be able to see in the gif, the previous two joined me so quickly that my expectations of success were high. Alas.