Thanks to everyone for the comments very gratifying to feel it did work.
Before answering the individual messages, a common theme is brevity ... but an awful lot V2 aars are brief (I mean even Rens has actually finished one) and most (setting aside the interactive ones as they have very different dynamics) seem to be 8-12 pages long. There's been a bit of chat about this and why elsewhere and why we're not seeing anythin like 'Fire Warms' or 'Special Providence' et al for V2. I think part of this is its new, so most AARs are in the gameplay phase and with a major expansion on the horizon (plus no doubt a couple of patches to follow) its no time to start an AAR that has the potential to last many a year. But I think its a bit more than that. In part a lot of AARs work around the game's electoral cycle so that tends to give you 25-30 updates for the century but I think its more how it plays. To me its a very elegant, slightly hands off game and once Avindian taught me how to grasp the basics it rattles along at a fair pace (even for me who is an inveterate pauser - I'd be rubbish at MP in the Paradox model ... I'm rubbish at AGEOD PBEM as well but for a different reason). Even so, unless a major war broke out, I could play 3-4 years at a sitting (& then that tended to become the currency of the next update). Its not character based (not that stops anyone from doing wonderful character based AARs in V1), but I do think there is scope for a slow detailed AAR as a sort of economic history.
Whether anyone would read I'm not sure - lets face it Economic History is (for perfectly understandable reasons) not the most popular subject area but all you need is there in the game.
Another reason why the ends seem odd is they often aren't that clear cut. You finish a HOI3 game usually with your faction utterly dominant (or utterly humbled) so the end isn't a product of the clock but of a clear cut outcome. You tend to finish an EU game as a relatively major power clearly ruling a portion of the globe (or as a WC) and so on. But its easy to reach the end of a V2 game as the big power in your own part of the globe, and with other big powers still around - so in the sense of the narrative we expect in an AAR the natural ending isn't there?
dunno, but thems my ideas at the moment ... enough rambling and on with the feedback:
That seemed so quick. Damn those Paradox people for making any game that lasts less than 400 years.
While you may have been missing the characters of the (nominal) human rulers, I thought you did well with displaying the gods' characters through their bitching and backstabbing. I suppose that it is part of the story of the Victorain age that individual characters start to become less important as modern nations/empires rise to the fore.
I'm glad it worked - I was delighted when I found I could access the diplomatic insults of the various rulers as that produced a mass of instances to hang their characters around (& at least to me, that some of them came from CK with fully formed characters and a lot of previous involvement helped)
Not the end, eh? What could be next... a conversion to HoI, perhaps?
Not sure it would work. The wider world wasn't that interesting, France is strong, Germany divided, UK still spans the globe, the only place where it could be feisty is in the Far East, but theres no clear map to the faction system (just a few states have gone Communist). Its a bit like why I never tried to convert my CK game to EU, apart from a stronger than normal Russia (& that Russia was anything but normal), the rest of the world offered nothing interesting to see how it would develop.
Although I haven't been commenting, I have been following and enjoying this AAR since the beginning (South American democracies are fun)
Well done, and good luck in your future endeavours!
appreciate your comments now. Yes Latin America is a hoot in V2. Theres a nice balance of power at the start, you need to dodge GPs etc (I was so lucky with Columbia wrecking its army in the forests of Brazil), but using the immigration and culture trick you can come to be hegemonic on the continent and usually play the colonization game too.
I really enjoyed this; taking Venezuela to #2 is no mean feat! I look forward to your next AAR.
What I liked was I never got the liberals out of power (gave too many political reforms too early), so I had to manage the economy with NFs, taxes, tariffs and the stockpile. I never had a sustained gap on a good I really needed (ammunition around the 1870s was the only one), so it proves those tools do work and it was fun playing around with them as I juggled between numbers (craftsmen were rarely a problem due to immigration) but I often needed fresh capitalist blood and focus on particular industrial branches.
I think it did work, but I'd agree that V2 doesn't make it easy to fit characters into as you have to keep track of them outside the confines of the game. Doubly hard for you as your characters were scattered around the major powers rather than concentrated in a single county.
Anyway, congratulations to Harry for brewing world-beating coffee for a century, and for being a surprisingly liberal sort.
as above, he was forced to be liberal ... I was actually aimiing for State Capitalism as most advice for Latin America on the main forum reccomends that as a key tool. But it was when I spotted the potential of playing around with the diplomatic messages that gave me a lot of character narrative. Some came from the CK game so Harry was easy to play as affable, incompetent and dangerous, Astarte as sex crazed, efficient and very dangerous, Micky as a bit of a bufoon with delusions of grandeur, Raphael as rather repressed and not happy with the world (that Italy built no rail roads to the 1900s was a real boon) & Gabi sort of lost between an allegiance to Harry and being, after all, the Archangel Gabriel.
It's over?!? The end came a bit quicker than I expected - but I guess bloodily crushing Communist insurrections while not being able to enact economic reforms does not for a lot of narrative make.
The promise of more to come (albeit it lacking any definitive timeline - I shall have to exercise patience) is very much welcome.
Proof - if proof were ever needed - that Harry is drinking stronger stuff than his coffee:
That isn't just a mild case of booze-induced poor judgment, this is beer goggles times ten. I think Harry's going to feel rather dirty when he wakes up next morning.
That last revolt was scary, so didn't dare risk even a minor war till it was over.
You mean the ultimate male bonding scene in the history of cinema does nothing for you ....
This does seem a bit sudden! Rather sad to see this end but at least it has gone out with something of a bang; millions of waiters on strike (note to self; never work for a coffee chain), more fluffy kittens causing fear
and mayhem, lots of diplomatic backstabbing as ever and a fantastic finish for Venezuela despite having suffered through Harry's management (the coffee must work well, Harry was really rather competent on the whole!).
I personally felt that V2 worked rather well for Harry and crew, you worked the events to fit the AAR rather brilliantly on the whole. Oh and I'm glad I'm not going nuts, I checked your inkwell recently and saw the mention for The Queen Mother's Diaries but I couldn't remember having seen such an AAR anywhere! So it is next and an EU3 AAR to boot. Looking forward to it.
I also shifted the time line of the events a lot to fit the narrative, but I think you could still work out the real sequence. And as with 'Tales' I also missed out a mass of important stuff (battles and so on) if they didn't fit my theme.
Aye, my last attempt at an EU one was a short disaster but I've been playing around with Hansa and reckon that Ming has real potential ... & since the Queen Mother is both immortal and her palace is a meeting place for various dieties (according to Chinese myths), who knows who wil turn up
But I won't start it till later in the year ... I need to get the GPW done before it takes over my life.