because anny has been going about making a huge stink of this, I'm here to dispell the propoganda.

this is a half-second created chart of my decisions, anyone with half a brain should be able to follow my subsequent explanation:

my position was behind a single (dead?) asteroid, it was obviously quite tempting to sit there and defend because our empires were comparable in size and I had the desert, making it seem that I would be able to outproduce him. under normal circumstances I wouldnt have engaged in that, but because his HW was diametrically opposed on the star's grav well, because pirates were looming and because his fleet had the initial upper hand I chose to remain on the defensive because frankly I had no other choice. offensive against his fleet would have ruined me very quickly.

so throughout the game why didnt I send a strike force against his HW like I did with Ron? simple: I didnt have star superiority nor proximity, if I had sent anything to attack Anny's planets directly either 1) he would send out a small detatchment to remove them or 2) he would build proper defenses at his HW in time. option 3 would be a large detatchment, but he would have been able to simultaneously defend against me AND screw my internal planets over. I had no way of gaining star superiority due to his overproduction of fleets, and was thus, utterly and completely fucked.

everything cascades from there.

at the point where we became interlocked I already had built up a solid infrastructure at my desert planet, the culture grab *seemed* to be doing okay, and my economy appeared to be outdoing Annies. the first time he attacked he was able to do significant damage to me, but I had wiped out his fleet. eet brought up a valid point: why didnt I counterattack? simple: doing so would have ruined me, he already had minor defenses at the asteroid and I had no way of grabbing it before he could build a fleet capable of destroying mine and sending me back, this time down a cap and a few frigs and with a fresh armada on my tail.

after that it was an engagement of several balanced fleets that *began* to leen towards using LRMs, I was a fool not to notice, but there wasnt much I could have done in that respect anyway: so why didnt I produce fighters and light carriers
1) nobody knew at the time that fighters were particularly effective against LRMs, including me.
2) producing an abundance of them would require quite a bit of money including research and
3) they take time to build their fighters, time I did not have in any measure.

why didnt I reconfigure my infrastructure to build frigs? well I tried, but by the time it became apparent to me (yes I fucked up) that it was the move to make I was already too far gone to do anything about it.

so finally I have no fleet and anny bypasses my asteroid and I have the balls to say "hey, its your game, we done here?" because I wasnt interested in wasting either of our times for something I couldnt salvage.

anny you didnt make any goofy blunders, but you can hardly call your victory strategy of spam and spike "skillful", let alone enough to judge me every time I open my mouth. frankly this loss came at more of my lack of choice and/or decisions on my part that seem stupid in retrospect because we already know how things unfolded. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just kidding themselves.

I dare anyone to look through the replay with simply what I had in my intelligence and tell me that they would do different. the options were VERY limited, and while the map looked apparently even it was quite not. I admit, I didnt always make the smartest choices: but the story would be the same had I made any other moves.

finally eets wanted to know why I was making a culture grab: the point was that after anny built defense against it I might have had a chance at the pirates, an apparent waste.

so I've had enough of the utter BULLSHIT flowing from both anny and eets saying that somehow anny's actions were more skillful, there was almost NO skill going into those battles. "skill" would have been sending a small detatchment away while engaging my center fleet to tear up my infrastructure, rather than blindly sending wave after wave of units and using trial and error to realize "duh, I should use LRMs!". Annys actions were more or less common sense "lets attack him", and for him to judge me when I'm discussing completely different battles is total folly. total and complete foolish folly.