to Wlk777
Remember our last game (with a disclaimer about my skill level, obviously). At my respawn I had 2 cons and a Dragon Utopia, but absolutely no wood, plus a bug: on the way to an adjacent secondary site, I hit a mountain (I don't think I've encountered that before). You only had an external dwelling of elves and a portal in the dungeon.
Meaning all week I spent every turn fighting off skeleton piles for resources for horses in the citadel, then money for redemption, and I could only get a 3-stack of cons around 125 or so... While you stripped a free respawn (though I stole a couple of piles from there) and came to me at 126 with your native power. Which mattered more—my 3 angels with a level 12 Valkyrie or your 20 elves and company with a level 7 Kirr—you saw for yourself.
Let's ban cons, double-build, external dwellings, and let something else matter. Like the wood piles at the sawmill.
For me, the whole beauty of randomness is exactly in the randomness.
Damn, it kills me when you spend 3 weeks calculating things, making some beautiful moves on the last turn, fighting off stuff with your turns, overtaking the opponent in terms of stats, and then they get a tea kettle or a book in the Dragon Utopia and that's it—the excuse is ready: obviously he won, he had a Dragon Utopia with a tea kettle! I'm not talking specifically about myself right now, but in general. Rarely does anyone write: "I lost because I played like sh**" (c). Of course not, the opponent just had too many cons and snails.