Hell, late as usual.
Firstly apologies for being so predetermined in this game at the start, I hope I
can explain it.
Having never really made italy work well going west I wanted to see if it was
at all possible. To me it was clear that Germany and England BOTH needed to
play ball to allow italy to progress against France. I didn't know David in
France before so that it was easy to decide to pursue this opening. It was
clear that it was dicey, but it looked good when Germany happily agreed to going
against Fance also. Britian hummed and made non intelligable noises but I hoped
that he would jump on board once GI got moving west.

So I went west and Adam funked. He cried about it afterwards - there was a great
nashing of teeth but by then it was too late. We had France very exposed at the
start with him gaining only one unit in the first year (if my memory serves me
right), but Adam couldn't commit (Adam, Mun - Bur (or the lack of it) was our
downfall mate!) and then the whole thing fell apart.

At which stage I went into survival mode, made grovelling peace with David,
tried to kick life into the agreed AGI only to find out that AT had something
much better going, got rolled over, thrown a life line (which looked more like a
noose) and tried to reposition in turkey (ha, ha). The "plan" being to encourage
Austria to stab Turkey by weakening turkey so much and then become the new
turkey!

Apologies for being uncommunicative in this one. RL was a bugger (another
daughter born a few months ago) and my perspectives for the game were poor. It
was also plain to see that agendas from a previous game were still a big
influence here.

Congrats to Fletcher (though i think you should have gone for it too) and many
thanks to all especially Craig for the best GMing that I have seen in a long
time. Those regular reminders saved me from a few NMRs.

Hope to "see" everybody again soon.
Cheers, David O'Callaghan