Ashe

[Rhea]

This thread is for Ashe's questions and finalist answers.

[Ashe]

To Dorothea, I feel your speech is under-selling your game. Like all I got from it is that you made connections with players, including players you normally wouldn't have, but I feel that's something the other finalists also accomplished.

What was your perspective on getting the F4 tie to happen? Did you play any active role in that?

What happened on the church tribe? Did anything happen on the church tribe beyond the idol find?

What did you do during the F11 round? I believe I know the answer to this one but it's weird it went unstated.

Who were you talking to when talking about targeting Shamir or there being an idol between Shamir and Edelgard?

[Ashe]

To Shamir, I do feel your speech adequately covered most of your game and gave me insight to parts I wasn't working with you during. This is probably a very odd question but one thing I've never wrapped my head around is that it had always felt like you were under-valuing Dimitri as an ally. In the early game prior to his first mutiny incident you didn't seem to care for him at all, you were ready to get rid of him when he mutinied to the flame army, you tried to at the merge boot, and you willingly let him go at F9. Whereas it seemed (though I could be wrong on this) Dimitri always had you high on his list of allies, being only behind the other deer.

So I guess I'm asking you to either explain why my assertion of you under-valuing Dimitri as an ally is wrong, or to explain how your game was in a good enough position to never need him.

[Dorothea]

Yeah I should stop doing that >.>  TBH, I'm not great at showing off and it just feels unnatural.  Edie speech talks about how awesome she is and I'm over here nodding in agreement and getting called out for not trying to win. 

Don't worry, I'm going to answer all these questions honestly and fucking blow your minds. 

*Ahem*

F4 tie was a complex situation.  We were "working" together at that point but only out of necessity.  I was hoping you would just stay the course but understood why you considered voting me out near the end.  After I gave you my pitch, which come on... that was a really good pitch, I realized my only other option was to rely on the connection I had with Edie.  I solidly believed that I had a better relationship with her then Shamir did.   Yeah they worked together and had the same strategic mind, but after bitching about the game and reminiscing, it became clear to me she might give me a chance.  She has her own reasons and stated them in her speech but for me, I just needed her to consider the positives of me staying.  It was pretty much the same pitch I gave you... why eliminate me when I'm a gamebot that favors control?  My vote would lean Shamir and Edie was willing to take the risk I'd lose at firemaking to win my vote.  I also told her I would praise her in my FTC speech and I'm not about being a dick and recanting that.

Church?  Nothing.  No for real, that tribe was boring.  I liked the people but all we did was build relations and the only real exciting thing to come of it was me winning the idol clue for us.  There were little things that I did such as give the idol clue to Lorenz before everyone else as a sign of trust and then Lorenz made a private group with Raphael/me/him/Petra so it was the start of our first "merge" alliance but for the most part, that segment of the game had very little impact on the game outside of relationship building.

I need to address the F11 round in a seprate post I think as well as the idol theory. Taking a break.

[Dorothea]

Oohhhhh kay continuing on.

F11 A.K.A.  The fucked round


This was the real start of merge.  Just before this round, an alliance of Hapi/Lorenz/Raphael/Petra/Myself was established.  In my head, I didn't see Raphael as someone that would stick with this for long.  I also knew that Lorenz viewed Hapi as a threat to win and would want to make a move against her eventually but I expect this to be several rounds later.  We as a group worked together to force out Claude and establish that we were a team.

During F11, Hapi and Shamir had their own disagreement that I was not apart of.  What I was busy focusing on was building a relationship with Caspar/Felix and preparing what I wanted to be the majority of F9 and F7.  As long as I could maintain myself in the majorities and keep people I trusted in them, I didn't care too much who went.  Felix/Caspar fit into that for me.  When talk of the Blue Lions being a threat started to circulate, I instantly knew this was fear mongering to push a blue vote.  There were several rumors flying about on who said what with Hapi vs Shamir but the biggest one was that Hapi wanted to target a blue, specifically you Ashe.  This was never true and I doubted Hapi wanted to push anyone at all.  She was likely just compromising.

In our talks with Petra/Hapi/myself, Hapi was just trying to figure out how to get out of the situation and only wanted Shamir gone for spreading misinformation.  I attempted to rally our alliance to stay the course on Shamir but once word got back to me that Lorenz leaked the alliances existence, I knew it was over.  Sure enough... Raphael ditched and was voting with Shamir which is where I expected him to end up all along and now we have Lorenz to deal with.  I thought it was better to cut our losses and target Lorenz so that I could keep Hapi in longer but unfortunately, he had an idol.  There were too many unknowns and too many players for me to put my foot down on anything so I searched for compromises that would benefit my F9 and F7 vision.  Ideally, we should have stayed the course on Shamir but that wasn't possible after Lorenz was being pinned for leaking information to everyone.

---------------------------

The Idol Theory is a bit easier to explain.  Early in the game, Edie approached me about the hidden idol hunt she found in a spectator's account.  This was my first warning sign that Edie was observant and thus more likely to find an idol.  She name dropped Raphael as another person she told about this and I kept a mental tab on them.  Raphael then proved to be decent at challenges through our time at Black Eagles.

By the time Merge hit, Shamir and Edie had been together for a while and I figured they would be close.  If Edie did have an idol, Shamir would surely know about it because of how quick Edie was willing to share information with me.  I had two other hints, one being that Shamir panic'd with me during F11 attempting to confirm there were no votes on her and two, a more obvious hint, was how good she was at the cartridge hunting challenge.  That's EXACTLY the type of skill set you need to be good with idol hunting.  So I discussed most of my idol fears with Petra/Caspar/Ashe as I expect that to be the F7 majority alliance at some point.  But in order to maximize our success, we NEEDED to pull idols out somehow.  I tried several times to get Caspar/Petra to consider voting Shamir in a blindside but each time was met with resistance.

[Shamir]

This is probably a very odd question but one thing I've never wrapped my head around is that it had always felt like you were under-valuing Dimitri as an ally. In the early game prior to his first mutiny incident you didn't seem to care for him at all, you were ready to get rid of him when he mutinied to the flame army, you tried to at the merge boot, and you willingly let him go at F9. Whereas it seemed (though I could be wrong on this) Dimitri always had you high on his list of allies, being only behind the other deer.

So I guess I'm asking you to either explain why my assertion of you under-valuing Dimitri as an ally is wrong, or to explain how your game was in a good enough position to never need him.

Great question. The worst part is that I would need Dimitri to actually come in and confirm or deny if he felt close to me. I never really knew where he was at.

When the two of us first formed a support link, I was very enthusiastic. Being right to the point, in post #9 I made myself a little vulnerable, shared a bit of information, and asked him what he was hoping to get out of our support link. I was expecting something like, let's work together, or use this to our advantage somehow, but the answer I got surprised and disappointed me. He said that it would be like a normal conversation through PM [#10]. So, I took him at his word, and treated him like a normal person who I wasn't really allied with. This combined with the fact that he only really talked about how he liked Flayn and Annette and Lorenz confused me greatly. He was always willing to say he valued others, but never me. I felt like I never knew what his intentions were, long term or short term. I think he had it out for Dorothea for some reason...? But I don't know why. So if he did consider me an ally, he had me fooled.

By the time we were at F9, ROCKS + Purple Hotties covered the entire game minus Dimitri. If it wasn't Dimitri leaving, I would have to really justify flipping on someone to keep him: and there was no one I could justify flipping on at that point.

[Ashe]

To Edelgard, I found your speech to be very strong though wonder if it's overselling parts of your game. I am mostly satisfied by your explanation of the F4 round which is not something I at all expected to be able to say.

You had described Lorenz having the idol on Leicester as your biggest obstacle this game. I'm a rather speculative person, so had he not Lysithea stays and I think it's reasonable to assume the game plays out the same up to F14 with Raphael having the second idol Lorenz got. Your choice on if Mercedes still has the dancer idol or not, how do you forsee the next few rounds of the game being/playing-out (more) favorably for you?

[Edelgard]

I'm really glad for that. Ashe, if you had said nothing at all to me from the jury I would have understood. I'm sorry for not warning you what I was doing, but reasonably I thought if I did you and Shamir would kill me. If I don't post a Closing Speech it'll be because Shamir found my house on Geoguesser and shot me.

Speculating on a future with Lysithea instead of Lorenz.. The hardest part of speculating on this is how different Flame Emperor's Army would be. Lys didn't seem like she disliked Hapi, she didn't like you for abandoning BL though. It's entirely possible the votes play out the same, but it's also possible without the Idol as a reason to dislike Mercedes the votes are you and Hapi. Shamir would have pushed to keep you though so it would have been fun to disagree with her so early. I think at the very least we vote Hapi instead of Mercedes and then Mercedes instead of Yuri.

From there it's hard to say. The beginning of merge was dictated entirely by Hapi. There's probably a too-many-Eagles panic but with so many numbers on our side it likely targets Raphael or Dorothea? The main difference for me is instead of fighting for control at the merge we would have started with it. Most importantly Claude probably gets locked into jury and if there's anyone I think would be locked as mine it's him.