I think you should have kept a stronger partnership with Austria. When you stabbed them in Spring 03, you severely weakened a buffer between you and Russia and you and Germany. You ended up losing a center in the deal, and you had to redeploy a fleet back into the Adriatic to get back Venice, weakening your attack on Turkey.

you can learn a lot from studying the first few years of any game you play. ill give you some positives and some negatives of your play

positives: love the move to piedmonte to scare france into thinking youre taking marseilles and curbing his opening growth.

love the move to greece. if you can ally with austria and guarantee yourself greece in A01 then you can ensure future growth as italy. alllying with austria and not getting greece means that you will not be very successful in a campaign against the east.

you did well in dismantling turkey and continuing growth

negatives: poor defense. italy doesnt take much to defend the boot but you have to leave an army nearby to keep out unwanted visitors. if all your units are way out east then youre begging to get stabbed and brutally so, usually by austria but sometimes by france. its suprising to see germany take the first of your centers.

you turned on austria way too early. if russia is growing quickly then you really need to continue communicating with the rest of the board. russia has the fastest path to victory out of any of the 7 countries and if R gets out of control, the worst thing you can do is ally with him, especially when you have half or less than half the centers he does. you can simply expect him to steamroll you as well. only after russia was under control should you have turned on austria and only if you dont have an enemy in france yet.

if you would have continued talking with germany then you would have had austria and germany focused on russia keeping him at bay and germany would have stayed out of your lands and giving you the ability to remove turkey and gain one last build. if you would have continued working with austria.

the best thing you can do for yourself is to come up with a plan and stick to it. keep an ally as long as you can until you have the upper hand and no enemies that need attention.

As a response, I had planned to ally with Russia at the get-go at the expense of Austria. However, he was new, so he took what was supposed to be a subtle hint and took it as an outright order. Seeing Austria near destruction encouraged me to hedge my bets and take what I could. As you can see, there was clearly a lack of coordination or cooperation on the western side, and I was too focused on pulling off my precious lepanto to properly defend myself

I always prefer to have a 'buffer' between me and a powerhouse. You should have kept austria alive from russia's advances so you'd have time to grow. If russia was a true ally, he would let you get to his size before you meet so there wouldn't be tension. You were tiny when he broke through so it shouldn't be a surprise he ended up stabbing you out of turkey and that left you with nothing...

The fact that you had turns without growth and tunis was sitting for the taking made for a tough predicament for you. I'm not a big fan of the lepanto because italy gets stretched too thin. You'll notice that it was very difficult to defend yourself when russia started knocking on turkey's door when you had a foothold. If you have turkey, you better have a chunk of austria to have a united front to be able to defense... otherwise you end up pushed back with only what you had when you started....

One last thing that is more of an overall thought: you wanted to crush france, you had the opportunity, because A/T/R was a cluster and they'd have battled it out until england or germany interceded (or two of them joined against the other). This would have given you access to france without having to worry too much about your back end.

knowing when to work with someone, when to turn on someone and when to try reworking things with an enemy is a trained skill and has quite a learning curve to it. a good rule of thumb is to try to have people focused on the largest man on the map (even if youre allied with him/her) until you're that larger man.

foster relationships. be vague in communication where you can, give detail when you have to and keep more promises than you break.

knowing when to work with someone, when to turn on someone and when to try reworking things with an enemy is a trained skill and has quite a learning curve to it. a good rule of thumb is to try to have people focused on the largest man on the map (even if youre allied with him/her) until you're that larger man.

foster relationships. be vague in communication where you can, give detail when you have to and keep more promises than you break.

Hey Triskelli. I have some imput into this game that I'd like to share with you, but I'd like to wrap up our current game first. It's funny because I just chanced by this thread and realized a couple of posts in that it was you who'd started it.

Pardon my typing... this phone.