Ok, some overall comments. I think my biggest problem is that I'm playing too quickly. Not in the sense that I'm missing what he's doing - if I do, that's where you see me scroll up, and it looks like I do that really quickly, but I see what he did, and that's enough. But what I mean is that I'm not thinking and planning enough, and the big thing is that I'm not adjusting to his strategies enough. Probably this is a consequence of playing way too much, and so going at a lightning speed all the time. I'm playing BM like I would against another BM player, and I think usually against his engines, I need to do more build up, and BM-playing isn't necessarily my problem. Of course, part of the issue is that going BM often IS my problem, and he's a top-notch engine builder. And actually, his unique skill, from my view, is the ability to prolong the games in order to give his engine time to be worth it. What else? Most of my disparaging comments are due to my own frustration; this is about as frustrated as I get, certainly the most frustrated I get over something like this game. Like, I actually think that he played the first game quite badly, and after this, a couple mistakes for sure that I can point out to you (throne room as first action, not ending the game when he could with a lead, which he did I think twice, maybe in the same game? Not that I blame him so much for the first one, it was actually sort of tricky, just I saw it while sitting there being tortured by his endless turns; the second one is the outpost thing, and yeah, it's idiotic to take an outpost turn when you can end game with a win in your normal turn, because maybe you won't be able to in your outpost turn, apart from it being just sort of a running up the score deal), but most of the time where I'm saying 'I don't like that' I mean 'I don't like that' and not 'I'm sure this is bad.' My big issue is that apparently I don't like some things that are really, really good.
Shark_Bait - yeah, this is an issue. Though I would like to point out that part of my strategy was predicated on guessing that he is going to hit my duchies or SR, and so I planned for this by over-greening a bit. Then he hits the TR and I'm left stuck in a bit of a rut. Also, hitting duchy or SR gives something back that's going to be a lot more useful than the copper.
philosophyguy - excellent! I must agree with you here. The gardens I actually miscounted for, and thought that I had like 10 fewer cards than I actually did. But not looking to end the game right is something that plagues me for sure. I will get to a big lead, and then I usually go for the most points, because most often, your best bet of insulating your lead is to just make it bigger, if you can't end the game immediately. But there are some cases, like here where he's building a mega engine, that that isn't true, and you need to forego bigger leads to look for ending the game, and I seem to be not so hot at that, at least I wasn't in this match.
paddyodoors - definitely not just an off day, this seems to happen every time I play the guy. I actually even gained rating points yesterday despite this thrashing, probably from knocking off AVeryHappyFish a couple times at the end of the day. Also, I did have gardens in mind when picking up that explorer.
About the CR logs, they should be up now (it's much easier to do them for a big string of games like this or a tourney series than for my random games I post, which I have to hunt for out of thousands of logs...), but they didn't exist when you guys were posting the comments
def, I'm not just picking stuff up randomly. BUT, I'm not at all the best at getting my components in the right order.
Rest of the stuff seems mostly game specific, which is going to mean - A New Post (and hopefully, A New Hope).