About this time I get writing... Needless to say I'm rather saddened by the fact that my sole partner has about the same radius of exploration as the partner who dropped and it's already 25 minutes into the game... I figure that he's going to get hit hard and so I start expanding his way and building some military to stop any charge from that direction (red). So finally while slowly gaining ground against blue, red mauls my partner who runs to my town with about 6 vills saying "he rushed me" or something like that... Note that he had just bronzed at about 23 minutes with a dozen farms... and red came into his town with about 4 compies at 25 mins... so I build a few galleys to harass red's fishing... About 30 minutes in, yellow has finally rebuilt (quite good seeing as the damage I did) and my galleys just got slaughtered by red triremes as he had ironed... so since I've boomed I have a chance to iron and I take it figuring red will be knocking on my door any minute...
A few minutes later about 8 compies and a cav show up which I dispose of via the first elephant I built and a few chariot archers... start my upgrade to scythes because I know that flooding scythes is about the only good thing about phoeny in iron... at least with the egyptian still in the game... finally red shows up with a sizable force... (about 20 horse archers with alchemy) which I turn back with my last mass of chariot archers + a couple stone throwers + the element of surprise (he was running by them and got rather shredded...) Finally the scythe upgrade completes... and so I start rolling out scythes (just in the nick of time) to take out the masses of horse archers that red had... On the other end, blue was falling back into yellow (who had ironed in the meantime) I decided I needed to take the seas... so I built a decent sized trireme force and tried to smash the red dock... apparently he was thinking the same thing because he smashed my triremes... After stalemating red's advance at about 7, I owned from 3 to 6 on the map... red started taking out my docks one by one... and I had no wood (argh and I was phoeny even) or time to build a counterforce that could equal the size of his force... so slowly we lost the sea...
About this time blue resigned... a small victory... as I rolled to about 2, yellow resistance started getting tough until I was trying to fight a stalemated battle on two fronts (at 3 and at 6) and finally had lost the sea... So I keep pumping scythes but it was pretty hopeless at that point... In the meantime my partner is wondering why I'm whining about losing the seas... "I was never on the seas so no big deal" or something to that effect... Finally sick of fighting a 1 person war (ok he built 2 stone throwers to add to the cause after blue was dead) and without any more food, not having anything that would be effective (phoe stone throwers vs shang cats and massed yamato horse archers not pretty) and losing from 3 to 4 and from 6 to 5 said gg and resigned... What really got my goat though was that my partner (who I might add was still farming with about 8 vills left and hadn't done squat the whole game) said "he's no fun, what a quitter" right after I resigned... Of course I think he realized about 2 minutes later when about 20 horse archers, 10 cats, 5 ballistas, and a slew of compies entered his town that I had a good reason to resign... but it just made me mad at the time... That and the fact that the opponents didn't even acknowledge my gg's...
In any event, 1 v 3 isn't much fun... Anyone of you ever won a 1 v 3 against players who weren't completely lost?