RB Pitboss #2 - Postgame Discussion Thread

[Sullla]

The game has finished! Thanks to everyone who participated, either playing or reading.

Let's condense the postgame discussion into this thead, instead of splitting it up into all of the various team threads.

[Sullla]

Some quick comments off the top of my head, before going off to read some of the spoiler threads for the first time:

Mortius - sorry, it was not your game. I really wish we had seen Mortius in some of the other Pitboss/PBEM games here.

Byzantium - having eventually gained control of your starting two cities, they were just too far away from each other. Especially with no copper or horses to play with! That kind of gambit only works when playing against the Templars.

Jowy - you made a daring, aggressive play that ultimately fell short and put you in an unwinnable position. It was a sound strategy, albeit very risky, even though it didn't work. We thought that the two biggest mistakes were planting Thebes in a spot with no food or production bonuses, and secondly building the Great Wall during a hot war with our team. I hope things are going better in the Pitboss #4 game.

Whosit - it seemed like you were sort of charging all over the map with no clear goal in mind. I think you needed to develop a stronger economy, since even Aggressive Praetorians lose their shine eventually. Signing peace with Korea rather than eliminating them was, in retrospect, one of the biggest mistakes of the game.

athlete - Great play in the early stages, then you kind of lost your way in the middle portion of the game with a bunch of wars that didn't yield much benefit. I think that playing as Willem with all that open land, your tech could have been a lot stronger. The wars with slaze were ultimately your undoing; why attack longbow against longbow instead of teching to your janissaries and going on the offensive then? Of course, those wars were really great for my team...

Dantski - you made the bold decision to invest in a huge army of Ancient Age axemen... and then did basically nothing with them. We thought your biggest mistake was not attacking Holy Rome immediately after changing over to our side. (Yes, I know, NAP and all that.) By the time you were finally ready to attack, Holy Rome had out-teched you, and with India on the other side, you really had nowhere to go. Thanks for the help in the endgame!

slaze - the early Incan leadership was in a great position to dominate the game, with open space to the south and both neighbors attacking in the opposite directions. I thought they largely squandered that lead though. slaze did a much better job, especially with expansion, making the one mistake of not having enough defense for all those cities. That invited attack from athlete and Whosit, and even though slaze defended BRILLIANTLY, of course he had to sacrifice his economy in the process. But hey, you out-survived both Ottomans and Rome, which is pretty impressive!

Korea - I'd give plako my vote for best player of the game. Korea was literally out of this game after Whosit's early attack, and then plako rebuilt the civ from the ground up into an island powerhouse which was one of the major contenders at game's end. Building the Great Lighthouse was the #1 best play of the whole game, IMO. No one thought you would outsurvive Whosit - simply amazing stuff!

Holy Rome - you guys put yourself in a good position economically, mostly by sitting back and not fighting anyone throughout the whole game. Your best play of the game was the Mausoleum/Taj combination, which did wonders (haha) for your team's position. The problem was that you didn't have enough land to be a viable competitor to our team, and the land that you did have was spaced out across all those islands. It was next to impossible to defend, and Speaker was taking advantage of that in the endgame war. When the Golden Ages + cheese gifts of money from athlete/Whosit wore off, you lost your economic edge over my team. And when we intervened in your war with Dantski, we pulled you into a war of attrition that you couldn't win. Thanks for being such good competition though - I wish your team hadn't turned on us in the initial alliance, although maybe you feel like you didn't have a choice.

Krill - I still have a lot to say here, not all of it positive, but for now I'll simply thank Krill for serving as our administrator. Although the ruleset didn't always work, it was better than having nothing at all.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Table of Contents: India

Is this example from the India thread useful/interesting enough that there are volunteers to compile a grand index of events reported in all threads?

[Sullla]

Alright, some thoughts on reading the Byzantium thread. I looked at Mortius' poor team, but there really wasn't anything to say there.

- Lots of spamming posts. I've never understood this desire, but whatever. You sure posted a lot.

- I never figured out your naming theme until now. Probably shouldn't have named the capital Athens with another Greece in the game though.

- Where are the pictures? Hard to see what's going on. For all those posts, I think there were maybe 30 pictures in 1000 posts.

- Why does everyone focus on our team, even at the start of the game with nothing going on? heh

- Honestly, darrelljs was the one that was right, over and over again. Advocating the less aggressive, practical plans. Why didn't you listen to him?

- Late contact due to lack of exploration units. I think that the failure to defog the territory immediately south of your capital (which was very strong) was a major factor in restrospect.

- I think the very long delay in researching BW/AH was the biggest fault in this game. No visibility on copper until T40? No horses until T65??? This led your team to select city spots ahead of time (which didn't have resources) and set you up for the disaster that followed. Mentally, your team had already decided on where you were sending the first settler BEFORE copper appeared - dangerous, very dangerous. You can't skip BW and AH for so long! (Remember how we made fun of Templars for doing the same thing?)

- Here's why this situation was different from "Pink Dot" in the Apolyton game. #1 in that game we had massive C&D knowledge on the Templars. We knew exactly what they were building, what techs they had, and so on. We KNEW that they had no resources whatsoever, and that they couldn't attack with anything better than quechuas. In this game, you didn't even know who or where your eastern neighbor was! #2 in the Apolyton game we were forced to settle Pink because the surrounding land around our capital was terrible. The south had the only good land available - it was a move made out of desperation and weakness, not strength. In this game, there was tons of beautiful grassland around your start, including a double-food resource with grassland location due west. Or a copper + food location to the south. #3, when we settled Pink in the Apolyton game we sent along 2 warriors and an archer, which made for strong early game defense. In this game, you settled aggressively with no archer defenders. All of this added up to an insanely risky blunder. Have to say, this was a classic case of copying the Pink Dot move without understanding the context in which it was made.

- Seriously, you guys didn't know IKZ eliminated Mortius? Were you watching CivStats at all?

- I really can't believe that veterans of the Apolyton game were so keen on "signing a border agreement" with Jowy. Remember how that played out with Templars? Border agreements are WORTHLESS! The only thing that matters is claiming land for yourself, and then being strong enough to defend it. Come on guys!

- With a military of three warriors, and no resources connected, your build path in the capital was worker -> worker -> Oracle. Ummm... do I even need to comment on that?

- Also, waiting until T47 to get a second city up kind of sucks. We had city #2 on T35, and city #3 on T50. Plus more workers and more actual defensive units!



- This just is not a good situation.

- sunrise, have to call shame on you for letting this team go for the *ORACLE* before even getting Archery tech, while settling aggressively. The Paris play actually would have worked, if your team had brought 2 archers along to the party. Instead, you guys were off in religious lala land.

- Also hard to believe that a single email from athlete could confuse your team so easily. People lie all the time in diplomacy - don't trust anyone!

- Although, that being said, athlete's emails were completely full of lies and falsehoods. Like, 100% "lying through my teeth while doing the exact opposite" messages. Yikes. Mis-clicked warrior indeed....

- And also, what was up with Jowy's diplomacy??? He completely changed his stance towards your team with no provocation whatsoever. Have to say, felt similar to our relationship with him too. Now I need to go read the Jowy spoiler thread and see what was going on there.

- Moving defending warriors *OUT* of your aggressive city, when you're expecting a likely attack from another team. Ummm, regoarrarr, what were you thinking there, dude?

- Keep in mind that if you had just researched Animal Husbandry tech, you would have had a horse resource at the capital which could have been hooked up in time to counter with chariots of your own...

- I don't know why you continued building Oracle in your capital rather than nonstop archers. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you built a useless Oracle rather than letting another team have it, but I don't understand the reasoning. Surely Iron Working was useless unless there was an iron directly under your capital city, right (?)

- I also enjoyed the "look how many cities India has!" diplomacy posts, which I expect to find in probably every team's thread at some point.

Overall, risky as it was, the forward city play really could have worked. The biggest fault as I see it was ignoring Archery tech for so long. If you simply knocked out Archery before going for Meditation/Priesthood, you could have had 1-2 archers in that frontline city, which would have laughed off chariot attackers. I honestly think the Oracle killed you in this game. (That, or you could have done what darrell suggested and planted Paris one tile west to grab copper immediately. That also would have worked.)

More than anything else, what this game shows is lack of information. darrell commented about one point about playing in the dark, and I think that was very much true. Information is everything, because it lets you make informed decisions. When you don't know what's going on, you're forced to play blind, and you inevitably make mistakes... like getting rushed by chariots from your neighbor, haha. I was surprised at how little information there really was on your neighbors despite all those thread posts. (Like, no reading of the Demographics charts and analyzing your neighbors strengths and weaknesses.) We knew better than you did that athlete was building up for a major attack!

One other thing which was controversial at the time: Jowy's decision not to send iron to Byzantium to save them. I still think it would have been better for Greece to save this team, and I'm not saying that from the perspective of "it would have been better for India". The key to winning one of these games, if you've got a neighbor on both sides, is to get a rock-solid alliance with one of those teams, then go conquer in the other direction. My team failed at that, miserably, in the early game... and you all saw what happened when we finally did get such an alliance with Dantski later. (Just conquer around the circle in clockwise fashion.) Jowy could have saved Byzantium - with minimum effort - securing himself a very strong alliance to his east, while also slowing down an otherwise runaway Ottoman team.

Now, you have to contrast that against having a runaway friendly Ottoman team as Greece's neighbor, which is the other option. I still say that's a worse option for Greece, because you're counting on a team whose core cities are *VERY* far away to save you if you come under attack. In the end, athlete did basically nothing to help save Jowy when the time came. Even more simpler than that, if I'm forming a long alliance, I want to be the strong partner in the alliance, not the weaker one. I want someone who's not a threat to win the game to be the one helping me out (see: Dantski in the lategame). I'd rather have a partner like that than a runaway Ottoman team who already had lied to and attacked their neighbor. Plus, it's just good to have your neighbors fighting each other and weakening themselves. Anyway, that's the way I would have played things, feel free to disagree.

It was also interesting to see how much flack regoarrarr received back in December, being attacked as a double-mover and rules bender (or whatever). Perhaps like a recent situation involving another team, eh? I think the real solution is to create a clear double-move rule which could be applied universally to all of our Pitboss games in the future. That seems like the next step we as a community should take, as it would eliminate 90% of the drama/controversy which takes place in these games. I'll try to post some thoughts on that soon.

[WilliamLP]

Originally Posted by Sullla

Now, you have to contrast that against having a runaway friendly Ottoman team as Greece's neighbor, which is the other option. I still say that's a worse option for Greece, because you're counting on a team whose core cities are *VERY* far away to save you if you come under attack.

On the other hand, the overriding fact is that you now get both a solid ally to the east, _and_ an entire player's worth of land to expand freely into! I don't see how letting a neighbour die for making a stupid mistake (especially if they're a better player than you) isn't a complete no-brain choice.

[Selrahc]

Korea - I'd give plako my vote for best player of the game. Korea was literally out of this game after Whosit's early attack, and then plako rebuilt the civ from the ground up into an island powerhouse which was one of the major contenders at game's end. Building the Great Lighthouse was the #1 best play of the whole game, IMO.

It almost didn't happen. The Ottomans had a detailed plan for building the great lighthouse through forest chops. I think it was delayed for a few turns as the workers were needed elsewhere, and by then Korea had managed to grab the wonder.

Korea were about 7 turns clear, but if Ottomans hadn't delayed and Korea had...

[darrelljs]

Originally Posted by Sullla

- Honestly, darrelljs was the one that was right, over and over again. Advocating the less aggressive, practical plans. Why didn't you listen to him?

Brilliant analysis as usual !

I don't think The Oracle was as big a mistake as the location of Paris. I think if we get Copper at Paris we're in a good spot to defend the city and perhaps even avoid war with the Ottomans. But yeah, there isn't much positive to say in terms of our strategy. We made multiple mistakes that culminated in our early removal. Its too bad because we had a nice leader/civ and a pretty good location.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

Originally Posted by WilliamLP

I don't see how letting a neighbour die for making a stupid mistake (especially if they're a better player than you) isn't a complete no-brain choice.

Its funny how polarizing this issue was in the lurker thread . Yeah we were dumb and deserved to die, but that has nothing to do with whether us actually dying was good or bad for Jowy. As I said before, we were willing to cede major tracts of land to him in return for metal, so really he'd get a better ally AND the land by helping us. I still think there was residual bitterness over our hard tactics in negotiating the original border agreement, and that was the main reason he wasn't willing to help us against the Ottomans.

Darrell

[Krill]

If Jowy had given the iron, he would have made an enemy forever with Ottomans, and tbh, I still think Ottomans would have won, but that is beside the point. If there had been a long fight between Ottomans and Byz, then who would have been able to attack India later on? Greece, Mali, HRE, Rome.

Byz couldn't have helped versus India regardless of what happened, so from Greece' point of view, what was the upside to keeping them around, if Ottomans were going to be friendly and helpful anyway? So to answer Darrells' question, he got the land, and Ottomans weren't a bad ally, and he got the help against India in the HA.

Greece had their foreign policy set by Ottomans in this respect, Byz couldn't control it. I reckon Jowy made the right choice there.

[Adlain]

Maya???, i assume you mean Greece