RB Pitboss #2 - Postgame Discussion Thread

[Square Leg]

Actually - Korea's game was right up there with India's for me. I really enjoyed watching them rescue themselves from certain death at the hands of Rome to then eventually get retribution and re-take their homeland and more.

Had the game lasted a 20t longer I think Korea would have been a firm 2nd place - even when the game ended HRE were on the backfoot and probably already in 3rd.

The nice thing about this game was the variety in the threads:

MP101 in Spulla's with some of the best posts going on MM and MP style.

Paranoia101 in Whosit's with some of the best quotes i've read here at RB. The "meth'd up hippo" was pretty funny!

Island rescue in plako's/broker's was really fun to read.

HRE was a really good thread too with a lot of good posts - I like the way that the thread really took the lurker through many decisions and gave reasoning.

Athlete/Kalins thread was really good for a time until the shit hit the fan and the posts's dwindled - I understand why that happened.

Jowy/Yaz showed us the youtube video with the really cool voice over!

Slaze would post nothing for an age and then cobble together an awesome shot of millions of LB's marching all over the place! Superb!

I didn't really get into the Byzantine thread much since the wall of text was tricky - pictures help so much! I was rooting for them to pull off a Korea though and excape to the islands! It would have been cool to see two civ's relegated to the islands.

Mortius - such a shame - He was the one who started PB2 and we haven't seen him since he was eliminated.

Top game this one - really enjoyed it.

[pocketbeetle]

Agree with SL above.

Particularly Whosit's thread. xD

[T-hawk]

Originally Posted by Sullla

Planting cities 4 tiles apart does help if you think you're going to be attacked.

Isn't that also how to get forked by 2-move mounted units?

[athlete4life10]

Well this is attempt #2 here to respond. I had typed up a full response last night and somehow managed to delete it rather than post it. I was quite frustrated as it took me a long time to get it done!

Originally Posted by Sullla

Well, this should be interesting. athlete and kalin's thread:

- Warrior heavy opening seemed to work out OK, although it was slow in terms of growth. Taking the capital to size 4 before building a worker is generally not the best move though. I'm not at all sure about the value of whipping two workers consecutively either (double-whip followed by single whip). That dropped the capital back to size 1, and further added a -2 happiness penalty which froze it at size 3! (size 4 with furs) Plus the capital had to spend turns regrowing before it could start on a settler for the second city. Anyway, certainly an interesting opening, but possibly not the best.

I'd have to agree with you here. I had the same initial thoughts that speaker voiced in your thread. Go big (or risky) or go home. Start worker first (we did start with a warrior after all) but I never really voiced this with him and I acquiesced quite easily to his wishes of going warrior first. I would definitely do it differently if I had to do it over again!

Originally Posted by Sullla

- I really don't understand why athlete and kalin were carrying on separate diplomatic correspondences. That had to have been extremely confusing. Why not pick one person and have them send all the messages (?)

This was my fault. Kalin handled most of it initially but there were definite points where I was feeling like I wanted more control over it. Given that it's a pretty glaring weakness with me I probably should have let well enough alone here.

Originally Posted by Sullla

I hope this doesn't sound arrogant or anything. athlete specifically asked us at one point in the game for tactical advice, so here's some of it now that the game is over.

Absolutely not. I appreciate the comments. Definitely very constructive.

Originally Posted by Sullla

- I don't really approve of outright lying to other teams (worker "accidentally roading"), but I guess that's more of a personal thing. Some of the other lurkers are apparently OK with everything that goes on diplomatically. What's funny is that the roading action was completely unnecessary, and actually conterproductive, as said above. Byzantium made the mistake of not realizing what was going on, so you could say it was their own fault for believing such obvious half-truths.

Frankly I just saw no other way to get around it when we got called out on it. I couldn't tell them hey we're going to attack you soon! Within the context of the game I think that this was ok. The post in the tech thread regrettably was not. The whole outcome of the war is as much their fault as it was our success though.

Originally Posted by Sullla

- It wasn't a bad move to try and broker peace between Rome and Korea, in the hopes of getting Whosit to settle towards Inca. Of course, it didn't work out in the long run, not least because your own team encouraged Whosit to keep attacking other targets, but the thinking at the time was sound.

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Sullla

- I have no objections to this kind of stuff, and I like having lurkers involved in the games. But seeing how Krill relentlessly attacked lurkers in our own thread and posted multiple CODE OF CONDUCT messages... well, it's interesting to see posts like this in the other threads. Very interesting.

I'm pretty sure Krill's post was prior to him being voted in as admin (if that matters). I know there were some definite posts in the first ~160 pages of your thread that I thought definitely crossed the line. However some of those came from dedicated lurkers and I don't care enough to try and sort it all out...

Originally Posted by Sullla

- I did appreciate reading your post months after the fact where you thought we deserved the second half of the turn split, athlete. Thank you very much for that!

Hey NP .

Originally Posted by Sullla

- I made this point after reading Whosit's thread, which bears repeating here. A lot of the lurker commentators suggested that athlete's attack against us was a good move because it was easy - they had the horse archers left over from the last war, so it didn't "cost them anything." I disagreed with that in Whosit's thread, and I feel the same way here:

Finally a good point as to why we shouldn't have gone to war with you. Yes the other reasons are good to but I still believe were outweighed by your soon to be runaway civ. Without the HA's, you would have made even shorter work of Jowy.

Originally Posted by Sullla

- I didn't know that you had plans to build the Great Lighthouse. The game would have been... different... if you had gotten the Lighthouse instead of Korea! And then the same city lost out on Hanging Gardens due to our team taking Jowy's stone. I wish I could feel bad about that, but I don't, haha.

Yes the game certainly would have been different! I was beaten by only 4 turns maybe 5 I think. I overflowed/chopped just over 100 hammers into the GL the same turn they completed it and I had 2 more forests to go I think plus 12HPT or so. Would have been a much different if I had managed to get that!

The Hanging Gardens was another thing I should have gotten. However the remaining CoW members all pushed Jowy towards accepting peace. Shortly before you attacked him around T150 I was reflecting on that decision and came to this conclusion. I should have pushed Jowy to either a) finish the fight the first time as I believe he was in a stronger position to do more damage to you then or b) re-negotiate terms down to a single city. Would you have accepted a single city from him rather than both?

Originally Posted by Sullla

- Do you think gifting away so much gold to other teams for various favors was worth it? I tend to feel that gold is a precious resource in a No Trading game, and basically all of your commerce should go into as much tech as possible. Gifting away gold means you're not spending it on tech. What do you think in retrospect, athlete?

In some cases yes it was fine. It delayed a non-essential tech only a little bit and I was returned the gold and garnered good will amongst my allies. When I through Whosit under the Tonka Truck known as Slaze I should have just let him go completely, however I tried to assuage my guilt by gifting him gold to tech. This was a very poor play as it delayed CS and with my palace going up in Endor, I had a very strong site for Beaurocracy!

Originally Posted by Sullla

- About the Incan war (which clearly was a terrible mistake in retrospect)... I don't think it was wise to split up the stacks the way you did:

I haven't even read the details of what happened yet, and I can already see something bad is going to result. A galley attack like that from the sea needs the element of surprise, which you wouldn't have here because slaze was able to see the boats 2 turns before the units landed. Going around the outer island to the east quite possibly would have worked better (?) Also, why did you move every unit up to the border one turn before attacking? All that did was reveal exactly what you had to slaze, and removed any possible element of surprise. You could have had them two tiles back and hidden with no loss of movement.

The galley attack was whosit's idea and I decided to give it a go. I never considered giving Slaze the exact number and composition of my stack would really matter though. Bit of a moment there!

Originally Posted by Sullla

- Did India catch breaks, or did we make our own luck in this game?

I tend to believe we make our own luck/fortune so insert whatever appropriate saying you want here (You need to be good to be lucky etc...).

Originally Posted by Sullla

- I noticed that you didn't post too much on your backstab of slaze in the thread. Look, I don't want to get all preachy, but I really feel that was the worst unethical play in the whole game. slaze put his trust in you, and then you brutally stabbed him in the back with his own army. Wow. That was some dark dealings there... It's definitely not enough to say "it's a game, get over it." I feel (and felt) the same way as slaze, and would have reacted exactly the same way (did react the same way in our thread to other incidents). It felt especially bad to me because you couldn't beat slaze "fairly" with your own army, so you lied and cheated him out of his own army and then came back again a second time. Not meaning anything personal, I'm sure you're a good person in real life athlete, but that was a *LOW* blow there. Your civ inherited a lifetime's worth of bad karma from that!

Ya I'd have to agree with all of the above. The whole thing went like this. I throw whosit under the bus, get help against you and speaker. I screwed it up with my post in the tech thread. Once that post was made though I had to try and figure out what to do. What I thought could happen was have you guys leave me alone while I then try and take it to Slaze again. By leave me alone I was thinking for a much longer timeframe . It's pretty flimsy but at that point in the game I was really just flying by the seat of my pants. I was beaten down by Slaze, had some very strong stresses in RL and the game was becoming more and more of a drain. Losing Kalin hurt a lot as I just couldn't keep up with the requirements of the game. Rather I couldn't put as much energy into the game as I wanted which was demoralizing as I felt I had played a pretty good game to that point. Definitely a marked improvement over my pbem game!

Originally Posted by Sullla

- You posted nothing on our final war. I can respect that, but would you mind mentioning why you made all those bizarre moves at the end of the game? What was your goal by abandoning so many cities without a fight (?)

Well it wasn't for a lack of want. I know the whole time thing was a real issue with you but I actually am busy! During my time in the game I was working a full-time job, part-time job, volunteering weekly with 2 different organizations, taking a college level course (online) attempting to complete a career change into law enforcement (requiring gym time to stay fit) and trying to see my wife and 2 kids enough so they remember who I am. After all that then came civ time. Oh and I need to eat/sleep/shower and shave in there. I enjoyed keeping the thread up to date and thought I did a decent job for the first half of the game. I asked for a teammate after signing up because I knew stuff was going to come up and it was going to get difficult, unfortuneately I lost the teammate along the way and trying to find somebody unspoiled for this game would have been impossible. Anyways on to your actual questios

My reasoning behind abandoning my cities was I thought I could do more damamge making a final stand somewhere, because once that army was gone it was just a matter of 2-3 turns before I was done. I thought it should be at Hoth which I started as I attacked out at one point there. I then figured I might do a better job at Endor because it hat 60% cultural defence rather thant he 40% of Hoth. This was a mistake because by the time your units were at Endor they were Cav's and not Cuir's so when I attacked out I did 0 damage what-so-ever.

Originally Posted by Sullla

- I found this interesting as a final point.

That comment was meant more that if somebody of a skill level more appropriate to our was playing as India they never would have gotten out to such a quick/strong/decisive lead and there would be no need for CoW. Not a reinforcement of hey Sullla and Speaker are a team we have to all gang up on them.

Originally Posted by Sullla

Reading through the thread and trying to get the "feel" of the whole thing, I believe there was too much focus on the attack from your team. As soon as Byzantium planted their forward city, the whole discussion turned to "attack attack attack!" OK, fairly so, but then even before Byzantium was gone, the main subject of discussion turned to attacking India. Then while that war was going on, half the emails with Whosit had the subject of attacking Inca once the current war was done. Internal development of your own civ seemed to get lost in the shuffle somewhere along the way... I could be wrong, that's just the impression I got from reading. After the early game, there wasn't much talk about what your own cities were researching or building. All diplomacy and the current/next war taking place.

Again I have to agree about the need to attack. I definitely felt the call of the war horns. I was far to eager to go to war than I should have been.

Originally Posted by Sullla

I'd also love to see some of the other players reading our thread and commenting on it (Nakor, DMOC, slaze, plako, Broker, Dantski, etc.) when they have a chance. I can't be the only one interested in reading all these spoiler threads, right?

I am definitely trying to read the other threads but don't have nearly as much time as others apparantly. I tend to get time to pop onto RB in 10-15 minute blocks of time, not enough to really get through a lot in one go...

And this took a 3rd attempt to post...luckily I copied it to clipboard before trying the 2nd time

Edit - If there's something I missed feel free to ask again! /Edit

[Sullla]

Thanks for the comments, athlete. Well written indeed.

Would we have made peace with Jowy for one city? I had to sit and think about this for a minute. That would have been a very tough choice for us. Ultimately I think we would have said no to that, since we were already in position to raze Athens and capture Argos anyway. However, we would have lost much of our army in the process, so you're likely correct that having Jowy fight to the finish at that point would have left us in a worse position. (You saw what delaying another 40 turns did, only putting us vastly further ahead from Greece and placing Jowy in an impossible position.) Of course, that would have required asking Jowy to sacrifice himself for the rest of your coalition - which he might well have done, since I got the impression that your teams were really tight. Would have raised some more ethical questions about sportsmanship though.

The idea of retreating all your units to the capital and making a stand there doesn't really work in this game on a tactical level. It delays the inevitable a bit, but it makes your army a sitting duck for collateral damage. We were very critical in our thread because we saw the whole thing as a ploy to survive slightly longer so that you could continue gifting all your income every turn to Holy Rome. I guess we shouldn't go into that again, but you can probably see why we would view that as an artificially gamey and cheesy series of move. I think you could have fought a lot more effectively by counter-attacking us constantly, using the advantage of your cultural borders to re-capture cities over and over again. The one and only time you did that, it set us back a few turns. Also, janissaries make tough defenders when they're in cities on hills. You abandoned too many of them without a fight! That whole invasion should have been a lot more costly to us (we barely lost any units at all).

Anyway, good luck in the other Pitboss/PBEM games.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Hijack....

Originally Posted by athlete4life10

I know there were some definite posts in the first ~160 pages of your thread that I thought definitely crossed the line. However some of those came from dedicated lurkers and I don't care enough to try and sort it all out...

That reminds me - a quick search of the forum suggests that I owe Krill two apologies

1) For throwing a nuke into the works when he was trying to address the lurker spoiler problem. If I had simply shown some patience, a follow up message would have appeared explaining that lurkers didn't mean everyone but Speaker and Sulla, and Krill could concentrate on resolving things without the extra headache.

2) For not publishing apology #1 in a timely fashion.

Therefore: to Krill, I apologize (x2).

[antisocialmunky]

Originally Posted by Sullla

This is another, separate issue I want to raise before any more time passes. I haven't even touched the lurker thread yet, but I've seen comments from a number of people indicated that they hated the way that Speaker and I played. I saw a lot of sentences to the effect of "arrogant jerks" and "lost all respect for them" bouncing around in various places.

Ultimately, how you feel is up to you. I don't feel the need to apologize for posting what I legitimately felt at the time. Speaker and I simply posted our honest thoughts at all times in the thread. If we thought other teams were acting dumb, we said so. When we thought other teams made a nice play, we said the same. I don't see how we could have done things any other way there and been true to ourselves.

That meant that sometimes we ended up posting some nasty stuff about other players/teams. No worse than what I've seen in the other spoiler threads so far, but definitely not nice. I think a lot of lurkers seemed to want me to act differently, or had some kind of nice-guy mental image built up (?) Well, both Speaker and I are fiercely competitive people. It was our goal to win the game, not to make friends along the way. Maybe that shocks some people, but it probably shouldn't. I don't believe we broke any deals with any teams throughout the whole game - most of the nastiness game from out-of-game rules disputes, which hopefully we can solve with more polished rulesets in the future. Did we push for maximum gain in those areas? Of course. We're fiercely competitive, we wanted to win. Did every other team in the game do the same? Yes. How does that make us any different from the rest of the teams then (?)

In the end, we can argue justified or not until the cows come home, but the fact remains that 5 different teams charged around the world to try and eliminate our team from the game, a move unparalleled in any other competition we've had here. (Sure, we saw similar moves against Exploit and regoarrarr in Pitboss #1, but MUCH later in the game. Doing so in the early Classical Age is a different matter entirely.) Several of those teams openly lied to us in their diplomacy to try and backstab more effectively. Yes, we did take it personally; yes, we did make it our mission to eliminate those teams from the game; and yes, we didn't feel much desire to be polite to those teams afterwards. We weren't role-playing Jesus here: I don't see why we should have been expected to turn the other cheek towards teams who were doing their best to kill us. And I think most of you would have reacted the same way, when literally every hand in the game turned against you at once.

No, I have nothing against any of those individuals on a personal level. I'm sure they're all great people in real life. I do ask that anyone reading keep in mind that we had real feelings too, and expecting us to play some kind of completely dispassionate game isn't really fair. I recognize that rooting for the underdog is fun, but too many people seemed to adopt a stance of "team ___ is behind and India is ahead, so that justifies any action taken by them to catch up". And that was darned irritating to us!

I really doubt that we'll play another one of these games, since we got so much flak for this one.

You can be honest without being adamant that your opinion is the only right one. Its not an issue of you two having freakouts or tough opinions but its the fact that for many if not most of the times people tried you present an alternative view point it was shot down. That's what made you specifically look arrogant - a lack of recognition that you don't have the complete picture.

However lots of things were said in the heat of the moment so we posted our honest thoughts like you posted yours.

[novice]

Originally Posted by Jowy

Was that really necessary?

Agree with Jowy, that wasn't necessary. Just ignore Dr. No if you don't like what he's posting. You can even add him to your ignore list, so his posts don't show up for you.

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/profi...?do=ignorelist

[Sullla]

Team Inca:

- I remain surprised that the team valued Inca so highly during the selection process. Inca is good, one of the best civs, but I think going for a leader first might have been stronger (Elizabeth was still out there, after all!) Inca also locked the team into an Expansive pick, and with Darius (Exp/Fin) and Peter (Exp/Phi) already gone, Mehmed was a fairly mediocre choice. Joao for pure settler spam might have worked better - especially after eliminating poor Mortius!

- I don't blame Inca one bit for eliminiating Mortius either. It was the right move, and I would have done the same. Better lucky than good!

- I think that the quechua (max shields) -> work boat (max shields) -> worker opening could have been a little stronger. For example, in this picture:



One more turn before starting the worker lets the city hit size 2, pick up the furs, and then build the worker in nine turns; you get back that one extra turn for free and gain nine extra commerce in the process. OK, I see that a lurker posted the same comment in the thread, so a nice swap.

- The original team, ummm, didn't have very good communication with one another. I kind of got that impression while playing the game, and the spoiler thread more or less reflects a state of disorganization. Having a larger team can actually be a bad thing, if everyone isn't on the same page. It's a shame that Zeviz, Kodii, and then IamJohn all disappeared though.



- While these are good cities, I think they were spaced too far apart. The two yellow dots were the first two cities, and the dark purple dot was the third one. With no roads connecting them, this was a sitting duck empire had anyone bothered to attack (which fortunately they didn't). Even the barbs caused a ton of headaches later, because the cities were spaced apart and tough to reinforce.

- It's hard to tell with the player turnover and few screenshots, but I got the impression that Inca had a lot of land... and little of it was well developed. I don't know what happened there - too few workers? Too many barbs running around? It just feels like this team should have been MUCH stronger, given all of that land and absolutely no pressure from any other teams for the first 125 turns of the game. Maybe over-expansion leading to a poor economy (?)



- This screenie does a pretty good job of showing the farmer's gambit slaze was running (basically no military builds anywhere). There's a Demographics picture from the same date showing a Power rating of 105k (7 out of 8, average rating = 174k). But was it a bad move? Probably not. If I had to inherit a team in mid-game, I'd probably take a similar gambit. slaze had to take some risks to have a chance of competing and ultimately winning the game. I think that maybe his diplomacy could have been better though, as it seemed that the Incans rarely returned or initiated much email contact.

- The 25-turn cancellation notice NAP that athlete had with slaze was a very silly deal to have. slaze knew ages ahead of time exactly what was coming, and when. It's never a good idea to let your opponent know you're planning on attacking, and give them 25 turns (!) to prepare for it.

Athlete split his (unpromoted) stack. I picked off 1 out of 3 prats with fodder axes (4th one had cat withdrawl down to 3.7, knocking the prat to 2.0) and then won 6 longbow v catapult battles, worst at 78% odds. Down to 2 cats, with only 2 more a tile away on the hill, he may not even take a city.

Athlete still wont promote his units. Even if they're two tiles away, I still have workers. This is the beginning of the end for him; he won't be able to do anything but run away (but hopefully he sticks around for a turn cause if he stays put I'll go in for the kill).

- Very nice! And a good reminder why not to split up attacking stacks. (Also the first description in any thread of what actually happened in the first Ottoman/Incan war.) Too bad that the price of winning the war was decimating the economy...

- I don't want to harp on the attempt to secretly betray my team, other than to point out to the lurkers who gave us so much flak that this was the second time (Holy Rome being the first) that a team deliberately tried to play a double-agent role and backstab us. I very much doubt that others would have taken that sanguinely either. That doesn't excuse what athlete did, which was totally unprincipled and brutal on his part... But we couldn't feel too bad about it in-game, since slaze was trying to do the exact same thing to us.

Note that at roughly this same moment, Holy Rome was selling out their "Mutual Protection Pact" with Rome, athlete was selling out Whosit on his end, slaze was selling out India, and athlete was then further selling out/backstabbing slaze. Wow. Yes, all of that really happened.

His [athlete's] stack of 42 grew to 55. And his stack of 6 grew to 11. Where's sullla when you need him? Likely confined to an NAP.

- Not inclined to help someone who lied to and betrayed him?



- That's a lot of longbows! I probably don't need to say it, but the massive slaughter on both sides in the Ottoman/Incan wars was what really broke the game open for my team. We were already in a dominant position, and the collapse of Ottomans (with India getting about 80% of the spoils) turned the game into a winning position. Once we didn't have to worry about athlete, Holy Rome had absolutely no prayer in a war against us.

Athlete wants to quit. Spend the rest of his units on sullla and have me end up with all his cities. I turn him down. If I get what I don't earn Sullla will have reason to fight me.

- And I really appreciate this. We would indeed have declared war on Inca if those city gifts had gone through. (Yes, athlete tried to gift away five cities at the end of the game. No, he didn't post this in his thread.)

Overall, I think slaze played a really strong game, especially having to inherit a team halfway through the game. Inca outsurvived all of its neighbors, and delivered a brutal beating to both Ottomans and Rome (despite being behind in technology). I wish there had been better relations with my team, but I guess our position as the favorite made it difficult. Congrats on a great game, slaze.

[Whosit]

Originally Posted by athlete4life10

The galley attack was whosit's idea and I decided to give it a go. I never considered giving Slaze the exact number and composition of my stack would really matter though. Bit of a moment there!

I grant that it was my idea, but I could have sworn that I suggested you go around the island, or that I at least pointed out that slaze would see you coming. I could be wrong, though.

Originally Posted by athlete4life10

The whole thing went like this. I throw whosit under the bus, get help against you and speaker.

To paraphrase Tarkin: "[Whosit is] far too trusting."

I knew I was getting the short end of the stick in the war against slaze since I was attacking first, but I was naive enough to believe in two things: 1) Athlete was capable of actually capturing Incan territory; 2) Athlete was going to help me through the end. Whoops.

That's all I wanted to comment on.

My thread may have been "Paranoia 101," but I think I tended to jump at shadows rather than the real threats. Well, maybe that's the definition of "paranoia."

Originally Posted by Sullla

Note that at roughly this same moment, Holy Rome was selling out their "Mutual Protection Pact" with Rome, athlete was selling out Whosit on his end, slaze was selling out India, and athlete was then further selling out/backstabbing slaze. Wow. Yes, all of that really happened.

Umm ... does this mean that I was actually one of the honorable civilizations? I only stabbed people in the front (minus that one-turn NAP-break war with Korea, but I gave them the Worker back--dumb, perhaps, but honorable in my book).