[no players] Six little newbies sitting on a tree...

[Hollybombay]

Nothing matters now. Here's my advice to any players who read this, if you join a greens game, Oracle Iron Working and fuck them all up, "God will know his own". That surely is how to approach this game, yes.

I guess when i finally decide to play a pitboss here ill have some advice to follow!

[Hollybombay]

But to end on a proud tradition, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLMf_O7JGSU (That song has rather insane lyrics, too; but I like Nico -- her best album is The Marble Index, if anyone cares... And it's only fitting.)

For any further updates, go to Charriu's thread. I'll no longer provide your entertainment.

e: Thread renaming. Of course I'm not a god, I'm not even good. My now-catalogued sanity's destruction, my civ's destruction, Charriu's civ's destruction, they are all almost unreal, yes even the stuff of amusement, to everyone but me (and Charriu), and now I think that's even more disgusting to me than how this game turned out. The end of laughter and soft lies. Still, let me end this on a conciliatory note (not with Charriu, of course):

shallow_thought and Magic Science, from all I've seen, you've played good games, and I wish both of you success in future games as well. Wish it could have been on a fairer field that we competed. As for RFS, well, the technical aspect of Civ is apparently trivial anyway, so you'll easily improve that in your next game, and as for good metagaming awareness, you sure have that if you went Iron Working now. GG, all of you.

I hope I can retire soon, but quietly. It should help me calm down about this, too. If it all fails, I'll do what Gavagai did in PB38 (for similar motives) and ask for a permasub in Civ General, but for now I'll just play on. You can sufficiently imagine what I'll do.

........................


Charriu- Im going to go attack Coeurva because he basically culture bombed me, fair enough.

Coeurva- Why would anyone attack me, this is bullshit! QQ.

Did i miss anything.

[Commodore]

Going to be a hard read here in the lurker thread when he joins us.

Basically, Coeur, nobody here is enjoying your suffering. There are probably some baffled laughs from the disjoint between your portrayal of Carriu and how he actually is; he's not spiteful, raging nor even mad, bro. His build up was aimed at RFS not you, and the snap decision to invade you after the culture bomb was impulsive but more desperate than anything else. He's green, but entirely unhateful.

[Bacchus]

I have to admit, I'm having more sympathy for Coeurva the longer Charriu just sits his army there. Coeurva is getting fortification bonus, more units, and soon he'll get the culture pop too. It's not going to get any easier for Charriu - now's the time to take the army teleporting home and go hit someone else.

So this is exactly the situation that I actually meant to ask about -- not where the attacker is able to achieve his objectives through force, but where he is unable to. Lets say Alice does something that Bob just can't live with -- for example plants a city. Bob can't take the city. But he also believes it's a game ending issue for him, AND he believes that ceding the city is NOT a game ending issue for Alice. Does it ever make sense for Bob to throw his army at Alice, just to pressure her to cede, even though he can't make any gains in earnest, unless Alice lets him? All Bob can do is damage Alice, and he figures that Alice would rather avoid the damage and cede than get stuck in a costly face-off.

NB Of course Bob can be wrong about the game ending consequences of Alice's original action, and its not really the case for Charriu, I'm interested in cases where Bob is right in his original assessment. Given that, should he bring war, or should he just resign to defeat, or hope that some other factors swing the theatre conditions and he gets an opportunity in the future to correct the situation by force?

[WilliamLP]

Dodging the fascinating metagame question. I'd have more sympathy for Coeuvre's actual position, if before this he weren't clearly dominating in tech as Rome. You want to take the fight to Rome before Praets regardless, if you can, no?

I can just imagine the wheels grinding in his head when he learns that Coeuvre wasn't planning on an attack before Henge, and how wrong he is about Charriu's personality. He already realizes that he should have spent a couple of those 250 hours skimming Charriu's PB39 thread to get a read on skill and play style.

[Mardoc]

hope that some other factors swing the theatre conditions and he gets an opportunity in the future to correct the situation by force?

Honestly, this one.  With possibly a side-order of 'research and build in order to swing the theater conditions'.  Civ is enormously complicated, 6-way free-for-alls are enormously complicated...the combination means that you're basically never right about a single plant causing your game to end.  The other player will get in a war eventually, or swap into Caste System at a bad time, or you'll out tech them, or something.  If there aren't any factors that could change the situation, then you're already so far behind that the city is a symptom, not a cause, of your defeat.

And, in addition, I really don't think it's possible to communicate limited desires, at least in an AI-Diplo context as restrictive as this one.

You could address that by turning diplo on...but honestly I expect that to go back to the failure mode that caused banning of city gifts in the first place: it doesn't let the weaker party win prisoner's dilemmas, it lets the stronger party extort cities from all neighbors without having to lose units.

[Bacchus]

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well, Mardoc.

And that does mean that I've been unreasonably defensive about my advice in PB37 -- it was bad, and whilst Incan sea presence was an absolute nuisance for Carthage, we could have waited it out. OTOH, Carthage really couldn't wait out preparations for defending against dtay (but that in itself was a consequence of a earlier mistake of a strategic nature, which lost us the game by itself). Sorry, Krill.

[Mardoc]

I made my decision. I will attack now.

No city capture visible in CivStats. So Coeurva probably has a GG waiting for him and maybe a peace offer as well. Perhaps a turn too late for his equilibrium?

[Krill]

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well, Mardoc.

And that does mean that I've been unreasonably defensive about my advice in PB37 -- it was bad, and whilst Incan sea presence was an absolute nuisance for Carthage, we could have waited it out. OTOH, Carthage really couldn't wait out preparations for defending against dtay (but that in itself was a consequence of a earlier mistake of a strategic nature, which lost us the game by itself). Sorry, Krill.

Pffh, don't worry about it. I was the first player to make a game ending mistake, I picked Inca which led to the wandering which led to getting chariot rushed...that whole game was a clusterfuck from me.

[WilliamLP]

I expect China's forces to die in some hilarious tactical blunder.

Well...