RBPB4 Postgame Thread

[plako]

Great game everyone and Congratulations to Lord Parkin for the win and thank you for all that contributed. Special thanks to Krill and his map team, GES for guiding the game through the disputes and Sunrise for reliable hosting.

There seems to be already some post game discussion in the spoiler threads. However traditionally these games have had a post game thread so I decided to open one.

Despite of repeating myself I'll say again that it was about time to end the game. I got even more convinced after checking few late game messages from the spoiler threads: Just check the the current power graph, the amount of beakers LP had accumulated, the amount of land LP potentially would be grabbing and above all this he had secured Rego as an ally. There was no question about who would win this game without some ridiculous manouvers like AP or UN diplo victory and I'm not even sure they would have been succesful. I definately think that those victories wouldn't have been fair conclusion to the game.

I've also opened up the archives of the Parkin Violators. You can find them from here:

http://z15.invisionfree.com/Placiv/index.php

[Lord Parkin]

I'm a bit surprised to see that... although perhaps I shouldn't be. I was under the impression that hosting discussions at entirely different forums wasn't allowed for games here, or else I might have tried the same thing myself earlier in the game. It certainly does have the effect of binding people together much more tightly than would otherwise be the case though, so I'm not entirely sure it's appropriate for a competitive NTT game.

Anyway... man, looking over that forum both amuses and annoys me. It's amusing because of all the comments that drastically misrepresent the game - both the alliance's position and mine. (On a related note... geez, once you all decided to align against me you sure found excuses to hate on absolutely everything I did or said. That's the effect of insulating walls erected around a group I guess.)

It's annoying because I see all these vicious plans and gleeful speculations about burning down my cities and tearing apart my empire - which obviously wouldn't have been fun for me if it happened, but I would have been expected to continued playing anyway (and would have done so). And yet when the situation is reversed, everyone immediately gives up before I even get a chance to really get started. For instance, Locke, you posted this only 10 days ago:

This is wrong thread for this discussion but we have zero interest in conceding game. We should try attack because everyone spend so long preparing. If that does not work then try to win another type of victory. If someone can build UN then we might have enough pop to vote one of us the winner. Or someone can go for culture. Parkin still has to tech most of Industrial and all of Modern, then build all spaceship parts, then wait for spaceship to reach destination. That is a lot of time to try and do something.

I say dont give up until Parkin actually win game.

Zero interest in conceding? Looking to win by UN or culture? Lots of time to try and do something? Why the sudden change of face the instant you got attacked? And I repeat, you never even logged in after my initial attack (where I took only *one* city) before you gave up and refused to play any more.

Maybe I'm being too harsh - and you certainly weren't the only one that wanted the game to end... I guess I'm just annoyed that your position changed so quickly from "never give up, we can keep on trying!" to "I'm not even going to bother logging in any more". Oh well.

[plako]

It didn't even occur to my mind that there would be rules preventing founding an alliance forum and I don't think it was inappropriate. There were also several lurkers including e.g. GES and I gave access to anyone who wanted it.

Dogpiles against the leader are most of the time failing. Usually there are too many competing intrests. In this case I tried to get a bit more organized attack, but as you can wittness for your amusement. We failed miserably .

edit. I can't speak on behalf of Locke, but if I had to guess these might the reasons for his changing his mind within the 10 days: Rego's joining the war, our big mistake and losing all our fleet and units in them combined with Nakor not having defenses.

edit2. There is also quite a difference, if we somehow would have managed even to slow you down a bit it would have been totally new game full of opportunities for almost everyone and probably more to those who weren't part of it especially Rego. After we failed there was no one to fight against your might.

[Lord Parkin]

It made some sense strategically, sure... but going about organizing it while you were still supposedly in an alliance with us was pretty low. Sure you'd been broadcasting your hostility for some time, nitpicking a whole bunch of issues which you yourself admitted wouldn't be a problem if you were in the lead... but that still doesn't excuse your betrayal. At least I knew well in advance that something was very wrong with our relationship, and I was right.

Anyway, that's all in the past. I'm pleased that you at least were willing to keep playing if others were; I can definitely respect that. It's not easy to keep playing out a losing battle, so being open to that is very commendable.

[Lord Parkin]

...combined with Nakor not having defenses.

Yeah, this was quite perplexing to me as well. Just looking at home defences alone, Nakor made a few pretty serious strategic mistakes in this war - as well as apparently misunderstanding some fundamental game mechanics. There's a bit more detail on this in some of my more recent posts. Not sure if these were genuine knowledge gaps or just an absence of caring by the time the war rolled around. In any event, hopefully some people can learn from it.

[Jowy]

Congrats LP Always fun to see a player who delivers.
Stopped following about halfway thru, but out of curiosity here's my picks before the game:

1. Locke and Cervantes (3rd)
2. Sunrise and Rego (4th)
3. Plako (2nd)
4. Luddite and Atlas (5th)
5. Lord Parkin (1st)
6. SleepingMoogle (6th)
7. Mackoti and Ioan (8th)
8. Nakor and Gaspar (7th)
9. Adlain (9th)
10. WarlordDR (10th)

Real position in brackets. Pretty close actually! Only big mistake was underrating LP.

[Rowain]

Thanks Plako for opening that archive

Reading some of the Diplomessages from LP I now realize why he gernered so much hate . Or why several people couldn't understand Rego's actions at the end.

But I must say: Very interesting and strong Diplo from Lord Parkin here. It nearly got him cought but it did buy him enough time to reach the winning position .

[plako]

It made some sense strategically, sure... but going about organizing it while you were still supposedly in an alliance with us was pretty low. Sure you'd been broadcasting your hostility for some time, nitpicking a whole bunch of issues which you yourself admitted wouldn't be a problem if you were in the lead... but that still doesn't excuse your betrayal. At least I knew well in advance that something was very wrong with our relationship, and I was right.

I had my reasons that I had sent you a long time ago, but didn't get a response. I tried to find your reasoning from your thread also, but it wasn't there either. Maybe you've silently approved my points . Here is link to my message to you concerning the reasons:

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showpost....count=1031

Even before this message our intentions weren't surprise to you. We "foolishly" signaled hostility already some 50T ago. It definately would have been more beneficial just to keep the friendly facade and give you false sense of security, but I think that would not have been appropriate.

[plako]

Congrats LP Always fun to see a player who delivers.
Stopped following about halfway thru, but out of curiosity here's my picks before the game:

1. Locke and Cervantes (3rd)
2. Sunrise and Rego (4th)
3. Plako (2nd)
4. Luddite and Atlas (5th)
5. Lord Parkin (1st)
6. SleepingMoogle (6th)
7. Mackoti and Ioan (8th)
8. Nakor and Gaspar (7th)
9. Adlain (9th)
10. WarlordDR (10th)

Real position in brackets. Pretty close actually! Only big mistake was underrating LP.

Score ranking is not worth much in this case. Rego is definately 2nd at this point. Rest of the positions are harder to evaluate.

[Lord Parkin]

Yes, I got that message and was going to reply to it. However, I'd already gone over all of those points before with you, and it seemed a waste of time to spend a large amount of effort on continuing a pointless discussion that kept going around in circles. Basically the gist what you said boiled down to "Yes we're doing a very bad thing. But just look at this long list of nitpicks and excuses! Isn't it long?". Maybe I'll put some time into writing a rebuttal at some point, although to me at least it's fairly self-evident that a lot of the excuses were grabbing at straws.

One particular thing I never understood, though, was your blaming of us for the Rego situation. You acted as if that was some master plan of ours all along, to ruin your relations with him. That was never the case - you pretty much did that entirely on your own.

Basically, prior to the whole borders debacle, the underlying message I heard over and over from you was "we don't like you, and we're really itching to get out of this alliance". I tried a few times to fix things, but it became obvious that you were unwilling to change your stance. So I looked to Rego for a closer relationship, and made a proposal to him involving the Open Borders he'd been looking for all game. We quickly found a lot of common ground.

Then out of the blue, you suddenly announce that you're closing borders with Rego, as if it's some sort of favour to us to do something we'd been doing all game on our own - to which I couldn't really say anything but "uh, ok?". Seriously, you treated us pretty horribly for 20-30 turns and basically telegraphed your intention for future aggression against us, and then got angry when it turned out we'd gone looking elsewhere for a friend? The timing of your closing borders was unfortunate as it apparently made you convinced that everything was our fault, but there was never any master plan there. You screwed up your relationship with Rego on your own.