[SPOILERS - NO PLAYERS] The PB39 Map and Lurker Thread

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I'm almost certain I would have taken the shot at killing the city. 30h for a WC vs. 100f/h for a settler plus whatever other investment in infrastructure? All else being equal (not NEEDING the unit for immediate defense, etc.) I'd probably have attacked anywhere north of ~40% odds to win. With a solid, second ring border city to fall back into, I think it is reasonable to assume that even if the attempt failed and yuris rolled whatever he has forward that you can still make it work on defense and bleed the opponent. Plus, yuris isn't the most bloodthirsty player we have. I think this is a missed opportunity for superdeath.

Coerva, the geography in this case favors the attack IMO. There is a nice choke point to defend. Defenders have an inherent advantage. And, to be fair (and no disrespect intended), dtay is a different case than yuris. Both are mostly rational, but dtay has a stronger track record and is more likely to make you pay. But the biggest factor here IMO is that the solid front city is likely to hold and you have a low-cost opportunity to cripple a neighbor. That said, if you are going to make this kind of play you better be ready for the blowback, which means having some more units around. This map is super lush, so 60h invested into two WCs is 3/5 of a settler, which can slow the snowball if it delays your next (6th? 7th?) city by a few turns. But this delay is less important now. He has secured the primary chokes. He can fill in the land in a reasonable time frame without serious risk of losing territory. A couple turns later on cities is worth an opponent who will be ~10-15 turns later to knights because of an early city raze.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

After reading yuris' account, yeah, this is a lost opportunity but the attack wasn't a complete waste either. If yuris had to put chops into spears, as well as at least one 2-pop whip, then this is a very cheap intervention to slow a neighbor's growth. This would have been far more effective if superdeath had razed the city though.

[Coeurva]

To clarify, my view is that the raze would have been advantageous to superdeath who invests 60h to eliminate 100h, but it would have been even more advantageous to everyone else bordering Yuri, as they invest 0h to eliminate 100h (as well as 60h on their competition to conquer, "those could have been a granary"). A raze gives you no hammers in the future.

Completely different case if superdeath could capture a border city early using 3-4 war chariots, or even more since hammers and food aren't weighted equally and surely yuris would lose hammers as well. He doesn't only gain more yields per turn for himself, he also denies them to yuris, and war chariots easily hold their own on the defense afterwards so you just need to produce 1:1 against an opponent on whom you're up 2 cities right now

[The Black Sword]

To clarify, my view is that the raze would have been advantageous to superdeath who invests 60h to eliminate 100h, but it would have been even more advantageous to everyone else bordering Yuri

Are you talking about sending out the war chariots in the first place? I agree with the logic in that scenario. But when you already have built a war chariot and it's sitting beside an empty city, it's a trade of 30h for 100+h and the 30h is sort of a sunk cost. I'm not sure I'd turn that down.

There's also a point that if you turn down the trade you're letting all your neighbours play really light with their defences and they get some efficiency over you. Not sure how strong that is though.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

It isn't just the equivalent hammer trade now, but also the future hammer investment required to take what you want from your neighbor later in the game when you would be going to war for fun and profit anyway. If the loss of an early city stunts the development of your future enemy and it only costs you a little bit, here 30h that you've already spent anyway, that's a win because it will lower the future cost of conquest by some undetermined amount. This is not a certainty, but it is a high probability reduction in that future cost.

There is little counterpoint against the reality taht your 30h investment also benefits your opponent's other neighbors too, and without them having to invest, so that is a consideration. But in this case the benefit to the attacking civ seems pretty clear so I would want to do it even if others did benefit more. If everyone is playing to win then other unknown factors should dictate actions down the road that would be less favorable to those civs and perhaps more favorable to you so that these things tend to even out, if all actors are rational. Take your chances when you get them and hope for the best.

[mackoti]

Interisting debate here.I  think alway depends who the opp is,becasue if its Comm or gavgai,xenu or several others  if you  dont have whats need to finish they will trow theyr game and for sure will destroy yours.And even 4-5 axes and  a spear can put you so behind...But here we talk about Yuri I would atack without thinking twice(he is apacifist to the hart) .

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Yeah, that would be the non-rational actor side of the coin. Who is in the fight matters tremendously, not just in terms of player ability and tactics but also their likelihood of tilting, to your detriment. This is totally on brand for Xenu - (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻) - while Com and gavagai are just dogged, gritty players that never quit. None of the players in this game have that kind of reputation. Ipecac is the closest, I guess, but even he can be made to see reason as long as he is still in the game.

[Coeurva]

But in this case the benefit to the attacking civ seems pretty clear so I would want to do it even if others did benefit more. If everyone is playing to win

I think that when other players benefit more than you, then you're setting them up to defeat you later, provided that your resources are both exactly the same otherwise (to enable the possibility of both players pursuing the same and optimal game plan, e.g. "finish crippled opponent with horse archers (or better)").

If your UU or some early wonder (Mids or Oracle most likely) can quickly make up for your opponents' faster granaries (for instance) because it comes early enough before your opponent can convert the advantage from these granaries, then maybe do indeed take the raze.

Take your chances when you get them and hope for the best.

True. But I'm arguing that you should also take a pass on deceptive chances and that this is one. If you sacrifice something early and your opponent gives up some material (read: already-sunk hammers) to stabilize the position, but a different line would eschew material while keeping a strong attack -- you should probably take the line that preserves tension (that is attacking chances) even if you gain no immediate material, rather than simplifying into a draw and thus allow the third party to steamroll.

Yeah, more poignantly -- maybe instead of razing the front city, just continually threaten it. You have initiative by threatening the raze; you lose it immediately once your enemy is no longer obliged to defend the city and instead throws his game at you. Give them an out so they believe they can win -- they'll keep betting instead of folding instantly, and this will increase your profit in the end.

Provided, of course, that your enemy does do the rational thing -- and "tilts" in response. (See further below for reasoning on that)

Are you talking about sending out the war chariots in the first place? I agree with the logic in that scenario. But when you already have built a war chariot and it's sitting beside an empty city, it's a trade of 30h for 100+h and the 30h is sort of a sunk cost. I'm not sure I'd turn that down.

You're right about sunk costs, but that's not my issue here.

You're investing into the efficiency of your neighbour's neighbour's conquering army down the line if you raze, just as much as this invests into your own. You're not doing that if you don't. Whatever else the chariot has done or will do doesn't matter to the decision to raze. Since the damage to your economy has already been done (-60h), your neighbour's neighbour is benefitting anyway if he so much as builds a granary instead. One would merely "shift the blame"; one might be punishing one player for underspending on military but also in fact encourage another to do this.

In practical terms, Civstats will unfortunately alert your neighbour's neighbour immediately on raze so they can adapt. If scoring were less transparent, I would perhaps also value razes higher since your opponent still has to make the right call. If they also build just chariots, then you have indeed made a winning play, or at the very least not a losing one.

There's also a point that if you turn down the trade you're letting all your neighbours play really light with their defences and they get some efficiency over you. Not sure how strong that is though.

That was my reasoning in PB37. Twice, in fact. I've since come to think this is an intrusion of "ethics", i.e. personal ideas about what a strategy game should entail, rather than what the game at hand demands.

You can, you're even obliged to get away with light defenses in free-for-all Civ4 to a point because your defense can be precisely your threat to "tilt", or more fairly, the economic potential to convert your entire civ into more efficient Raging Barbarians if someone seems to be doing the same to you. This is an extension of the threat of a third party benefitting the most from an uneven exchange between two players, which I've been arguing here. Far from irrational, this is the contract that lets players build up their economy in this game, and the only such "trust" that can exist between them. The aim of the game is to get past this point through converting your built-up potential into an asymmetric game plan that actually provides an initiative that your opponent can no longer respond to; until then, you had better stay flexible with your pop and not spend your resources early. This point can of course come much earlier than the "standard plays" of e.g. knights if your opponent builds only warriors and you have 8 axes or chariots, for instance.

I'm not saying that early attacks or early military threats aren't worth it, far from it. I'm saying early city razes with stray units aren't worth it. (superdeath isn't even close to ranking first in military, for that matter, from when I last saw JR4's graphs, and JR4 is doing nothing out of the ordinary besides, well, having planned to and succeeded in capturing a city.)

[Krill]

Question: you mentioned two points in PB37, when precisely?

[Coeurva]

Once against the Russians on ~T55, when their military consisted of four warriors. The second time against you and you'll know which point that was.

The aim, however, was not to "punish you for building too little military" on some emotional level, if you're reading it as such. Rather, it should mean that I overestimated -- by far -- how much an army currently on the board and in position ("initiative") means vs. one you can potentially produce ("economy"), because this ratio is -- I think -- different in other strategy games I'm more familiar with (because they resonate more with me perhaps, so that's why I said ethics). Thus I developed deficient game plans.

The wars against you and Savant had the same goal: trying to convert our "initiative" (a large but soon-to-be extremely obsolete army/navy) back into economy for something that could match the dtay doom clock, partially due to this "sunk costs, might as well try" mindset, and because I'd hoped (rather very optimistically, yes) that you'd not want to convert your economic potential into the response "lol no, here comes the doom fleet", for essentially the reason that "an eagle doesn't pounce on flies". Whether you'd really want to lose some of your island cities so as to contest half of China is surely, uh, up for debate. That's the rub; you're right that you couldn't know we wouldn't just break the contract of allowing each other's economic development once again at the slightest opportunity -- and that I failed to consider this in my reasoning (throughout the game even, perhaps); that precisely because shared principles of metagaming are the way players can trust each other not to attack, they can develop an economy at all (even if they ultimately win or lose on diverging principles, but this hinges on a select few decisions, strategically, not constant "mavericking").

We didn't need Astro against Savant, and we could never push Astro against you (in hindsight); resources spent on this could have been spent economically, but I committed them early -- when it turned out that you had all the resources you needed to respond (three Great Scientists), while at the same time I had failed to commit to an earlier push (NumCav) that could have helped us far more. You know that if not for your own Astro bulb response, that war would not have been a foregone conclusion (barring substantial and unlikely fuckups from you, but better to take the unlikely than impossible...?). That I saw your game plan as being Astro-fueled ships as well was another reason; trying to throw any kind of wrench into that before you'd inevitably take all the islands we had captured from Savant, since the fleet you'd eventually have ("some 40t down the line" as I figured iirc?) would easily crush us, but overestimating what we could do before you'd have built up sufficient force to crush us. Chalk it up to poor understanding of the game's economy, too, even beyond bad meta-reasoning. In any case, it would have been the best outcome, I do now realize, for both of us to never bulb Astro and thus allow each other to take advantage of the GScis in some other way -- another example of "contract". So, will you be the first to disarm your war/eggheads... (That's why I now believe breaking contract is a one-time move: when we already had the army, how could you possibly have trusted us not to bulb Astro? The payoff can be immense, more than on any other investment, but you can't go back -- unless you end up neighbouring someone who has also broken contract; then it begins again.)

Condensed (if a bit too much): Civ4 actually encourages cooperation for the longer part of a match -- until you have the niche to actually make economic gains on others. Failing to recognize that makes everyone within your radius of action more miserable and others better off.