Epic failure i.e. Postgame discussion

[plako]

Better start this now, even if I don't have much to say. I've read cursively some of the threads, but it all feels pretty lame so I'm not sure I will bother going through them with much more thoroughly. All in all this ended up as failed experiment. I still had lot of fun with this game, but my current feeling is a big disappointment.

I blame myself for a vague rules. I thought they would be appropriate for relaxed game, but apparently they just caused us to have different rulesets for different players. I've also learnt a lesson and double moves fully allowed just isn't the way to play long term civ. It is just too unfair, if your opponent gets best of it every turn.

I also blame Lord Parkin, but I've nothing to new to add to discussion so better just mention it and move on .

[nabaxo]

I believe that if LP wasn't in, someone else would've used double-moves like no tomorrow due to lack of any such rules.

[NobleHelium]

Why didn't anyone else do that in the real game then?

[SevenSpirits]

You're saying that because LP was in it, other people didn't? I don't believe that - I would think seeing someone else do it would encourage other people to do it too, not the opposite.

Or are you saying there would still be the same amount of complaining, but about whoever was abusing them the most? This I doubt too. LP was annoying everyone in the game by holding the turn almost every turn. That's the "clock games" that were discouraged in the very simple rules. I don't think anyone else earned such universal contempt - all other enmity in the game was over local things. For example if you replace me or Xenu all that arguing goes away - it doesn't matter much which one of us you remove. But taking out ASM (even though that was clearly necessary) was nowhere near enough.

[nabaxo]

You're saying that because LP was in it, other people didn't? I don't believe that - I would think seeing someone else do it would encourage other people to do it too, not the opposite.

Oh, I know that other people did. Just saying that LP got a lot more crap for it.

Or are you saying there would still be the same amount of complaining, but about whoever was abusing them the most? This I doubt too. LP was annoying everyone in the game by holding the turn almost every turn. That's the "clock games" that were discouraged in the very simple rules. I don't think anyone else earned such universal contempt - all other enmity in the game was over local things. For example if you replace me or Xenu all that arguing goes away - it doesn't matter much which one of us you remove. But taking out ASM (even though that was clearly necessary) was nowhere near enough.

I can't say anything about this part.

[Commodore]

Read PB5. Move along with the whole "have to double"

[Ichabod]

I have read a bit of most of the threads, but not any of them throughly. So I can't comment much on the gameplay, so for now I'll comment more on the issues with the game and the players that I've made contact in the game.

First of all, I need to thank some people. I want to give a special thanks to DaveV and Ilios, my teammates that gave me a big help everytime I needed, be it in gameplay aspects or to give me a needed moral boost. I also want to thank the lurkers that helped cheering me up, like darrelljs, Thoth, Mardoc, Rowain, Gaspar, etc. And, finally, thank the other players in the game.

I also want to apologize to anyone that got offended by my jokes/posts/whatever. Especially with the ones that I made direct jokes at, like Team Rome, Sunrise089, Team Nyan. There was no harm intended in any of that, rest assured.

I had my share of fun with this game. The interactions within my thread and in the diplo thread were the high point for me, because I never took the playing very serious (due to my lack of civ skill and the nature of the game, that was very random). The low points were of course the rule breaking, the fighting between players. I won't make any judgement about that, because I understand how it is to get involved in a game.

When Sunrise double-moved me I felt prett annoyed for some time. It did not seem like a fair thing. Thing is, I doubt I could have held my city even without the double-move. But the way things happened, it gave a feeling ojust watching something and not playing it (due to the inability to react). But I think I made the right thing by taking time to cool a bit and try to get revenge in the game, not outside it (I considered the diplo thread part of the game, by the way :neenernee).

Despite all that, I agree with T-hawk that, despite all the fighting, we actually ended the game in a very mature way. In other places this game could have exploded way earlier and ended with tons of bad blood, which I guess wasn't the case here.

I think that, gameplaywise, Lord Parkin, Pindicator and MackSeven (edit: plako also played very well with a bad start) were the winners of the game, with Sunrise and Lewwyn after them. Team Rome really had the short stick regarding the map, but they managed to do very well regarding what was possible. I can't say much about the others due to lack of knowledge.

My own civ management was pretty lacking. I didn't expand fast enough (this was a lot due to lack of food resources near my land (only 1 wheat, 2 plains cow and a wheat in a 7t radius from my capital). But my main problem was not building enough cottages and making a heavy food + hammer land improvement pattern (which killed my economy near the end of the game). The war against Rome was more of a fun movement rather than a smart gameplay one. I knew I wouldn't be able to win the game at that time, anyway. I also lacked a good planning during my mid game, I really didn't have anything which I was really aiming for and I didn't have fixed objectives. This, of course, made my civ suffer.

I'll probably make a few more comments later. I hope other players also give their insights and I hope the lurkers do the vote for the awards. I don't want the game to end without these, but I guess that's out of my hands .

[Gaspar]

Updated Awards Post here. Please leave any suggestions there.

[spacetyrantxenu]

As a charter member of The Problem and not The Solution, my thoughts:

I'm sorry my behavior got out of control but I really don't take personal insults well. Not an excuse, but still. As for the game itself, I probably played about as well as someone of my skill level will play in a game like this, which is not very well. Yeah, Mao sucks as a leader and I probably didn't even leverage the Natives very well (should have built more dogs sooner and sent them cracking skulls before I did). Problem is that combined with my land I didn't have a lot of long term tech potential anyway so why not do a foolish ancient era war? Sure, I'll take on two of the top players around, what could possibly go wrong? At least my civ had some kind of bonuses, they had...Germany. Sorry guys, you got screwed by the map and by the civ assignment, but you did well for yourselves.

I don't think the guys out west really knew how well Mack and Seven were playing in this game while it went on. I took a quick look at the first few pages of the MackSeven thread this weekend because I was dying to know what kind of start the map must have given them to make them wander around so long before settling. Yeah, their land sucked. They were behind the 8-ball from the start but they put together a plan and succeeded in executing it (and Azza). I knew I'd have to try to attack them to steal some of Azza's land away from them or they'd eventually snowball me and kill me (if it wasn't destined to happen anyway because they're M7 and I'm not). So as they tried to consolidate I invaded and we pretty much fought until the game fell apart. We had some luck (and decent play, haters) along the way early on in our attacks and picked up a few cities from them but we never could get Azza's old capital site from them, which surely would have been the tipping point. We had them on the ropes (or close to it? hard to say) but they beat us back.

Once our attack stalled out we lost the initiative. We should have been smart and just held onto what we had, but we hadn't taken enough land to gain advantage for the long term and would eventually be steamrolled. So we attacked again. And again. Each time we did we just wasted more and more hammers on both sides. The difference was that our economy was dead and they kept on teching. It was over for us before they even started taking back cities. I'm sure I skipped a lot of stuff but that's the broad strokes. Mack and Seven played a good game of Civ, I just wish the diplomacy had been better.

I've never been so irrationally angry at some random guy on the Internet as I was at Seven in this game. I really hope that was just some awful persona he was using for diplomacy in the public thread. He seems like a human in other threads I've read around RB, but in this game he acted like some kind of anti-human with anti-charisma and anti-likability. I'd suggest going with a kinder, more human persona for the next game with diplo unless enraging the opposition was the intended result. My behavior was awful in this game but it was awful only with respect to my dealings with him. I can't put my finger on it (other than being called a cheater....still waiting for an apology there, but I'm not holding my breath), but congratulations, he broke the Xenu humanity emulation algorithm. Once I stopped caring I just got way out of line. So sorry to everyone else.

Lessons learned:

Never play drunk.
Never post drunk.
Never post drunk.
Never post drunk.
Don't play in a game with double moves allowed.
Don't play in a game where people take things so seriously.
Don't take things so seriously myself.
Don't play as Mao again -- seriously, twice is enough.

Basically, this game should have been two games. One with people like me who want to log in and play for a few minutes a day and that's it. And another game for people or teams with more time or more interest or more whatever, and in their game they could do whatever they wanted that was relevant to the rules under which they wanted to play. But in the kind of game I'd want to play in, I wouldn't have to watch a clock or care about being double moved, or have to worry about what is going on in between the times I'm able to log in and play. I don't have the availability to play in and succeed at the kind of game PB7 turned out to be and will never sign up for a game like this again. I got into the PB7 player field toward the end, I think I was one of the last few to sign up, and as I was reading the sign up thread it all sounded like a good time, nothing serious, something CASUAL. Under those circumstances you guys would not have met Xenu the Asshole and the game would have been better for it.

The biggest lesson of this game for me is to make damn sure the people playing in a game know what they're signing up for, and to not let in people who do not, cannot, or will not play under the same operating conditions for which the game was designed. It's one thing to mix players of different skill levels, that can work. I'm not opposed to playing in a game with someone like Plako or Mackoti, or (insert good player name here), where I know I'm going to eventually lose because those guys are better at Civ than I am. I can live with that. But I'll never play in another game with people who have a reputation for game rules abuse. Those kind of players should only play in games defined as strictly competitive (think...non-casual for an example of what competitive is) and they can do what they like in that game and leave me to enjoy the kind of game I like. I get that there was enthusiasm for a new pitboss game when this one formed and people like to play, and I can't argue with that. But this was not the right game for some people and I think we've all seen the result.

Overall I'd like to say I had a good time but that's not the case. I really enjoyed probably the first half of this game, but anything after that was just a chore to play. I don't think it had to be that way.

Anyway, thanks for the game idea Plako, I hope one day RB will give it another shot. With the right players this can work. But I think I'll lurk that one, probably best that some other players in this game just watch as well.

[SevenSpirits]

I've never been so irrationally angry at some random guy on the Internet as I was at Seven in this game.

Me either. It's too bad that happened and I'm sorry for my part in it. And I'm sorry for calling you a cheater. I said a lot of things that were utterly useless unless you consider "making spacetyrantxenu mad" useful, which I don't think is a particularly tenable position. Sorry for that.