[no players] When beetles battle beetles in PBEM 49...

[pindicator]

Does anyone but novice still have a chance?

Hard to say with novice's lack of updates recently, but zak is rebounding nicely

[BRickAstley]

This game has a surprisingly large amount of naval warfare compared to typical games here.

[Commodore]

Poor Boldly/Novice...30 vs. 30 triremes, while on the other side 3 vs. 3

[BaII]

Pretty, sure if Boldy didn't have so many triremes, then u might have been able to actually aquire territory and not be as behind in the other categories.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Commodore, this map is unfair. The player to the northeast of the land bridge has an advantage over the player in the southwest.

I don't think I understand this. Can you explain?

[SevenSpirits]

It's a joke.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

It's a joke.

Sometimes I guess I take things too literally. I was scratching my head trying to figure out what my Civ-betters obviously knew that I didn't. Based on the linguistics lesson in this thread....yeah.

And the triremes were the bane of my existence. I'll have nightmares for weeks, probably.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Pretty, sure if Boldy didn't have so many triremes, then u might have been able to actually aquire territory and not be as behind in the other categories.

To answer this, I had the Colossus, so I depended on those coast tiles and very large city populations to get my economy. I expanded heavily to get my crop yield up, so I wasn't really that far behind. I didn't have an island to myself as novice did, so that wasn't a realistic gain for me to be able to make. Which meant attacking novice head on against his entrenched hill cities with 60% cultural defense at tech parity. Clearly that's not a good plan.

Also, I was IND and had both stone and marble, so long as I could defend them. With forges, OR, IND bonus, and resource doublers, wonder fail gold was a very strong option, but only if I could keep access to the trade routes, which meant killing off novice's triremes, down to the last boat, or pushing them into his borders. If I had converted all of those hammers into catapults, horse archers, swords, etc., novice would have converted his hammers into defensive units and catapults, seen my advance a mile away, and slaughtered me as I approached his front city. As things stood, I got to blockade novice for a while and forced him to take a less productive tech path to Optics (as well as spending cash on upgrades). I don't know that this prevented him from being competitive in the chase to Liberalism because I haven't finished reading Zak's thread yet, but I know it cannot have helped.

When we began our naval arms race, novice was winning. By the time he had killed my navy off, Zak was ahead and leaving us all behind, and with his strong late game traits (ORG/SPI), he was going to do so even more the longer the game went on. I had no way to know that he and Zak were no longer sparring, but even if I did know, I could hardly have ignored novice's ability to deny me Colossus coast and/or stone/marble. Until the last 5 turns or so (until I got a bank in my capital and shrine city), I was scraping up economy however I could because I had over-expanded for a little while. That's my take at least.

[SevenSpirits]

I have to say I don't understand some of your guys' naval strategies. I'm picking on you, Boldly, because your post is right here, but I mean it for at least two of you (I have to admit I completely lost track of who all was blockading whom).

I had the Colossus, so I depended on those coast tiles and very large city populations to get my economy.

I got to blockade novice for a while and forced him to take a less productive tech path to Optics (as well as spending cash on upgrades).

Your opponent building more navy to fight you with is not a good thing.
Your opponent detouring to an early optics and upgrading some of their triremes near you to caravels is not a good thing.

In fact they are terrible for you! You want your nearby opponent to consider your mutual naval front to be stable and harmless. It seemed to me like every time someone got a naval advantage in this game they would move in to aggressively blockade, with terrible escalating results.

[novice]

I tried signalling non-aggression from time to time by not blockading and retreating boats. It didn't seem to take. But at the end I just wanted to sink every damn boat, strategic soundness be damned.

Also it should be said that blockading Boldly's stone and marble cities were extremely efficient ways of hurting him, and he was as much a threat as Zak to me.

I thought I had a NAP for a while with Zak, but reading his thread he doesn't seem to have realized. I left him three workers on the southern island that I could have deleted, but instead he deleted them, and I moved some units away from the fort.

I guess in a tight game like this it's hard to differentiate between friendly gestures and forced retreats.