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Coeurva · November 11th, 2017, 07:35

I do regret not taking EXP more than not building 20 NumCav by T100 -- not least because I think I haven't made the most of IMP.

I'm not sure if early-game aggression is cheapest -- you build less units, but you also have less build queues and pop in total to produce what you need, at a time when settlers/workers/granaries are at their highest demand (due to diminishing returns of fpt, hpt, etc.) and you're less likely to secure a meaningful technological edge until the Classical Age, unless you catch someone without copper while you tech BW early (we were in position to whip 3-4 axes by ~T45, iirc, but lacked information on CML other than his notably late switch to Slavery -- but perhaps we should, in fact, have done exactly this; a few turns earlier and we could likely have camped on his copper -- it's not easy to make such gambles in a long game, though).

I can never maintain an interest in single player, but the one Immortal game I played on RtR showed as much as yours about the computer's inability to deal with any mounted units (played as Justinian of Mongolia iirc).

Here's music to accompany our eschatological experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpzhoU0Y4_U

(Lyrics)

Old Harry · November 11th, 2017, 12:31

I'd say aggression is most useful when your economy can take it. So before courthouses it's usually a bit dodgy and after communism it's obligatory. Of course, it needs to be successful too, which is normally the higher bar to hurdle.

Coeurva

Apparently, we're losing cities to Krill.

I'd guess that Hamnbuse has fallen to him; the other one should be Chehalis. He might think that dtay has other concerns than booting him off the continent. I have no other explanation for this.

chumchu · November 15th, 2017, 13:43

It's a free for all. GJ has landed as well as Krill. I would say we have max 5 turns left alive.

The positive explanation is that we inflicted enough on Dtay that the others dare to take the mainland. A more reasonable one is that they expect him to be stretched out thin enough that he can not attack one of them without being vulnerable to others. It's not a huge risk they are taking by doing some opportunistic raiding.

Coeurva · November 20th, 2017, 19:16

Next turn, we will carry out a three-pronged attack on Mandrake, Sweet Water and Regna. I've set aside seven galleys (all promoted to Drill IV) and three macemen for this purpose. Our knight stack will perform a surprise encirclement against dtay's troops (I've attached our latest Great General, Don Quixote de la Mancha; this gives our troops +25% hill attack if there's a windmill on the tile) while we can surely buy peace from German Joey with our surplus whale resource. By now, we should be close to the threshold for Legendary Culture; has the Sistine Chapel been built yet?

chumchu · November 21st, 2017, 04:28

I think we have the men to attack Emerald isle as well. Who needs the mainland =)

Krill has the chapel if I am not mistaken. Another reason to attack him in my humble opinion.

Do so. I'm going back to global lurking soon as well.

Coeurva

Skimmed through the others' threads, including Krill's. Yeah, it's that time of the week, I'm afraid, for what's hopefully a final final statement on my part...

Krill is right that once his C2 galleons were in the water and he had double our number of ports developed on his relevant shores, we had no chance of holding any of the eastern coast against him. I underestimated the relative combat odds of C2 galleons, which compounded the error, but it should be clear at least that I didn't ignore his production base. He even gives the same rationale (of course, Krill's first assumption is that I'm incapable of anything resembling rational thought): that short of his own incompetence, nothing could have prevented his victory in that sea (which is amusing considering how much he goes on to point out my incompetence, when it ostensibly didn't matter anyway -- but I'm inclined to agree).

I think that's why we had to put his competence to the test before he was ready, because waiting quietly until he has assembled his uncounterable fleets in the locations of his choice loses assuredly, and so does waiting until dtay assembles his cannon/knight invasion stack with double our production capabilities, which was inevitable as soon as we had lost the war. According to Krill himself, he had already been planning to seize all of our island holdings with an Astronomy bulb even before we had first declared war on him, and considered this inevitable -- yet if we anticipate this, we should have realized the futility of fighting him? While Shwedagon Paya played little part in our decision to settle the western sea much more heavily than the east (iirc), although we did correctly assume that Joey had enough on his hands at all times to contest us there (partly due to the GLH build subtracting from his potential navy), we did at least identify the threat to our eastern coast -- Krill cannot honestly claim we could have avoided settling any cities under potential threat by him.

I'm also willing to concede that my economic understanding of Civ has been awful so far -- Krill briefly identified wealth builds as unsustainable (and, impressively, easily predicted the crash from GNP graphs), and from the experience I now have, I'd say that's right. The short-term superiority of hammer conversion in wealth builds vs. courthouses ignores first EP, but more importantly the macroscopic inflexibility: hammer tiles tend to consume food before Serfdom windmills (and then those aren't that great), which means you work fewer tiles unless you expand horizontally -- which demands new wealth builds to make cities break even on themselves. Now at some point, the map is filled as far as peaceful settling goes; trap sprung: unless you've already got the army to secure a meaningful chunk of territory, you can't switch away from the wealth builds without your economy plummeting because you can't add more wealth queues; but if you don't switch away from the wealth builds, suddenly the guy with the courthouses has a lot more queues to put units into. Wealth builds aren't necessarily wrong, but decidedly "front-heavy", reliant on early conquest -- and when dtay beelined knights, our game was over perhaps due to this mismanagement.

So should we have attacked Yuri, or later dtay (who might have been more vulnerable than we had thought, although his thread doesn't reveal too much)? -- That's definitely a point to argue, Joey taking this position decisively in his commentary (including our criminal neglect of elephants), although where Krill and I also agree is that we supposedly couldn't have attacked Yuri, as dtay could have pushed against any gains immediately with his knights; even if we had managed to get rid of the stack that had overrun Yuri, dtay's production base would have been closer to the new front lines and, due to his Colossus coast economy combined with a tech lead, he had the most (and most expendable) pop in the world to whip off. Besides that, he could suddenly have created forking threats with one of the strongest units on the roster. Beelining knights would also only have delayed cothons further.

Anyway, for all of Krill's surely very amusing ridicule and contempt of me, he hasn't mentioned much of an alternative foreign-affairs strategy that doesn't involve him ultimately profiting from our actions. While Joey was lagging behind in Astro research (and actually caught by surprise that we got it faster than he had anticipated, unlike Krill, which ironically does show that he took us seriously as a threat, if in the same way as a rabid dog), all we would have accomplished against him, even assuming miraculous lasting success, was to a) provide a few more islands for Krill to seize, with still no hope of matching his production (factoring in that Krill gets 90%-odds units for the same price) -- if Joey couldn't just have retaken them; b) weaken the only strong counterweight to the primary threat to us (dtay), as JR4/Ref were in no position to contest him after their losses to Gavagai. Sitting around on a Classical stack wouldn't have accomplished much, either -- maybe dtay needs to build a few more cannons before he breaks through it.

Yet had we not built units at that point, we would have been immediate fodder for dtay's superior army. Then, once they were built, we were waiting for dtay to kill us regardless while our economy was dragged down by them -- the only hope was to acquire more build queues, and there weren't many targets. Incidentally, I think Joey's musings on the relative value of Guilds/Engineering vs. Astronomy are spot-on, although Carthage has unique gains from Compass en-route, and we couldn't have raced dtay to knights even by beelining (because our economy was unsustainable, see Krill's comments), but even limited land success against Savant while Yuri was heroically defending against dtay would have kept us in the game for longer, and with less exposure to Krill's galleons, though more exposure to then-top manufacturer Gavagai. I think the root of the error must have been the war against CML, then, at least when I failed to capture the capital, but it's entirely possible that leaving CML in peace still results in dtay beelining knights and consuming him, with our position turning out worse yet.

If that isn't clear yet, I don't begrudge Krill for playing a great game, for understanding Civ much better, for pointing out that I've made copious mistakes in playing (which I expected when I joined, and if anything I think I've been insecure about making some grave idiotic mistake sooner or later from the beginning) -- but yeah. Maybe that's just Krill's own style of hyperbole, but I'm upset over getting accused of mental illness ("thinking psychotically", "irrationally", etc.) because I play Civ about once every two years. But to point out false premises is one thing; to get diagnosed of a categorical inability to think, which is what I read in Krill's assessments, is crushing -- even if it might hold true.

Early on, Krill even makes some half-hearted comment about how newbie mistakes are understandable, seeing as how Civ isn't an important life skill, which I wouldn't even agree with (I think it reflects on important life skills). In fact, only because we both agree on measuring ourselves to our success in a strategy game could this ever get so strangely "personal" (that, too, might be inaccurate) despite both our intentions, as far as I can see. Contrary to what I had thought before reading his thread, I don't think whatever problem Krill has with me will ever be resolved, but that might actually be just my fault, as explained.

In any case, as fun as playing out the game as such was, in times of war and peace alike, and flawed as it was, the intensity of out-of-game "bad blood" is unlike other games I've played (although I've never played any form of poker for real money, nor tourney chess -- so there), and despite what Krill seems to think, it's much larger a part of why I've grown estranged from it than being unable to accept mistakes, or not finding joy in tracing consequences.

But that's not the whole story. It's been said in his thread, but I'll echo here that Savant has been impressively graceful about this whole game even as he seemed to be dying in a descent of enemies from all sides. Unlike me, by the way. I suppose I've been rather nonchalant about our actual demise playing out, but that's because I had been assuming that the war against Krill was our last chance to stand a chance against dtay, and Bacchus signing off (which I can understand well...) was all but confirmation that nothing mattered after that, unless dtay had decided to attack JR4 before us, which didn't happen.

From reading JR4's thread, I've learned that he seems to be a titled chess player -- impressive! -- and one of his posts mentions that he had recently fought a grandmaster rated at 2600 Elo, losing decisively -- was that a waste of time from the beginning, since the other player's understanding of the game was predictably on a much higher level? Is JR4's current war against Savant a waste of time, because they're both bound to get crushed by a larger neighbour at some point, who will take whatever they gain? I know I've been mostly joking about The Spirit Of Realms Beyond, and yet... I don't think Krill doesn't realize the appeal of jumping into a game you barely know; in fact, he's doing it with Civ6 PBEM5.

Say, from reading Joey's thread, I don't get the same impression as from Krill's. There, he calls me an idiot for signing OB with Savant and paying him gpt for it, despite us being the party with Currency. To which I thought, haha, yeah, that's right, it must look idiotic -- and iirc Bacchus found that baffling as well. From reading Savant's thread, I still can't assess whether there was a diplomatic benefit to it that weighed up for the economic cost. In any case, what I got from Joey nonetheless reads like "what's wrong, you can do better than that, get your shit together!" -- And you have to be truthful more than anything else.

(Joey also had full powers of observation on our war and found the intensity of the fighting astonishing. Apparently Krill had left his core empty to assemble the stack that re-took Mandrake; Gavagai could probably have rolled over him at the time, and Krill himself thought that Gavagai would get much more profit from our war with him even if we had miraculously succeeded -- which may have been true, but it ignores that we didn't really care about Gavagai gaining more as long as we could gain something of help against dtay -- but Gavagai never took us seriously, I think.)

There's also Joey noting that Krill never attacked China -- my "metagame" play was precisely that Krill wouldn't want to sacrifice his prospective gains against Ventessel/Donovan Zoi just to really beat us down with his galleons, and we could force him to choose between attacking China or us, with "us" being, hopefully, what he would have seen as the losing play, no matter how much success he might have had. Well, that went well!

Apart from that, it's clear that Krill thought little of me long before any war; whenever he thought we did something right, he immediately traced it to Bacchus; he assumed that I was mentally incapable of, say, realizing that his light island defenses were because he had pulled out the garrisons (well, at least that's an advantage of reporting too much: he can go back and see that my paranoia outweighs even my psychosis), or that he was leaving Regna almost empty because it was indefensible (retaking was probably a mistake, he's right -- but in the event that his taking Regna was a "bluff", in that he couldn't have defended it, I thought risking three swords was worth it -- units which I think wouldn't have made a lick of difference defending any other city, btw, although the galleon carrying them was another story, as well as the displacement of our forces); and he actually fell for the one time I managed to outplay him in this game: feigning anger via absurd gold demand after he declared war to feel out our intentions, which only worked because he assumed that surely a newb would get all "butthurt" over the blown surprise (his word). Funnily, had he thought more highly of me, it wouldn't have worked. In hindsight, though, that was probably yet another instance of a tactical victory within a strategic failure: sure, the misdirection worked, but it only cemented Krill's view that I had attacked him because of "thinking psychotically". Faltering under stress like I did must not have helped my case.

Funnily, one of our galleys steering southward did alarm Krill to hostile intentions -- before they were there, because it was actually carrying a settler whose planned spots had been denied in short order by Savant, barbarians, and Krill himself. I forgot whether I had noted that at the time, but you really have to make sure that not only do your moves make sense to yourself, but also to others, if you want to surprise them... (and that whole settler odyssey was another case of smoke

on a logistic scale, not even talking of the strategic failure of settling eastern islands: should just have been more decisive about claiming Emerald Isle; I think he ended up founding Toledo after his path had traced almost a complete circle from the capital, no exaggeration)

All this said, Krill may well be right that I'm categorically unfit to understand Civ4, at least at any level that might make it worth bothering with playing long-form games. There's wisdom in knowing where your ambition and abilities can't take you. But then again, that's also the easy excuse mischief

Well, that is all over now. I'm looking forward to reading PB38.

Edit: I think I'll write some more about what I've found in the others' threads (not only regarding our civ) when I've read them in more detail. I promise that'll go down without griping.

Bacchus · November 21st, 2017, 16:01

Dude, it's all just rhetoric, and Krill famously doesn't filter. He literally doesn't mean what he says, he is a medical worker, and the last thing he would do is accuse anyone of mental illness in earnest. He is also British, and smart, which almost automatically makes him a dick (at least in the eyes of nationalities other than British and Russian, we understand each other here). Banter, it's called.

Anyway, I am glad that eventually you've come around to see that not only we weren't doing anything outlandish, we were pretty much going for the only option possible. Yeah, the implementation could have been better, yadda-yadda, but overall we did what we had to do. Krill, on the other hand, I am going to say fucked up royally, exactly through bantering himself into a conviction that you and I don't undertstand the game at all, or even basic maths. 8 ports are more than 4, not really rocket science. Yet, for some reason, he was convinced that we would perpetuate a war against him, whereas in reality we were pretty happy to stop at Mandrake. I mean yeah, in the early days of the settling, you are right, we had to push to knock him out before he got entrenched in that sea, but once that's a fait accompli, all we could have hoped for, and needed, was Mandrake. Mandrake in his hands just killed any point in playing on, as our game would have been entirely hostage to him. Even with Mandrake it was not pretty, but logistics, forewarning and counter-strike capability got considerably improved.

On other fronts, yeah, some mismanagement, some economy fuckups, but really I think the only major error was losing focus around T100. You had legitimate crop yield concerns, military concerns, and infrastructure concerns. We should have chosen one, and addressed it, instead we floundered about building not enough units, not enough cities and not enough courthouses/forges. As for me, I felt that you CY worries were overblown, and we could have focused on Numids, but I didn't make that case forcefully enough, and I myself was distracted by infra concerns and Code of Laws (which, again, I didn't advocate strongly enough for). But I think it was good for you to play this game out as your felt comfortable, rather than take decisions that you didn't really understand.

TL;DR, you had a good first game, and a reasonable game by general RB standards, there are enough people who play at about the same level or lower, even years into it. And Krill's a twat.

Coeurva

Well, I like Krill, which is part of why I'm so upset over his seeming disdain -- and by the way, look at how he commented on your sign-off; I think that shows he thinks a good deal more of you than either me or chumchu; and that occurred at a point when we couldn't have threatened him even if someone had gifted us a dozen submarines, but he acted like he was firmly trapped in the madhouse now, when actually I wouldn't have attacked Krill at any point after that (if anyone, it would have been Savant if dtay had gone southward). I'm sure I said a lot of "come get us Savant!" during this game and made fun of his shock spears (which he stopped building at some point; wish I hadn't done it, but the point I think stands; fitting that my mistakes involved mis-assessing promotions more direly) and that wasn't to say he was some kind of idiot, but rather just banter (he was similarly baffled about our GG promoting a Woodsman III axe, which was useful for about one turn, but a very important one), so I can understand Krill.

There's no arguing, I'm a dick as well (but the melodramatic German kind, where all the words for it are unwieldy -- despite the sound, "schlong" is not among them), and perhaps it's just an issue of subliminal linguistic programming that I usually get the message with Joey and find his style encouraging, but continue to fail to get it with Krill. Maybe he thought the Italian all-caps ships were yelling untold insults at him, not a wild mixture of opera and poetry. Or maybe he realized it, and that was what drove the supposed erratic part home. Most likely, I am once again overthinking naming schemes. I should team up with RefSteel some day, I think... wink

(iirc he thought CML's naming scheme was specifically directed towards us -- because Yuri's cities, bearing the default names, were planted away from the front)

On another note, our diplomacy, which I had assumed to have been a complete clusterfuck, actually went over better than I'd expected, at least with Mongolia -- JR4 really seems to have appreciated that little 18g gold gift and understood its meaning as us thinking that we were in good positions to cooperate (hey, we never went to war with Mongolia after all!), and RefSteel immediately put forth a half-dozen theories on what it could mean, including that we were signalling an attack on Dark Savant in 18t, which is probably close to how I'd have reacted as well lol

To my surprise, the Khatunate never seems to have so much as considered attacking us, ever, and accepted the stone-sugar deal partially due to our "long-running friendship" despite us having done nearly nothing for them besides leaving them alone; but we had no mutual targets anyway, while Tularian Forest and Savant's culture blocked all of the northern ports (theoretically, they could have declared on Savant to get through, though -- I'm sure he wouldn't have minded them striking at us; but Savant--Mongolian relations were never very good in-game). I'm enjoying the JR4/Ref thread from first impressions, although it's a different brand of insanity from ours. mischief

It also turns out Savant was much more ambitious in trying to attack us than immediately apparent, but particularly in the early game and during the Stygian Crisis, he seems to have made war-plans. I think we handled relations with him well overall, seeing as his one declaration was completely telegraphed and didn't change much (Emerald Isle was a net negative for us); even shortly before dtay's strike, he considered attacking Ignis Fatuus, although that would have been fireworks in our favour, if I understand it right that he never spotted or suspected the 20-unit stack camping out behind the town (he only ever referred to the "garrison").

There's also the fun of unevenly-distributed omniscience: Savant wondering whether I was insane because all of our northern cities were empty (because almost all units were fighting CML in the south, with the sparse garrisons placed midway between Sicil and Ignis to reinforce both cities as needed), RefSteel and JR4 wondering so much about why/how we had attacked what they assumed was Ventessel... I'm sure they'll all find their share of the reverse in here later, too.

By the way, yeah, CivStats doesn't seem to have given away the early war to everybody -- I think Savant assumed CML had just whipped something until he actually spotted the ruins we had produced, although he called it into question at least once before that.

Against Joey, despite annoying him with our absurdly-extended crescent of islands to secure gold (incidentally, he didn't mention that as a possible reason why we would have settled like this), we managed to fly under the radar up until the end (agreeing to OB with him came at the right time), at which point his intercession even was to our benefit (I certainly preferred him razing our cities to dtay capturing them -- nothing against dtay -- and I'm sure Krill would agree with that, hehe). Beyond that, despite what Joey thought, we actually had a whole lot of Open Borders deals all game, even during the time of cothons, because we secured them early to make them more profitable than those of our competitors (I'm still not sure if my hunch that cothons are "softer" than the GLH stigma was correct). Or we built cothons far too late, but that doesn't sound as strategically impressive. lol

Joey also gave us "serious kudos" for the GLib plan and build, which I think is the same I felt about Savant's Mausoleum. So if you were not advocating strongly enough for CoL, you pointed that route out instead during that time-frame, and cothons do beat out courthouses, so I think the Astro/GLib route wasn't economically doomed as such; but perhaps Calendar should have come after Compass, and Metal Casting earlier, and we needed more early-game commerce, and so on... I agree with losing focus being the main flaw (Joey seems to think the same, we went all over the place), we built half an army in the south and half an empire in the north, and then our stack came disappointingly short of capturing Sorpigal, which I think would have been the real lifeline if we could have taken it (along with Harmondale and Fountain Head). It's hard to tell from Savant's thread whether I should have moved the damn thing more resolutely. Funnily, Krill and I agree on that the stack was "smallish", but that was because half of our units were boats, or stuffed onto them, and I kind of suspect that Krill just thought we were too arrogant even to assemble a sensible stack.

Where Krill is also right is that we didn't take dtay seriously enough (I more so than you) after his disastrous early game (apparently he lost a city to barbs, and then there was the obscure CML war). That was what should have influenced our T100 strategy -- the impending knight beeline to our south. Metagaming failure. Instead, I went on about some islands.

Oh, and JR4/Ref dropping out of the first war against Savant after capturing an ineffectual city led to both of them having second thoughts after our campaign showed its success. Man, we could have ruled the world together! (until Krill would have done the galleons thing, I guess, or dtay the cannons trick) -- They seem to be doing fine against him now, though.

Donovan was elated about our map trade, too. If he hadn't been crippled so thoroughly, we would have had another good ally there, I think -- mostly because of the lay of the land. No conflicting interests there.

Yeah, from applying role-playing criteria, we've won this game (well, actually I think that would be the Khatunate, but...). For instance, if I remember right, we built exactly one war elephant all game. I regret not naming a GG after myself and attaching him to it. Fuck galleons, that's what Civ is really about, riding elephants to victory. Failing that, amor fati.

Next time. Maybe. Definitely not very soon, but there's many reasons and most of them have nothing to do with Krill.

CML · November 21st, 2017, 18:41

(November 21st, 2017, 15:40)Coeurva Wrote: Blah blah blah

I think the root of the error must have been the war against CML, then, at least when I failed to capture the capital, but it's entirely possible that leaving CML in peace still results in dtay beelining knights and consuming him, with our position turning out worse yet.

Blah blah blah

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