[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[williams482]

I appreciate your candor about your emotions with regard to these games, although I find myself at a bit fo a loss for how to properly respond to it. And I definitely feel you're being harder on yourself than is really fair. Figuring out the right thing to do under uncertain and emotionally charged conditions is hard, full stop. And maybe a game like this shouldn't be "emotionally charged", but fuck that, nobody spends months at a time playing a single multiplayer civ game unless they are willing to put some emotional energy into it. Certainly there's nothing wrong with attempting to improve your play and develop some life skills along the way, but you're going to make mistakes, and independent of that you're going to lose sometimes.

With that said, I don't think pushing for FtW was a game ending error. I think it was a gamble that didn't really work out given the abruptness with which Thrawn encountered and subsequently attacked us, but not only was it a reasonable thing to emphasize given the investments already made in empire security, any damage done is rendered largely irrelevant because Thrawn is already in an overwhelmingly dominant position and neither of the other teams is in any position to oppose him either. You had built more ships than anyone except Thrawn and TAD at the time you made that decision, and planned from the very beginning on going Victor-3 with your opening quartet of governor titles. Clearly security and naval presence were not casually disregarded here, and we just got rekt anyway.

So, we've lost the game. Now what? What specifically do you want to accomplish from here?

If the objective is to survive, or to be as annoying as possible to Thrawn and maximize the (extremely slim) odds that someone other than Thrawn/Krill can ultimately win, you just pump galleys until you literally cannot because all your cities are gone.

If the objective is to preserve whatever fractional percentage slivers of win probability still exist, then it's a little more complicated. Picking up Monumentality, if it's at all possible, is a major help towards that goal. Cashing out faith for a settler or two after turtling up in the capital and waiting for another team to draw Thrawn's attention is one of the few avenues left where Japan could ultimately recover from this obviously disastrous circumstance. All the scenarios where you win this game involve some truly whacky stuff happening, so why not take a wild gamble on a potential long-term benefit?

Or the plan is just to play the game until it's officially over and see what happens. Nothing wrong with that either.

[ljubljana]

Thanks for the kind words I really appreciate that you've stuck with me for so long through all of this

I guess to the extent that chasing FtW was game-ending, really all the teams made game-ending errors by not rushing the CS as hard as possible. I don't really think that makes FtW not game-ending on my part, but it does maybe mean I'm being too hard on myself

From here, I think the right thing to do is maximize our odds of winning, as it is in any position, no matter how hopeless. But that does coincide very closely with messing with thrawn maximally, as obviously any path to victory for us runs through a spectacular collapse from them. Sadly, though, Monumentality may be off the table now just because I don't know where I can get the last few points of era score from. I'd need to hold on to Takakeisho for long enough to chop out the holy site, and that's looking unlikely at this point. But I will go for it if I can do that, or if I can think of some other way to make it happen (very unlikely but, I suppose, not impossible).

[ljubljana]

t54:



Takakeisho is dead, of course. But there is a way for us to recapture it if thrawn keeps it, at least theoretically - chop a warrior in the capital and buy a missionary. Two 30-strength warriors in Crusade should be able to retake...though what exactly we could do to keep them from re-retaking remains to be seen. Most likely that move will not be helpful until such hypothetical time as the naval situation stabilizes somehow...

My ships are very nicely trapped as well, which is what happens when you rush turns .

How can we top off Monumentality? Well...we only need 2 ES on top of the campus, not the 3 that I feared, as with Asanoyama's monument we are barely on pace to hit PP in time (era is rolling t60), and we got 1 ES from settling Taka on a river. So that means contacting another team would do it, and perhaps I will send one of these trapped galleys out to try to do that if I can sneak one out in the north. Other than that, I'll have to review the ES sheet to see where I could get +2 in the next 4 turns...

[ljubljana]

yeesh, i can only imagine the salt in chevalier's thread right now, both at our turn times and especially at the quality of our resistance to Norway. and they don't even know yet that i literally just gifted a free city to thrawn.

when you read this, i am sorry friend

tbh, i kinda wanna go through this thread and remove some of MY salt, which i mostly feel pretty bad about now :/

[ljubljana]

turn 55 - Japan

With longships at Asanoyama before I could get defenders there, the end approaches:



I too will likely be down to just my capital within 10 turns... This is also the death of Monumentality as we are now missing PP for sure. Oh well.

Norway now has contact with both other teams...and, curiously, is at war with neither of them. No idea what's going on there, and it looks like I won't get any idea until I'm officially dead

[williams482]

Thrawn has no incentive to attack them right now, he's going to eat us and get stronger while limiting the chances of getting dogpiled while he's at his most extended.

Chev/Inc and Woden/Banzailizard surely recognize the danger and intend to do something about it, but are likely lacking in visible viable targets. If Thrawn isn't going ham on their closest city states for the sake of not provoking them too early, and they haven't found Thrawn's home island, what can they even accomplish through war short of gifting thrawn the Defensive Tactics eureka?

That's my theory, anyway. Good diplomatic play from Thrawn if that's the case.

[ljubljana]

Yeah, I suppose the other two homelands probably look like: thrawn's longships occupying one-tile chokes, cutting off access to Norway's home island in such a way as can never be broken by galleys, and perhaps a few more longships blocking off and killing any city-states with convenient nearby oceans, like Mogadishu. If that's the case, war would make no sense for the other teams because there would be no way to realistically kill even one of thrawn's units, as has been the case for us.

Of course, this thing is REALLY freaking over if that's the case, especially as thrawn will run out of easy longship gains in literally like four turns once they eat Terunofuji. At that point, they probably will bottle us up at our capitals and drop these 20 longships on someone else...

Man, I wonder which of our decisions gave thrawn the signal that we should be The Target. I'm guessing either the religious builds or seeing MoM with three tiles of coastal access. This game sure would have been different if we had gone for that coffee site

[ljubljana]

I think after this round of galleys I may swap to Agoge warriors and try to retake Takakeisho and Terunofuji. That should be irritating with Crusade and Oligarchy live, and it's not like our galleys will accomplish anything once we have the critical mass we need to prevent an advance into the strait. Might as well swap to Archery research too, while we're contemplating such things...

[williams482]

Man, I wonder which of our decisions gave thrawn the signal that we should be The Target. I'm guessing either the religious builds or seeing MoM with three tiles of coastal access. This game sure would have been different if we had gone for that coffee site

I bet it's actually because we were the closest Thrawn had to a credible rival, with the largest empire and strongest military. Thrawn wanted to nip that in the bud and clean up the others later.

Could also have been geographic convenience, of course.

[ljubljana]

haha, wouldn't that be flattering

sadly though thrawn found us right around the time both other teams passed us in military strength. so i'm not sure we ended up as any harder a target at the time of their power spike than anyone else was....just as a more tempting one because of my CS conquests. oops