[SPOILERS] Pindicator emerges from the wilderness to play pb74

[pindicator]

Thank you! I agree we were in a good position, but I'm less certain we would have overcome you. You still had a very large production edge over us, and we only had a slight GNP edge - it didn't feel like we were making any ground in the actual number of techs. I think what we had to do was score a victory over you in the battlefield to show Mig and Comm there was a path to win the war and that they weren't just going to be slowly ground down by your better and stronger armies. But we weren't able to bring our troops halfway around the world with any kind of speed, and that really hampered any effort to slow you down.

Eventually I was going to try to open another front up on the south, but I think we were 10 turns away from that at minimum. And by then you would have had nukes, I assume.

Anyway, I don't feel pressured into a concession because like you said, we needed Mig & Comm resolved to stay to war. And obviously if the game has ended in concession then they aren't resolved. So that's why I gave the concession here: I figured if they are both wanting to concede then I won't hold them up because I can't win without them anyway.

[Gavagai]

Your southern offensive I expected as I've been tracking your transports and galleons moving near the polar circle. Nukes I would have much earlier than that. In fact, the Manhattan Project was due to be completed on the very next turn and then four more turns for Radio, subs, and the first tacticals.

[pindicator]

I'm not sure how far your vision went but we had another 30 ships and half a dozen transports coming ... Eventually. Logistics were a nightmare, I think that's why we couldn't really push you. But destroyers would take at least 5 turns from our staging point and of course transports were slower.

I felt that by the time that force finally got to your outer islands then maybe we push you back a little but then the nukes would be falling, and I didn't see Mig or Comm's will to right surviving a bunch of nukes.

[Tarkeel]

Pindi, the images for the first half of the game seems to be missing; T122 is the first that loads for me. Looks like it could be an issue with share timer in oneDrive.

[pindicator]

Yeah, OneDrive was a failed experiment. I'll see if I can rehost elsewhere

[Tarkeel]

156
[...]
Why would Civac and Tarkeel send us this? [Note: Corn for corn]

Because they closed our borders!




I don't know if I mentioned this (haven't been reporting here much lately, sorry), but the plan was to hit Comben with a set of our knights.  The only problem with this is that getting to Comben is near impossible unless we go through Tarkeel/Civac's lands.  And unless we wanted to go the long way around through Commodore's lands we there was a very specific way we had to move in order to keep Amicalola from spying our forces.  Last turn that meant we had to move right up against Tarkeel's border.

I thought surely Tarkeel wouldn't take this move aggressively because if we were invading we wouldn't show our hand right before invading - we would have set up 2 tiles back and then invaded!

Regardless, they took our move as hostility and closed borders.  Or perhaps they are feeling good enough about their Plemo war that they want to take Comben for themselves?  Or they just don't want to allow us to do this?  In any case, Tarkeel's lands are off limits and we need a new plan.

While we had our eyes set on Comben (and Powell!) due to how obnoxious they were, we really didn't want to betray our best friend before he was really on the way out of the game. That also meant we didn't want to let you use our lands to attack him. Very nice recovery attack here though!

174
[...]
I had first thought to leave some catapults and units behind in the north, but now I think we have to be all-in on the east. Hopefully Plemo keeps Tarkeel honest enough that he doesn't attack us. Though we probably need to keep a dozen knights and some catapults up north just to keep Tarkeel/Civac honest.

At this point of the game, we wouldn't have attacked you. Given the gamestate it would feel like a mixture of kingmaking and seppuku.

As you know we loaded up knights that were in our north to go after DZ.  Now I don't know if Tarkeel realizes they went onto boats and can easily unload next turn, but him moving like this screams to me that he sees an opening and is going to try to go for it with all his units before he falls behind.  Either that or he's trying to hide a lot of units from Plemo in some odd maneuver.

That's exactly what it was, trying to dance around plemo's scout in our lands. We had quite a lot of units, and due to Comm's enforced peace, a strict timeline on when it was possible to attack.

Staging for next turn's invasion:

So this is the part I really don't get. After being paranoid about us reneging on the fish a few turns earlier, and pushing us to go to war with plemo backed by fish, you're actually the one reneging on the deal. Sure, attacking us makes a lot of sense, but I'd have preferred to fight that war on equal footing. You'd probably have won, but lulling us into false complaceny by sending superdeath-quality fish deals kind of stinks. I'd actually call this the second biggest backstab in recent RB history, after Mjmd's shenaningans. (I mean, when SD sends you fish you know to shore up your defenses)

We were pretty sure that you did this because Gavagai had set you up to it, as this is in my eyes a critical part of why he won this game.

So we fucked up.




For starters, I forgot Tarkeel was Germany.  And Hitru forgot the UU changes for Germany in CtH.  So when we saw a bunch of whips last turn we didn't think too much of Chemistry finishing - but now seeing a bunch of Pinch Grenadiers we're pulling back and offering Tarkeel peace for his city and 400g.  I could go up to 600 i think.

Anyway, I really regret the war now.  Now we're rather stuck into fighting Tarkeel next.  The economy is starting to take off a little - and we're probably going to have to stymie it with whipping units.  Stupid move to attack Tarkeel when we really were counting on Plemo doing a lot of the work - I should never have pulled that trigger.

The part you didn't know (but should have been able to tell from the research vision) is that we'd made sure to partially researched Chemistry up to the point where it was bulbable before going into the war, and was currently saving gold (very slowly) in order to finish it. Burning the scientist and all those whips really crippled us.

Fired one of the merchants to get the harbor done this turn (oh, we finally discovered how good harbors are on this map), but we'll hire him right back.  The idea is to hopefully get a GE or GM sometime around Railroad and hopefully land a corporation HQ.  We'll be sitting at 534 GP points at the end of the golden age, but I might shuffle some tiles and try to get another merchant going here, or maybe a little strategic starving.  We'll see.

Case in point, we actually never got close to unlocking harbors, we just couldn't afford the detour, despite building castles *for the trade routes* everywhere.

Tarkeel had been building up units but now he's just moved everything to his capital.  Potentially he could hit Splendor next turn.  If he does that then nothing is going to help Mig until Tarkeel is dealt with.

Nope, there is another large force on the pigs N of Kingdom Builder as well. Defending against cannons covered by machineguns is.. not something you want to plan for.

[Hitru]

It's quite long time ago so my memory might be off, and if so apologies for that.

We were sending you fish and attack vs Plemo when we decided to invade the other continent. But I think there was some time between that and our attack ( as it took us some time to move stuff and capture stuff on other continent)

I pushed pretty hard to attack you after that, and I think you are missing some context here. You and Comm were absolutely killing Plemo and from our perspective you were doing some heavy lifting and allowed Comm to capture easily cities from Plemo. At that time I though Gav and Comm were the frontrunners and Gav was eating Picc while Comm was getting stronger eating Plemo.

We were not strong enough to directly mess with Comm, but we could hit you, which I hoped would let Plemo at least fight back. This all was moot as Gav declared 1 or 2 turns after we attacked you.

When you combine this with the fact that we really needed big gains to get stronger and had a lot of units that would soon be outdated it made sense to try something. I know this was big risk move but it was also quite close to working. And after Amica mess we needed something big.

I can understand you feeling like we betrayed you, and it was a backstab. But it was not just fish for you and then sending army in, if I remember right there was our whole war on other continent between those two ( and our original idea was that you can beat Plemo while we are busy on other continent. Sadly things got locked up faster than we thought there with Mig claiming big share of stuff ).

[Tarkeel]

We were sending you fish and attack vs Plemo when we decided to invade the other continent. But I think there was some time between that and our attack ( as it took us some time to move stuff and capture stuff on other continent)

I wasn't able to find a screenshot from when you first sent the offer, but there was indeed some turns inbetween to get war preparations in and then the actual fighting. The offer was pretty explicit in fish for war for plemo though, which in my mind means "you're free to go fight without us backstabbing."

I pushed pretty hard to attack you after that, and I think you are missing some context here. You and Comm were absolutely killing Plemo and from our perspective you were doing some heavy lifting and allowed Comm to capture easily cities from Plemo. At that time I though Gav and Comm were the frontrunners and Gav was eating Picc while Comm was getting stronger eating Plemo.

I think your lack of vision in the area made you misinterpret how the war was going. Yes, Plemo lost several cities, but he was trading space for time; there was very little fighting with his forces. I agree that Comm and Gav were the two front runners at that time, and you had stalled out after taking a long time to eat Amica. We would not have interefered with your game in any way though if you went away to the other continent.

I can understand you feeling like we betrayed you, and it was a backstab. But it was not just fish for you and then sending army in, if I remember right there was our whole war on other continent between those two ( and our original idea was that you can beat Plemo while we are busy on other continent. Sadly things got locked up faster than we thought there with Mig claiming big share of stuff ).

Again, I wouldn't have minded you invading us at all, if it wasn't for the very explicit fish for war; that was the only reason we let the forces leave our borders.

[Miguelito]

I'm not sure how far your vision went but we had another 30 ships and half a dozen transports coming ... Eventually.

Thanks for the destroyers, they kept me at least stable In the big battle we had very bad rolls but you mopping up at least meant that it wasn't all for nothing.

Could have needed more transports though. Maybe build those first and send them, then fill them up with units coming through our rail network? Half a dozen eventually wasn't going to make uch of a difference tbh. I think towards the end I was adding about two per turn. But of course they were soon going to get atomized.