Postgame Discussion

[scooter]

Ramblings

What gave SM the lead: A peaceful early start where he pushed fast expansion, combining that with Hanging Gardens.

Beginning of the end: SleepingMoogle getting two cities from TT peacefully, one of which was a Holy City. This was much much more severe than Moogle capturing two cities. Look at Serdoa's capture of TT's cities as proof of this. This resulted in SM getting two mature cities with all buildings intact, which really gave him a clear-cut lead. Due to his buildup for war, I had nearly closed the gap due to spamming Great Lighthouse cities, and I was primed to take the lead while he went to war and (ideally) slogged out a war against a technological equal. This also meant that I needed to shift from an expansion footing (which was really starting to pay dividends) into building military because I was running lightly on military. This isn't even covering all the things that this gifting influenced, but I felt like in the span of a few hours I went from a co-favorite to a longshot, which was disappointing at the time.

Nail in the coffin: Signing a NAP with SleepingMoogle until T140 (Serdoa followed suit shortly afterwards). This was an inexcusable move on my part. Serdoa and I considered a 2v1 war right before this NAP was signed, and in retrospect that was our last chance for relevancy. Serdoa touched on this in his thoughts a few posts before mine... We very well could have lost, but I do think we at least had a chance there. Signing the NAP was signing away victory, as I underestimated just how much he would pull away during that time. Out of all three things, this annoys me the most - that I was so naive to think I could catch up economically. Ah well, live and learn.

Despite the fact that the above two paragraphs sound gloomy, this game was a total blast. It got kinda dull towards the end as we were all playing SimCity and SM was blowing us away, but I really enjoyed this game.

General thoughts on other players

SleepingMoogle - First, I think you somewhat overvalued my Great Lighthouse. Well, better put, I think you underestimated just how far behind I was after the Dazed war wrapped up. It really was pretty bleak, so the Lighthouse merely helped me catch up a little bit by letting me spam cities. Problem is, you start to hit diminishing returns eventually, as the routes became less valuable since there simply wasn't enough cities to get routes to. You closing routes hurt me more than I let on, and the destruction of TT's cities hurt me because those were some mature cities I had routes to. In the end I only had foreign routes with Serdoa, which combined with it's power fading as the game goes on, the Lighthouse merely kept me in the game for awhile rather than making me a big threat. You were still researching faster than me, which was pretty amazing in all honesty. Question for you - how nervous would you have been if myself and Serdoa dogpiled you back when we had the chance? Serdoa kind of wanted to and I stupidly talked him out of it. I'm just curious if you think it would have worked or not.

Serdoa - I guess there's not tons to say to you, since we kept in touch pretty well throughout the game. I guess I will say this - sorry for talking us out of the 2v1 on SM. That more or less ended the game, which was mostly my mistake. Haven't read your thread yet, so I'll probably have more to say when I do. I must confess to others that although I greatly tried to downplay my relations with Serdoa (even dropping hints that I didn't trust him), I was much closer to him than that. I'm sure you all suspected that anyways, but I thought I'd mention that here.

Twinkletoes - I definitely think you improved from PBEM3, but I still feel like you would have benefited from a more experienced player giving general advice. For instance, you knew war with SM was coming, but there was no power bump on your graph, it seemed like you built almost no military. 10 turns warning on Quick Speed is an eternity. My best guess is you were far too hesitant to use the whip, but I haven't looked at your thread yet, so maybe that'll explain more. You made some other comments which I'll address in a different post when I make comments on things other people have said.

Dazed - Not much else to add other than what I've written in your thread and things I've said in the past. To be honest, I found diplo with you to be the smoothest out of everyone and I felt you would've been the easiest player for me to ally with, but geography and my agreement with Serdoa trumped that. I'm really not sure what else you could have done differently though, I don't think you misplayed the diplo quite as bad as you make it sound. I do agree that it would have been a very different game if you weren't reduced to an OCC so early.

[scooter]

I have read through Dazeds, TTs and the lurker thread and I was really wondering why my diplo was perceived as being harsh and aggressive - sure I am not talking around in circles. But that is because it simply does take me long enough to write what I am writing - I do not want to put an hour more into writing it

Honestly, I think part of it is just the fact that English isn't your first language so sometimes your wording can come out sounding more blunt than you probably intended. It's not really your fault, but I think that unorthodox wordings occasionally skewed the message somewhat. Again, I feel bad because it's not really your fault in that case, but that's my best guess. I felt nervous about our alliance for a good chunk of the game because I couldn't read through the lines on your messages very easily. Most of the time I can tell what people are thinking pretty easily on messages, but I had a mess of a time reading through the lines on your messages at times.

[scooter]

During my conflict with Serdoa, I was convinced that it would allow him to become the runaway power and it was surprising that didn't happen.

I touched on this a few posts up, but I'd also say that two free, mature cities (one of them a holy city) to the guy already leading in every category is more powerful than the Great Lighthouse. If you had a shrine (not sure if you did), the shrine income alone (Hinduism was well-spread) is probably close to being as valuable as the Lighthouse. The Lighthouse kept me from becoming irrelevant (which I should have been since I had SUCH a slow start - you had four cities before I had two), but couldn't help me run away.

To my fellow players: I'm really sorry for that guys. If there is one thing I truly regret about this game, it was this.

Nah I definitely don't hold any bad feelings about that. I said things both in email and in my thread that were moderately harsh at the time, but that's all part of the game and the experience. I'm extremely competitive - I get frustrated if I lose at a game of Uno, so I definitely don't take offense to things said in the heat of a competitive game.

scooter: <snip>
If anything, a little more aggression would help. If you're in that dominant position, then you should do something to levarage it.

Completely agree.

[scooter]

My only quibble was your anger with me over the gifting and the reference to PBEM3 in your thread in not the nicest of terms (goes for the others in the Lurker thread too!). I hope that through reading my thread you will see that the gifting had a ring of sanity to it and that it wasn't a surrender like before. I hope this will get rid of that from your mind and you will realise I was simply over my head in PBEM 3 and not out to screw anyone!

Honestly, your situation in this one was more frustrating than PBEM3. In PBEM3, you were very backwards technologically in comparison to Sandover, so you didn't have a prayer in the world at surviving against him without enormous amounts of help. I don't like at all how it was handled, but surrendering to someone who's put you in the bad position is quasi-understandable. In theory.

But this was very different... You were technological equals with SleepingMoogle, and you had 10 turns to prepare and didn't do anything. In fact I think you even built a couple wonders during that time instead! I haven't read your thread yet, but my principle still stands. If Dazed gave up against me that quickly, I think I would've been a favorite to win rather than someone desperately trying to make up ground all game. He was a thorn in my side for forever and he had no motivation to do so besides the principle of doing everything he can to defend himself. You had tons of reason to whip your cities hard (or even whip them at all) - you were still a contender - but you didn't really try (power graphs saying that, not me), and as a result, you had to gift away two cities to survive. Make sense? It's not a fair game situation really - I had Dazed at my north who fought hard to stay alive and bother me, I had SM at my south - and I'm guessing if I gave him 10 turns warning I would be attacking him, that he would've had quite the welcoming party ready for me. SleepingMoogle didn't have to declare war and he got two free cities from you - and the impact of those cities I've already discussed far too much already...

That's why I was pretty unhappy and said some sort of harsh things, because one player didn't try very hard to defend himself, and as a result my biggest rival got some freebies. I regret the tone of a few things I said (it goes back to the competitive thing I mentioned earlier), but I was okay enough with them that I didn't delete them.

Hope you don't take my comments personally. It's honestly meant constructively - if you make a habit of what happened in this game, people are going to be hesitant about allowing you into a game with experienced players. Learn from this game and I'm sure you'll be fine.

You played a top game though. You saw your opportunity with Dazed and took it along with your Great Lighthouse plan. Maybe if you had expanded out to more islands faster you could've pulled a lead out, but with land so good and pressed on the mainland, I can see why you didn't as much. It would've been interesting to see how you would have reacted to an attack by Moogle and me if Serdoa hadn't got me first, but I'm sure you'd have coped a lot better than I did!

Huh, I very much considered SM attacking, but hadn't considered you helping him. I'm guessing that's what you're referring to that was planned out in your thread? It definitely would've been annoying, though I know I had sufficient population to handle some harsh whipping. I'm confident that I would've survived, but I know it would have taken me out of the running to win the game. Interesting stuff.

[SleepingMoogle]

Question for you - how nervous would you have been if myself and Serdoa dogpiled you back when we had the chance? Serdoa kind of wanted to and I stupidly talked him out of it. I'm just curious if you think it would have worked or not.

Oh, that definitely would have made me sweat. I think I would be able to defend myself in the end, but at the cost of my economy, research and expansion.

[scooter]

Finally have a bunch of time today so I decided I'm going to finish reading these threads (only a couple I didn't get to). Started in the lurker thread - this made me laugh:

I actually named it Slight Return, in that the map is effectively RBPB2 map, redux, but I first heard the term "Slight Return" from that same Jimi Hendrix song. That the lyrics fit is either pure luck, or my sub-concious guiding me.

So yeah, more evilness

I honestly spent way too much time thinking the name through... So this made me laugh to find out that I was sort of right and way wrong all at the same time .

I wonder if Scooter will have the bright idea to get Dazed settled on the big ring opposite where Serdoa would land? It could be really entertaining to watch...

I'm pretty sure this was referring to when I floated to Dazed the idea of starting him new over in the new world I'd discovered. I don't think I ever said it in my thread, but honestly at the time I was kinda thinking about doing just that . It was either that or start him across from SleepingMoogle, but I definitely was going to try to create some fireworks with that move .

[scooter]

Reading the lurker thread was definitely interesting. I did check out the lurker thread as soon as the game was over to at least get a look at the map, but hadn't read anything else... A few people made comments saying they were hoping the rest of the map will be used - as I will say that I agreed with that sentiment, and I do even more so after seeing the rest of it. It is too bad that it was over by then, but it's the primary weakness of NTT - the game can be decided much earlier than with Tech Trading on. I still prefer NTT, but that's the biggest drawback for sure.

[scooter]

I've been buzzing through Serdoa's thread as well - mostly hazed over a lot of the C&D stuff, but when I got to some of the diplo with me, several of the posts were very eye-interesting, culminating in this:

Diplo:

scooter told me he will give me an estimate when he did look at the turn. Didn't happen till now and I really think that our "cooperation" has basically ended anyway.

This was in the early game when we were discussing a missionary trade. I made a few comments at random points throughout the game along the lines of this - that Serdoa was hard for me to figure out because sometimes he seemed annoyed with me and others he seemed friendly. In the end I wrote it off as a slight language barrier issue, but turns out I really did frustrate him. It was just eye-opening to me to find out that I screwed up diplo at that point of the game. In all honestly I'm just bad at estimating what a fair trade is under those circumstances (it was a worker-missionary deal that was being discussed) and I never intended to rip him off, but turns out it came across that way. Whoops!