(February 26th, 2014, 15:43)Krill Wrote: I was going to post after the game, but I don't really see it as a spoiler now.
Lots of thanks for your comments and yes, this is all so far in the past that it does not change the current game situation.
Quote:The way to have handled Suttree requires more depth than noting which units are effective counters to him, it's all about the strategy of containment. So city placements, research aims, every needs to be designed around the minimum necessary to contain Suttree regardless of what he does to hurt you. Then you are relying on his metagame skill to understand that harming you gains him nothing, but he has other options that are "kind of" mutually beneficial for the both of you, namely other directions to expand. Unfortunately, this is where I can't really comment because that would contain spoiler knowledge, so I'd have to come back to this once the game has ended or you guys are dead.
Totally, this was a pure metagame situation. At the time of our conflict suttree already had lost the game with his slow start, but so had TBS when dtay burned his cities. Both players had an option to expand to the island E of the continent. TBS went that way, suttree did not. So here we are coming back to the starting question, were their positions so different that it was clear that TBS decides to develop peacefully and suttree goes into full military mode.
In PBEM45g Sareln wanted revenge after my attack so I most definitely know that it is not uncommon that someone devotes rest of his game fighting his attacker, but I also know that this is not the way everybody reacts. My current hypothesis is that suttree has a very competitive mindset and our attack was the final straw, which made him realize that this game is simply gone. He probably thought that middle-of-the-pack position is not any better than losing immediately and thought that fighting the rest of the game brings him the most satisfaction or he wanted to make a statement that helps him in future games. Meanwhile I believe that TBS has more of an making-the-most-out-of-every-situation-attitude and after dtay destroyed TBSJ's game they simply set new lower goals for the game, kept playing and actually managed to create a decent comeback.
Quote:What I would do in your theoretical scenario...
Yeah, I agree very much here too. Of course in the game everything developed gradually. If we had known that we have to spend ~1000 hammers on units during the next ~25 turns it surely would have affected our tech choices too. We felt that we were playing catch-up since the beginning and tried to improve our economical position and Alphabet was an awesome tech for us economically. We kind of tried to show enough power that suttree would see that there is nothing to gain, but we also did not want to be proactive in the sense that encourages continuous military build-up. Since the beginning of the conflict suttree already had enough forces that it was also clear that building up our own military and destroying him early would have been way too costly. There was no chance to get an empire quickly without major losses like in mack-m_h case. (Remember also that our conflict started ~T90 as a result of settling race, that is around 30 turns before mack managed to get his m_h stack together (IIRC) so our options were to either give up the area, take it by force immediately with ancient units or take it 20+ turns later with classical+ units.)
Quote:I also think these numbers highlight another cognitive dissonance; you didn't actually try to contain Suttree. If you're saying that he spent more than double the hammers you did, you were only trying to manage his threat, but you were leaving him the continued option to build up and try to invade later: you were reacting to his threat, rather than being proactive and forcing him to defend...
This is true as well (although not really the 2:1 hammer ratio, we always kept higher power than suttree), we were reacting and trying to get away with smaller investment at this front compared e.g to your PB15 stack. We felt that engaging a "real" war would already mean giving up this game because "peaceful expansion" >> "benefits - costs from building up military and attacking suttree" We felt that in order to become competitive we needed that Eastern piece of land (to be honest that was only decent area anywhere near us) and we also had to get it as cheaply as possible. We kind of succeeded in this because we managed with only bows and axes and did not lose a single unit, but what we are discussing is that if it would have been better if we had invested XXX extra hammers into military and got earlier HBR instead of spending those hammers and beakers in our peaceful expansion. Possibly, I can't really quantify on top of my head what we would have lost, and it's also really diffucult to quantify what that unit mobility would have brought us (would HAs made suttree stop building military or give us peace? Regardless of answer what could we have accomplished with those units elsewhere? I stay with my claim that at least attacking suttree's core would not have been a good move).
Quote:Really though, I don't think this is a great answer, but I can't really remember your early game decisions, and I think that a lot of the "failing" against Suttree comes because of trying to deal with the capital you had and the lack of early workers.
I interpret this so that you also think that our starting area set us significantly behind, but are not convinced of our early micro? Would you like to give our sandbox a shot as a micro challenge if we send it to you?
Or anybody else? We spent a lot of time planning our early turns and thus:1. It would be awesome learning-wise if someone can show how to play our start better
2. "lack of early workers" is just too generic statement (for me to believe that you have analyzed our start and can say with certainty that we screwed up)
((there are couple of things that I know with certainty that we did wrong 
, but they aren't related to amount of workers))