[Spoiler] PB42: Rusten and mackoti play Krill playing Bismarck of Portugal

[Old Harry]

I don't even see how to interact with OH short of attacking him.

I love this line.

Whatever else happens in this game, I feel very strongly that the Privateer fits in nigh on perfectly at Paper+Optics. Because if you opt into the privateer as a defensive measure, it precludes you bulbing Astro AND Chemistry. Or you can can bulb Astro, then grab paper and be left with researching Chem. Or you can just try to bulb Astro and Chem before Paper but be left with a massive hole where you GA plans should go, and down Education/PP. But you can fight Frigates in small numbers with just privateers, it's only when they start appearing in stacks that keep on growing that privateers start to fail.

I *think* I agree with this. At the time it felt a bit unfair that we'd spent all that effort on our bulb strategy when caravels are already the same strength as galleons and being cheaper they can zerg rush the galleons (a strategy that totally failed for me in PB31 against Mack when caravels were str3). But it pushed us to frigates, which I think was reasonable given that we were even in tech. What are your thoughts on the fact privateers can still cause turn splits while at peace?

I just played T172, and it looks like the turn will roll, but I doubt I can play T173 tomorrow due to a wedding.

But here is T171.




No.





Looks like OH isn't taking the hint.

The funny thing is we never got a whiff of this hint, we thought that Lewwyn's land was so bad and would stretch you so that you'd never be interested in it.

Ultimately war between OH and myself is counterproductive. It always has been, until it reached a point where we had to fight to find a game winner. The moment one of us came to the conclusion that the only way to win, was to go through the other player, was the point we went from friendly neighbours to mortal enemies. In that sense, the surrounding players always needed to act to contain us both, and try to bring about that realization sooner. I reckon the sheer amount of land I had meant I had no one that I could realistically attack until around this point in the game. There were extremely poor coastal city locations, so actually being able to build a navy is quite difficult, which leaves OH as the main opportunity for conquest. The amount of land, and the lack of happiness essentially pushed me into a path that has made this more likely.

So now we end up in the position where if OH doesn't recognise that fact, we go to war. If he doesn't care about this, we go to war. If he feels threatened by me, we go to war. In fact, OH, we're going to have to try very hard to stay alive. (Thanks go to Rory Breaker/Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels).

Exactly. We just couldn't believe that you spent all this time hassling us when there was no way we could hurt you (well we could perhaps burn a few coastal cities if you were asleep, but that's what a sentry net is for) and we were too spiky for you to make decent gains from, even with your enormous production edge.

In our eyes it was inexplicable that you left the 'mids sitting undefended 15 tiles from your coast. Sure OT4E and then Gav had big armies, but you had carracks and once you took SJ's core you'd have the defenders advantage. As land goes it wasn't much better than Donovan's, but it was amazing compared to Lewwyn and much closer to you. With that land you'd have about 4 civ's worth of land and could have fought Gav to a standstill if he did want to attack.

Turn 185




OH runs away, and starts to reposition to defend against an attack. At this point I'm not interested in spending the time doing that, but if I were playing this as aggressively as I could in search of a win, I'd want to get a naval advantage, and that means frigates, SoL, drydocks and cannon. So peace is not an unreasonable move IMO. That means de-escalation, which I've been trying for the past 25 turns.

This last line made me

Obviously we got the hint eventually and went to take stuff from Superdeath. We tried demilitarizing our border so you could go get SJ but you never moved that stack of 30 knights, and your 16 galleons covered by more SOTL and frigates than strictly necessary up in the north suggested you never intended anything other than attacking us at some point. Or was that just a handy place to keep them?

So where did you go wrong? It was so odd that as the score leader with a tasty meal on the doorstep at t150 you just flatlined for the rest of the game. New IND is obviously a bit of a dud, and you weren't happy about your cottage base and tech rate, but RtR means tech rate isn't so important as mfg and you had that in the bag, so why so despondent?