[SPOILERS] JR4 and RefSteel have a plan

[superdeath]

I know this was a hard blow to you, but at the same time it was a highly entertaining move by him.

was it as entertaining as when i razed 3-4 cities in one turn?

[Charriu]

Yeah.

[JR4]

Well, this game saw an unusually large number of city razes as the keeping cities in foreign culture is almost impossible on this map. There was certainly enough drama in the last 50 turns to entertain the lurkers, I think.

I`ll have to get back to the post mortem in a few days as I`m very tired.

[RefSteel]

I`ll have to get back to the post mortem in a few days as I`m very tired.

Yeah; take care of yourself - I'm glad that at least with the end of the game, it won't be contributing any further exhaustion (though I'm sure most of that is real-life stuff right now). I'll look forward to reading your post-mortem when you do have time for it, but resting up definitely takes precedence!

[wetbandit]

(I do want to rant for a moment though:  Anyone who thinks we were too passive has no understanding of this map.  Attacking from a position of weakness when your target has three other neighbors who are also in a better position than you is not a way to get out of having too little land; it's a way to entertain lurkers, create false hope, and get further behind - as we actually demonstrated on multiple occasions.  We could have played each of our wars better, but not to the point of escaping the hole we were in, and it wouln't have helped us in any way to build and throw away a bunch of units, pretending it would magically help us, during the years when we instead remained at peace.  I understand other players wanting us to help them win by attacking someone else, but anyone who imagines that we actually would have improved our position with attacks they were imagining and/or hoping for is merely mistaken.)

I don't think it was your willingness to attack for your own gains that people were questioning, but rather your unwillingness to really commit to stopping me, even after others had attacked. After all, it's not like I did much conquering, in fact, my only offensive wars ended terribly for me, and I still won    But I do remember waiting in vain for any sign you would join in the dogpile against wetbandit. What would it have taken for you to join in on that one? Him losing most of his army?

I think this was the point that I didn't understand, why ya'll didn't attack me when everyone else had declared.  I see that you wrote that you were frustrated that I kept a sizeable garrison in my border city with you, but I didn't have much choice to concede anymore land when I was down to 4 cities.  In any event, that decision really influenced my future perception of your actions, especially with a lot of garrison in your interior cities that were not in threat but from commandos, which no one could have had. 

I certainly appreciate your fear of being attacked on all sides as someone who faced that in planning and in actual events in this game.  I certainly felt that I needed a 2 front army even when I went after cornflakes.

I think it's funny that we never actually had real combat in this game even though I envisioned your team as Enemy #1 for all of the early game until I got dogpiled.  Then we should have had better relations sooner than we actually did.

I found it hard to credibly communicate intentions and commitments.  (Do I sound like a lapsed poli sci major?) To that end, I'm curious how long you guys thought your interest aligned with Cairo.  I saw a bloc of superdeath/wetbandit vs cairo/aztec lasting far too long than was necessary, but I don't think that's because anyone acted irrationally, it was just difficult to communicate intentions to support a war versus cairo or the two militarily weaker powers in DZ and cornflakes.

[JR4]

POST MORTEM

It`s been more than a week since the game ended already. And I have to admit that it feels kind of weird not logging into the game anymore. As for the game as a whole - I am left somewhat disappointed with a fourth place finish. In PB 39 we seemed to catch every imaginable lucky break and in this game our grand attacks generally failed spectacularly. In the following I`ll focus on our own game:

Let`s start with the beginning. The rng decided to give us Augustus and Pericles of Aztecs and we did in the end go with Pericles. As Cornflakes noted in his thread, that combo is a little bit of everything with the Aztec UB wanting whips often and Pericles wanting to run a gazilllion specialists. We didn`t manage to prove that it was a strong combo, sadly. There wasn`t really enough food (or health resources!) on this map for a specialist economy, our cities were starving and really struggling to get up to speed.

I think we made a huge mistake in not taking on the barb cities that emerged in the early game. One city was razed by Wetbandit (on the site where we later built Messenger) but more importantly, Woolly Mammoth appeared in the fertile river valley west of Antiochus. That city neatly invalidated any site west of Antiochus (our second city) and left us horribly short of land. We should have built on Copper or connected it quicker. Too slow to the party. Also, Mr. Cairo managed to use the IMP trait to get the YeeHawdists site. We were off to a bad start.

Cornflakes tried to signal that he was interested in taking down Superdeath. We didn`t actually contribute anything to that war as I was determined to go for a big Knight force and try to take as much land as possible from Superdeath. Alas, Superdeath saw that coming miles away and managed to get Castles and Pikes in place just as we were ready to strike. That was the first failed war. Oh, and Superdeath managed to get the Pyramids a single turn ahead of us. Sigh, that was terrible indeed as the fail gold wasn`t really what we were looking for. That was probably a game defining moment for us.

Later on, we had a big chance to take down Wetbandit when Cornflakes decided to turn his mighty army west. Up until that point, I believe that Cornflakes played a magnificent game and the only reason why I was reluctant to heap more misery on Wetbandit was that it would surely hand the game to Cornflakes. But well, the game was far from over as Cornflakes just couldn`t consolidate his economy. For a long time Cornflakes had to save gold just to support his army.

Our next big offensive was against Cornflakes after he gradually was left behind in tech. Our monster Tank-heavy army was just about able to sniff out the attack from Cornflakes. If only I had remembered to move our Great Artist in range of Gr8 Unconformity, the game would have perhaps seen another course. We got stabbed by Donovan and that was a terrible blow to our (slim) chances of a comeback. At least Donovan got stabbed too (by Superdeath) a few turns later and we were able to do some real damage to him by burning a number of cities.

And then the late game featured an extremely interesting 3 vs. 1 where Mr. Cairo desperately tried to fend off the attackers. Of course, none of the three aggressors really wanted to use their own units on taking down Mr. Cairo so the dogpile wasn`t really effective until the very last turns of this game. Mr: Cairo did manage to add something to the "theory" of civ 4 warfare (that moving his units into Yaellqaeda would allow him to hold, instead of attacking out). Well done and congratulations to Mr. Cairo on a strong performance and his first PB win.

The map
I`m going to be honest - this isn`t really my kind of map. I think that the game would have benefited by having more sea/coast and islands. We got outnumbered on the important sea (SE of our core) and couldn`t add more ports as the game went on. However, I don`t think that the map was unfair in the sense that we got systematically disadvantaged compared to the other players, but it was just so extremely hard to arrange an attack. Both of the pitbosses I`ve played prior to this one has had a significant naval presence and I`ll probably push for a watery map if I sign up for another game some day. Also, I kind of like lush maps as that gives more options later on. At the same time, this game did last until the bitter end and I don`t think that any game would go all the way on a bad map. So, it all comes down to taste I guess. Anyway, I hope I don`t sound unfair to the map makers as I definitely appreciated the effort of making us a playable map.

Aftermath
This game took a lot out of me as I have a quite stressful job and don`t always have time to play a proper hour long war turn. Back in mid-December I was willing to concede (more to RL than to game considerations) and I`m still probably suffering just a bit from Civ fatigue. But, hey, I still managed to write up the turn reports all the way as keeping the lurkers informed is very important to me. 

A special thanks to RefSteel and BaII for all feedback and comments. I hope you had as much fun as I did. At least we got quite a few Great Generals so that`s some well-documented blood for the lurkers.

[BaII]

Thanks for the awesome reporting JR4! It was an absolute pleasure to follow along

[JR4]

I think it's funny that we never actually had real combat in this game even though I envisioned your team as Enemy #1 for all of the early game until I got dogpiled.  Then we should have had better relations sooner than we actually did.

I found it hard to credibly communicate intentions and commitments.  (Do I sound like a lapsed poli sci major?) To that end, I'm curious how long you guys thought your interest aligned with Cairo.  I saw a bloc of superdeath/wetbandit vs cairo/aztec lasting far too long than was necessary, but I don't think that's because anyone acted irrationally, it was just difficult to communicate intentions to support a war versus cairo or the two militarily weaker powers in DZ and cornflakes.

We did kill a random Viking Chariot that forked Lords and Escanes in the semi-early game but yes, we probably should have started to cooperate a bit earlier. I think it`s fair to say that I underestimated Mr. Cairo`s culture attempt for a long time. After stabbing Superdeath, we could never truly trust him but then we needed at least one ally. Due to our terrible mess of a border with Napcakes making a huge amount of culture and our cities desperately trying to respond to that we both spent a lot of resources on waging a culture war for a long time. There wasn`t really any way of showing that we`d wanted a demiiltarized border, though. You obviously couldn`t leave the Great Lighthouse city without a proper garrison.

If you`d signaled friendship with more mutually beneficial trade deals I would likely have been happy about ditching Mr. Cairo as main ally earlier.

[JR4]

Thanks for the awesome reporting JR4! It was an absolute pleasure to follow along

I`m glad that you enjoyed the game. Feel free to sign up again any time.

[Hitru]

Thanks for the good reporting