[spoilers] Pindicator and Regoarrarr - Bismark of Ethiopia

[regoarrarr]

To follow up on my post in the tech thread... I think that we've known for some time that Krill was in a pretty dominant position and likely to win this game. And the problem is that... he's Krill. If it were any of the other players out in the lead, maybe I could talk myself into someone else being able to overtake him. I mean you could even say that Yuris was ahead of us for most of the game, but due to some poor choices, we were able to catch up and pass him. Even if it were US in first place (With all humility :-) I rate us as the 2nd best players in this game), you could point out several times where at least I have lost games from seemingly unassailable positions. But Krill is (probably by far) the best player in this game, so I just see it highly unlikely that he will stumble.

As I have said a few times, our chance is if people at least stop trading with Krill. But nobody has seemed to want to do that (Nakor traded techs with Krill this past turn and someone also sold 2 techs to Commodore). I do like how the changes in RB Mod have allowed some tech trading to go on without turning this into a PB1 style cartel-fest. But this is just not working for me now. As far as what can be done to fix it in the future, perhaps No Brokering is the answer, or one thought I had that I don't know if it is a) feasible or b) a good idea is to only allow tech trades, but not tech sales - so you have to have at least one tech on both sides of the screen.

But to me the point of allowing tech trading is to allow you to catch the leader. That was (at least from what I remember) one of the main points when we were talking about RB Mod / tech trading back a few months ago. As it stood in the base game, there is no way to catch a leader once he's snowballed out ahead. So the idea of allowing tech trades is that in theory it allows the people that are in 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. to combine and trade techs between themselves, while the leader has to tech by themselves. But at least in this game that is not how it's played out.

It may be the setup itself, or it may be the no diplo. How can we communicate / agree to do that when we can't really communicate. I do think that "Stop trading with" and "Declare War on" would be a good idea to include in RB Mod as MP options if that's feasible. Or maybe simulate the diplo of what was it, PBEM13?, where you could leave messages in game but no out of game contact. That still allows some diplomacy and coordination against a runaway without turning these games into quite the time-sink that full-diplo games can become.

Anyways.... we'll see how it goes....

[regoarrarr]

Details on the tech trading

Nakor traded Constitution to Krill for Communism.

Commodore got Liberalism and according to CivStats got another tech as well (his score went from 1255 to 1303 in one jump). But I can't figure out what it was....

[pindicator]

Nakor traded Constitution to Krill for Communism.

This right here is why the game is over.

[regoarrarr]

"Pingo" post-mortem.

So I've made it through a fair number of threads, and thought I'd give my thoughts on our game, how we did, and how it turned out. All in all, from where we came after Commodore's attack, I was very pleased with a strong 2nd place.

I gotta say though that after reading Commodore's thread, I was even more depressed about that attack. At the time, I thought that he was out of copper, and had seen our copper and was attacking to secure a source. But really it was just a fun attack to try and hold gains on a separate continent. Tactically he did a good job, but I still think strategically it wasn't a great idea. Still, he almost pulled it off - had it not been for Cyneheard's copper and some good tactics and a whole lot of luck on our side, we'd have lost Church Lady and not been able to recapture Blues Brothers.

Now I know that nobody has gone through our thread - it's one of the downsides to being a thread-spammer, nobody has the patience to read your thread

But I just wanted to point out where we were at before Commodore attacked. Back on T80 (post 534) I posted

So the next few turns are big ones
* GLH t82
* 7th city T84
* ivory hooked up t86
* monotheism and hopefully Judaism t87

We are goign to attempt to get Judaism in More Cowbell, our Henge and hopefully future capital city

With my typical good timing, on T81 Commodore landed 4 chariots near Blues Brothers (which had 174/200 hammers in GLH). So the hammers in BB were wasted (not even failgold), and Scooter got GLH a few turns later.

I wonder how the game might have been different had Commodore not attacked. We'd have landed GLH (faux Currency), we'd have gotten Judaism, which would have let us use our first prophet on a shrine instead of bulbing Theology, and our 2nd GP on something useful (academy, bulb or trade mission?). We may have been able to push further east, both in settling as well as militarily to be able to provide some sort of balance against Krill.

Ah well, it wasn't to be and no real use in wondering about it. It's like wishing that 2nd Wheel of Fortune puzzle had an 'I' in it

As far as our start, I do agree that we had a good start (BFC) but not a great overall starting location - having half of our first ring cities on another continent was a real bummer. And then when we settled one of them, it was assumed to be a pink dot (and perhaps the casus belli to the early war). Even at the end, we talked about trying to attack Krill but it just logistically could not have worked. He had more MFG than us (even with us in a GA and him not), and that doesn't account for the fact that 2/3 of our production was on a separate continent and having to be ferried if we wanted to make any use of it.

[pindicator]

Yeah, I was chatting with Rego a few days ago about when we would have attacked Krill, and I think the only moment we had was immediately after we attacked Yuri. But that would have meant ferrying all those knights immediately to the east and trusting that Scooter or Commodore would leave us be. (I have a feeling once we did the actual war dec they would have, but up to that point we would have been running a risk.)

I think we could have done some initial damage by using our naval advantage to boat his starting peninsula, but I don't think we could have held anything. And once he got rifling, he reinforced all those cities and any plans of boating went out the window.

[pindicator]

Also: what was your favorite amalgamation of our names? I'm torn between Prego and Pingo

[waterbat]

Great game guys!! An honor it was to be your ded lurker. Your persistence and determination in the face of the early setbacks was amazing. Now to read the less comprehensive threads.