RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Selrahc]

I don't like complaining either, but what can we do? The rules of the game apparently allow this type of stuff. We can't stop the others from following these cheese tactics short of killing them all (which we're trying to do). We're angry and irritated, so let us vent in our own spoiler thread.

I'm not against you venting. This isn't a personal criticism, or about attitudes or any of that. I'm just saying that there might have been ways to prevent the current situation. If I'm out of line on this, just say.

As Speaker said, we had an active NAP at the time with Kathlete when Jowy gifted cities over to him.

You did. I'm pretty sure I would have broken that NAP myself. Bear in mind this was the same time as Athlete was ruthlessly pillaging the neutral lands left after Jowys defeat, and Slaze(who hadn't backstabbed you) was desperately imploring you to help him against Athlete. At this time Athlete is also basically taunting you by taking two cities that belonged to Jowy and were gifted to him, and fortifying them with single archers. His entire army is away fighting slaze, while your army sits at the doorstep of cities that should be yours.

That is more provocation than I could possibly have taken. The NAP was being flagrantly abused.

If a NAP is unbreakable to you then I guess there was nothing you could have done. But as a lurker it looked like you guys were pushed to breaking point, with Speaker advocating an immediate attack despite the NAP. If you'd broken things might be different... at least as far as city gifting goes.

Attacking Kathlete then would have been a disaster... it would not have gone well for us.

Remember that I'm not talking about a full scale attack. I'm talking about taking two undefended border cities then offering peace. Not all fights need to be to the death, and a quick capture followed by a peace treaty would have been all benefit. If he wasn't willing to sign peace Athlete could have whipped out a defensive army of longbowmen, but he couldn't have gone on the offensive with his troops away fighting slaze. It might have slightly hurt your economic expansion as you would have been forced to put larger garrisons in place. On the other hand it would have showed people not to cheese gift cities, which has been a gripe for the last 3 months. (It would have also gained you 2 cities and might well have kept slaze as a good ally.)

Not doing it might well have been better. But I do think in game action was possible to stop this tactic of city gifting being as prevalent as it became.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

I wanted to respond to this post with some thoughts. Don't think I'm picking on you VoU, you raised some interesting ideas.

No worries

You mean trying to be nice guys and sign Non-Aggression Pacts with all of our neighbors? Oh wait, we tried that, and it resulted in everyone gangbanging us.

Wasn't looking back that far, myself, but what the heck. Past tense, I wonder if the negotiations you were in engaged in with your allies/the neutrals were too fair. In other words, could you have taken the short end of the stick more often to create the game you wanted, and trusted to your skills to make up the difference?

(one possible answer: no, because the other players are too keenly aware that they don't know the game mechanics as well as you two, and therefore have too high a suspicion threshold for anything you propose).

* Nakor: prime competition to win the game. Probably not much room for cooperation here.

Win by one, win by twenty. You've got as much room as you can reasonably overcome.

* plako/Broker: our friends, but still not even willing to Close Borders against a mutual enemy.

Fresher in your mind than mine, but could you buy this, rather than asking for it? Or other "concessions"?

* Dantski: been a good neighbor, but also tried to kill us earlier in the game, and sold out his allies before to make peace with us.
* slaze: has never done even the slightest bit to help us, lied to our face, tried to backstab us.

Sure, but that's money in the pot now.

There's really nothing to negotiate: we are taking all of cities. End of story.

Which is sort of my point, actually - you've basically closed all of the doors, leaving only the option of choosing which way to pass you the screw. And I think he's done the right math - the best answer probably isn't feeding your attacking pieces a bunch more XP.


Put another way - you had declined to carry the earlier war to Kathlete on the grounds that you couldn't accomplish a profit that way. Observe that K is now effectively in the same position - all he can do by standing his ground is die.

(There are, of course, the meta considerations of how he will be treated in future games, including the question of whether he'll be invited to anyway.)

There seems to be a train of logic that runs, "well those are Kathlete's cities, and you're attacking him, so he should be able to do whatever he wants with them to stop you." The problem is that it break the notion of a fair game

Not sure why you are complaining about fair - you got half his land, slaze got half his land, nakor got his money and his troops. That's about as fair a division as you could hope for (rimshot).

As for your other examples, there is a practical difference between giving somebody the win, and giving them a competitive position.

but we're not going to interrupt our own plans to go into "save Dantski" mode. No one else has done a damn thing to save us militarily in this game.

Wrong debate - my question was purely "are you better off with Kathlete dead, and Nakor swallowing plako, or with Kathlete mostly dead, and Nakor stuffed at the border?" You've already eliminated the alternative of annexing Dantski yourself.

Put another way, giving up the chance to take cities from Kathlete just to save Dantski would be a poor exchange for us!

That's less clear to me - for instance, if Kathlete pays for that NAP he wanted with some useful cities, then your army doesn't need to be in the north just then. And the cities - having more of the infrastructure - would be stronger.

Of course, you already decided that no concession was worth allowing Kathete to live even that many turns.


Side note: if integrity is going to be remembered from one game to the next, then it ought to apply to "You have Chosen Unwisely[tm]" just as it does for NAPs.

[seifer_md]

One last thing I'd like to add: Holy Rome has captured one very-developed city at this point. Dantski has no military left. We could do a couple things:

So I guess option 3) Have Dantski cheese-gift his remaining cities to you, is out of the question hey?

[T-hawk]

Plus, you can't draft cities that are still full of foreign nationals. All of that goes away if we eliminate Kathlete from the game.

This one doesn't go away - culture from a dead civ remains in the city tile, and you still need to get yours over 10% to draft.

And gifting away cities that cannot be defended, and are certain to fall, to teams who had nothing to do with the conflict, is just a pain in the behind.

There seems to be a train of logic that runs, "well those are Kathlete's cities, and you're attacking him, so he should be able to do whatever he wants with them to stop you." The problem is that it break the notion of a fair game; you can't really have a game of this sort without an implicit understanding that each team will try to win the game, and not engage in petty, spiteful behavior.

The threat of giving away cities actually does work to help a team win a game. It's a poison pill. The possibility is a deterrent against an attacker like you, since you know you won't get all the cities. Threatening to give away the cities is actually his best chance to survive, by getting you to call off the dogs.

And then what happens to your implicit understanding once a team no longer does have any chance to win the game? Athlete isn't playing against SP AIs where clinging to any hope can let you sneak out a win later. Humans will beat him. Why should he keep playing at all?

Giving away cities is regrettable, but it is the least of evils. Jowy and Athlete wanted/want to get themselves out of a lost game. Letting the turns go unplayed and cities go undefended is not a good answer. Giving the cities to you would be even more unfair to others, feeding the team that is already ahead. The real best answer is an AI takeover, which drum I shall keep beating until it is adopted as standard procedure for our MP games.

I get the impression that most readers don't actually like this style of play, of giving up and handing out "gifts" at death's door to various competing teams.

True, but we can both dislike it and understand why a team would do so.

[Speaker]

A new record!

6/16/10 7:59 am athlete4life10 Logged out
6/16/10 7:59 am athlete4life10 Finished turn
6/16/10 7:55 am athlete4life10 Logged in
6/16/10 7:52 am Sullla Logged out
6/16/10 7:47 am DMOC Logged out
6/16/10 7:46 am A new turn has begun. It is now 1530 AD

[Sullla]

I'm sorry T-Hawk, we've been friends online here for a long time, but you and I will never see eye-to-eye on this one. If you're going to sign up for a Multiplayer game, you don't just sign up to play if things are going well, or if you're in a winning position. Someone's going to lose, after all... Rage-quitting and showing bad sportsmanship isn't a valid excuse for bad behavior. Remember how we all felt about PAL in the Apolyton Demogame? Athlete should keep playing because he signed up to play this game in the first place - end of story! I don't walk off the pitch when my intramural soccer team is getting its ass kicked for the same reason. (Sadly, this has happened more often than I would like to recount. ) It's just the right way to compete.

I don't like the notion that metagaming cheese moves are being argued as diplomatic strategies. "Do ___ or I will gift away all my cities" is simply ridiculous - it has no place in these games. What if someone deliberately said they would continuously crash the game ("Exit to Desktop") over and over again, unless their in-game diplomatic demands were met? Do you really want to go down this route? People can be GIANT assholes on the internet. I'd prefer that we stamp down on that sort of thing from the start... and, you know, have people actually just play the darned game!

AI replacement is not a valid tactic for online MP games - not even going into that one. Oh, and we have a turn to play too!



Quick mention of another theatre: plako is trying to take this heavily defended barbarian city just north of our territory. Three longbows in a city on a hill, rather formidable! I'm actually not at all sure that that city will fall to the current forces. Interesting to see what happens here. (FYI, this was the site of Jowy's last city, which we razed. I guess in retrospect we should have kept that one... would have had this island pretty well developed by now.)

In the south, Nakor has stopped his offensive for a turn to heal up the damage Dantski caused:



All of the units are inside Bas-Tyra; even though Nakor has a Medic III unit (from his recent Great General), he'll have to wait another turn to heal, since these units just moved inside the city this turn. Here's where mobility makes a big difference - Dantski's cities have ridiculously poor defenses (skirmishers and a maceman) but Nakor's army of one-move units will have to take their time capturing them. With a dozen cavalry, Nakor could blitz through Dantski's whole core in four or five turns. Instead, looks like it's going to take some time, even if Nakor suffers few losses. Good for us.

If Tadmekka and Tekkeda fall, they'll be engulfed by our cultural borders (both Shiloh and Bull Run are close to hitting the 500 culture/60% mark). That will give us a little bit of a buffer zone against Nakor.

OK, over on the main Ottoman front, Kathlete chose to send in the catapults as expected. He also sent in his knights:



But all of that was totally useless, as you can see.

Our forces were barely even scratched, to be honest. Catapults are the wrong unit to use on the attack against cavalry, let me tell you! (50% cav bonus on top of the crazy 5 vs. 15 strength difference.) His knights did absolutely nothing too. Thanks to the Medic III horse archer, every single unit will be right back to full health next turn, with the one exception of a single cavalry who will be at like 13/15 health. This attack was totally pointless. Well, actually it did have one effect: it let us move up some of our cavalry defending captured cities, because Kathlete has no more knights left to counter-attack our conquests!

Kathlete's other move was to send 5 longbows over to Hilton Head, to prevent its recapture by our cuirassiers. Huh? He split up his defenders (removing the fortification bonus in the process) just to go guard Hilton Head??? We don't get this one. Now our army is guaranteed to capture Endor with basically no losses. I suppose Kathlete gets to live for maybe one turn longer - but at the tradeoff of inflicting no kills on our army. Um OK, if that's how you want to play this...

We've lost I think 6 land-based units in capturing basically the entire Ottoman holdings. It's really been an abysmally poor job of defense, considering Kathlete's large amount of territory and the fact that he's not THAT far behind in tech. All he's tried to do is annoy us and gift stuff to Nakor or slaze. Not very impressive...

The new turn:



And Kathlete has actually played and ended his turn (!!!), so we'll be taking that capital as soon as Speaker gets back home this evening. Plus, there's another surprise we have planned for Endor, which I think you'll enjoy when you see it...

[zakalwe]

I'm guessing someone has a great artist to spare...

[Speaker]

In the face of our impending attack, Kathlete decided to pull their troops from Hilton Head back to Endor. I'm not sure why he didn't keep them there to begin with. In any event, they lost their fortification bonus, not that it really mattered.


Credit me with one more empty city captured.

Here was the real fun of the turn:

After suiciding 8 catapults, we had nothing but 85%+ battles, most of them better than 92%. All we lost was one weak Cuirassier at 88%, and to be honest, we'd rather not have his weak bloodline in our military anyways. General Sunrise won his battle convincingly. General Regroarrar gave me a scare, dropping to 1.4 health when attacking at 99% odds, but he did win.

The couple minutes I spent on this part of the turn was cathartic.




So long, Kathlete, and thanks for all the fish.

And the turn timer rejoices.

[Sullla]

Will post more later on the post-war situation. :2dance:

[Kristian95]

to be honest, I think athlete let the timer run out because he had a very narrow window of playing opportunity every day, and if he did not let the timer run out he would eventually miss out on turns.

Anyway: Congratulations on your conquest