Gavagai manages his personal GULAG

[The Black Sword]

I don't remember reading people saying the attackers need an advantage, do you have a link? What if the defender pre-emptively declares war to take the second slot?

My own preference is for the game to be played as close as possible to a sequential one. I thought that most people subscribed to this idea.

Ideally this would mean attackers always taking the first slot in the timer but that's unrealistic.* So instead just play whenever is convenient to you and when you're declaring war you should play in whatever slot you're naturally in. Yes, this does mean leaving the massive advantage of the second slot to chance, but I don't think either side deserves that advantage so chance(and whatever gives the smoothest game) is the best way to determine it IMO.

That's how I've always played it. I view deliberately changing your playing time in order to get the second half as (mild) timer games. I don't think it's illegal though, so long as you don't actually double-move, which is probably why I didn't object to your point 3 in the pitboss etiquette thread.

*What if someone always play too fast and you can't declare war? If you have to PM them a turn in advance to wait for you to play then you're giving them extra notice. Though I guess the tempo gain by this method is the same as before, just for the defender instead of the attacker. Except, this encourages people to play quickly ... hmmm.

I guess the other point is that when I'm talking about moving first or second here, I'm talking pre-industrial era, when this only matters at the start of the war. After that it doesn't matter too much what slot you're in. Since PB18 though I realised that bombing runs give the person in the second slot an advantage not just at the start, but every single turn. That's too big of an advantage IMO. I think whoever is in the first slot should be allowed to log back in and move workers and micro cities, but obviously no military units, after the second slot has played.

My recollection of the PB22 situation is the same as yours OH. No problem with moving discussion into the etiquette thread either.

[Mardoc]

As far as I'm aware, when this has been debated on RB the consensus was that attacking is hard enough in CIV as it is, so the aggressor should get to choose which split they want as long as it doesn't involve double moving.

In my opinion...I disagree on the reasoning, but practically speaking you can't really make a better rule. The trouble is, Pitboss is a tradeoff between turn pace and fairness. Strictly sequential play like a PBEM avoids all the fairness questions, at the cost of requiring games to be slow or small. Attacker shouldn't get any advantage or disadvantage from the timer - and doesn't in a proper sequential game.

Once you've decided to play pitboss, it's because you care about pace more than perfect fairness. Which means that, well, you should make an effort to enhance the pace, even if it costs you something. Ideally, everyone should always aim to play ASAP, except for avoiding double moves. If I could figure out how to make that the rule, I would.

The trouble is, you can't enforce that, because there's no way to tell the difference between 'honestly busy' and 'deliberately delaying' from the outside. Bright line rules are much better than things that depend on what you were thinking, because we also want to avoid false accusations and drama and grey areas. And simultaneously, we need to prevent double moves, which 'always play ASAP' won't do.

So the next best option is to allow the attacker to pick because they're the only one with the firm knowledge that there is going to be a turnsplit at all, and hence the only one who can always actually prevent (relevant) double moves. This rule does have the advantage of being very clear and always possible to obey. You can tell if it's been violated just by looking at civstats rather than trying to figure out someone's motives and situation. There is no temptation to lie.

It's unfortunate that preventing double moves allows the attacker to get the better half (it's unfortunate that there *is* a better half), but we take what we can get. We'd rather let the attacker have the better half than require out of game communication (and war warning), third-party admin involvement, or similar things, like would be required with any alternate rule I can think of.

And, of course, we acknowledge that winning a pitboss is just luck, only pbems reflect true skill

[Gavagai]

Grimace spent 7 minutes to play 2 turns. I predict win.

[GermanJoey]

I'm afraid this still doesn't make sense to me - people may or may not know you are going to attack. The fact that you are or aren't sticking rigidly to a schedule shouldn't be meta information they can use to decide whether they are about to be attacked. I know in most cases it is information you can use, but I don't think that it should be. If Barteq takes first half and the defenders all move north, then Gav claims the third third, then he's made an excellent tactical move (although I still think you should try and declare on the same side to avoid 3-way turn splits, other people (eg Krill) think that you need the third turn split so you don't double-move your co-dogpiler anyway so it doesn't matter).

The thing is, I *agree* that it is indeed an excellent tactical move, and if it is legal than it is the best move. I've wanted to make moves like this in the past and have been frustrated when it doesn't work out. However, the problem is that this move treats the timer as if it were a game construct, like the map or a unit or whatever, which IMHO is a bad thing to do because it has the potential to screw up the turn pace, and I think its more important to respect that than anything else. In this specific case, it creates a three-way split. This might not be a big deal if the split happens along nice time zones, or it could be a disaster for the turn pace. I also think that letting people game the timer is a slippery slope. If it's ok for one person to do it, just because the turn pace didn't suffer, why not for another, especially since there's no a hard limit on how "bad" the timer is allowed to suffer from a split.

For example, I'm now self-employed and working from home, so I could theoretically play my PB29 turn maybe at, like, any of 14 out 24 hours in the day. Would the turn pace of the game suffer if I Montezuma my neighbor with a whimsical wardec that gives me some small advantage on a certain half of the timer? Probably not. However, my wife and I are having a baby in 3 weeks, so my available time slots will probably drop by a factor of 1000 or so, at least for a little while. If I did the same kind of opportunistic wardec - perhaps even for the exact same tactical situation - the turnpace of the game would crash. I don't think its fair to say the former is allowed but the latter is not, just because my personal time is more flexible right now; the only fair way is to rule that both shouldn't try to game the timer. Sometimes that means it that players will just have to take whatever half of the timer comes naturally to them, and sometimes it will come down to random order.

And yeah, sure, once this current split is resolved (e.g. war is declared) I can cross-post to the PB etiquette thread. Gavagai/Bacchus, if you want us to move this to the lurker thread, just say the word...

In my opinion...I disagree on the reasoning, but practically speaking you can't really make a better rule. The trouble is, Pitboss is a tradeoff between turn pace and fairness. Strictly sequential play like a PBEM avoids all the fairness questions, at the cost of requiring games to be slow or small. Attacker shouldn't get any advantage or disadvantage from the timer - and doesn't in a proper sequential game.

Once you've decided to play pitboss, it's because you care about pace more than perfect fairness. Which means that, well, you should make an effort to enhance the pace, even if it costs you something. Ideally, everyone should always aim to play ASAP, except for avoiding double moves. If I could figure out how to make that the rule, I would.

The trouble is, you can't enforce that, because there's no way to tell the difference between 'honestly busy' and 'deliberately delaying' from the outside. Bright line rules are much better than things that depend on what you were thinking, because we also want to avoid false accusations and drama and grey areas. And simultaneously, we need to prevent double moves, which 'always play ASAP' won't do.

So the next best option is to allow the attacker to pick because they're the only one with the firm knowledge that there is going to be a turnsplit at all, and hence the only one who can always actually prevent (relevant) double moves. This rule does have the advantage of being very clear and always possible to obey. You can tell if it's been violated just by looking at civstats rather than trying to figure out someone's motives and situation. There is no temptation to lie.

It's unfortunate that preventing double moves allows the attacker to get the better half (it's unfortunate that there *is* a better half), but we take what we can get. We'd rather let the attacker have the better half than require out of game communication (and war warning), third-party admin involvement, or similar things, like would be required with any alternate rule I can think of.

And, of course, we acknowledge that winning a pitboss is just luck, only pbems reflect true skill

Yeah, I agree that it basically comes down to a tradeoff of turn-pace vs fairness. A huge 23-player pitboss game like this one is unplayable as a pbem or a sequential-turn pitboss. I think I've been subconsciously biasing more towards favoring turn-pace in this big game... its sorta in-line with other policy for PB27, like how we've been rolling without a pause on people who don't play their turns. And I still do remember how horrible PB18 was when were playing 3-4 turns every 2 weeks, with the krill/bgn/x splits...

It's also actually a really complicated problem IMHO and I don't think its unreasonable that there's a lot of disagreement about it, and I don't think its even possible to have a fixed rule about it with the way Civ4 is designed. For example, we've been saying that the attacker gets an advantage by going second... which is indeed true right now. However, if were talking about a big horse archer or knight stack, and there were forking opportunities, then the attacker would gain an advantage by going first. Similarly, boating also gives an advantage to attacker-first. Later, when bombers/spies are involved, the attacker gains an advantage by going second.

By the way, I don't think pitboss vs pbem preference comes down to pace vs fairness at all. There's still a shitload of luck in a pbem and a shitload of skill in a pitboss. For example, look at any of the recent finishing pitbosses (PB13/PB18/PB20/PB21/PB22/PB26) and tell me if you're surprised by the majority of the top 20% finishers in each game. Not to say that's there's always certainty, because various "stuff" (e.g. battle RNG, map variation, barb spawns, wonder dice rolls, etc) can happen; e.g. Mackoti in PB22. And besides, a pbem is still an FFA and it can still be decided by stuff outside a player's control early-on; PBEM61 is a recent example. If we all really thought that these games should be 100% decided on skill then we'd all be playing chess or go, which are both more narrowly-scoped games that give the players 100% control of their moves and perfect knowledge of the board. In exchange for the bigger scope, we have to make some tradeoffs of rules vs pace. PB18 lasted like 20 months even with Parkin/Gawdzak/Dreylin filling in for the dead civs, and the big endgame empires had several hundred, perhaps thousands, of units a piece.

I think PBEM vs Pitboss preference comes down to how you enjoy their different metagames. Big-game vs small-game, to me, is a similar difference to pangaeaish-map vs watery-map. I personally feel the big pitbosses are a lot more interesting and exciting, and have a higher skillcap, than the little PBEMs.

[Gavagai]

Tough luck. Went to sleep, woke up at an absolutely random point of the night; went to check civ and it turned out that Commodore logged in five minutes ago, after an hour during which everything was clear. And then Noble also logged in...

[Gavagai]

Sucks to be Grimace...

[Gavagai]

It's too late to make amends but at retrospect my original idea of attacking with HAs around T95-100 seems to be a much better option. We would allow Barteq to break Grimace down and spend his units and then we would take all the land easily.

[Gavagai]

For Bacchus, just in case:

1) Workers near Segezhlag should build a road on the Deer, not a camp.
2) Free workers near Construction should position themselves to build a road towards Borzoi next turn.

[Bacchus]

Not only do we still don't know for certain that Barteq is attacking Grimace, Grimace doesn't have any units to break, which is exactly what I was afraid of. 20 turns from now Barteq not only would have rebuilt whatever he lost, but would have established an appropriate defense. He has Jaguars, and there is basically a forest super-highway running all the way across Grimace's lands to ours. In fact, just look at the forests south and east of Borzoi -- if we had let Barteq reach them he would be able to make a mobile wall, using the peak, completely blocking off our advance. Attacking into strength 10.5, 35-hammer units with HAs is not fun. It is absolutely crucial that we have axes in position throughout Grimace's land.

[Bacchus]

And yeah, not only will Barteq equal mobility due to the abundance of forests -- you can't use HA's to keep cities, especially not against Jags. All he needs is a forest adjacent to any city, and whatever we take he can counter-attack, reducing our HAs to strength 3.

The current way is the only way -- we need to emplace our axes and build a screening force of HA's that can counter-threaten Barteq, bring up skirms to boost garrison strength, and then wrangle it out over where the border will lie. If we ceded initiative here, we would have got nothing.