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sunrise089 · February 14th, 2012, 12:44

Gaspar Wrote:Actually, I have a meta-ish question - feel free to ignore if its beyond the scope of stuff you want to talk about but I promise its drama-free...

Is the way this game has played out typical of these types of games? This is is the first game of its sort that I've had any exposure to and so I'm curious as to what the usual time horizon (in terms of turns) it is for the wheat to separate from the chaff so to speak? Obviously this game has been a two-horse race for some time (as Sulla's noted in his updates) - would this be the usual separation point or is it mostly due to the missed turn issues from T4 and the... whatever it is that's going on with T2?

So I think there are two issues. First I don't think this sort of game was ever too common among the SP-focused crowd, so there isn't a lot of data to work with. But what Speaker did when he organized it was try to adapt a common MP game type into the pitboss format. But if you're asking how the skill disparity tended to impact medi MP games, I'd say it was probably smoother, both because almost everyone had some concept of what plays made sense, and because will less time to play each turn you were less likely to see both missed turns and perfect micromanagement.

The other point is this is a very defense map, not just a large one. With choke points manually blocked off with peaks it means a smaller number of sentries can see an attack coming from a larger distance away.

Speaker · February 19th, 2012, 00:02

Here is a very wide picture of my whole territory (in spoiler tags because it is so wide):

I have managed to stay #1 in power, despite the fact that Team 3 is drafting/slaving heavily and I am not. The rest of my demographics are pretty shitty though, partly because I gifted Sullla something like 4 or 5 settlers, but mostly because of my land (compared to Sullla and the other teams' players in his spot). On any given turn, I drift between 6th and 10th in GNP, and my crop yield is middle of the pack. My manufacturing is pretty close to #1 though, and I have mostly shifted from using slavery to build units to building them with mfg.

Here is my base hammer count by city:

Prenerf Shen: 22
Junglewick: 15
Ravage: 21
AP Galio: 26 (Heroic Epic city)
Parrrrrrrley: 23
TurboFkingScorp: 20 (Could be as high as 30, once it finishes growing)

At this point my army consists of 8 Curassier, 15 Knights, 4 Musketmen, 6 Catapults, and an assortment of other trash.

We decided to grab Economics before Rifling since we have a Scientist, and could get Sullla another golden age with the free Merchant. It is only about a 1.75 turn research at our current tech rate, so not a huge deal.

Ceiliazul · February 19th, 2012, 01:58

Speaker Wrote:Here is my base hammer count by city:
Prenerf Shen: 22
AP Galio: 26 (Heroic Epic city)

So Galio will get something like 58hpt? So that's how the mongols got their horde!

Dantski · February 19th, 2012, 14:10

Are you going to rename Prenerf Shen to Permaban Shen?

Speaker · February 19th, 2012, 14:37

Ceiliazul Wrote:So Galio will get something like 58hpt? So that's how the mongols got their horde!

Something like that. I pretty much could build a Knight every turn, and on the rare turn I couldn't, I generated enough overflow to keep it going.

Dantski Wrote:Are you going to rename Prenerf Shen to Permaban Shen?

I probably should, I guess.

Very big update (in typical Sullla fashion): http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ4/RBPB6.html

Speaker · February 19th, 2012, 22:31

Here is a picture of one of our sentry units. While looking at him, I couldn't help thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail....

[Image: RBPB6-SP15.JPG]

Speaker

We have captured the first of Oledavy's island cities. We decided to keep it, and I renamed it "Teleport Gank." Since we attacked out of the fog with boats, it seemed appropriate, given the League of Legends theme of the game. We got a little lucky with combat rolls (Sullla won a 20%), so lost just two Knights to kill 2 Musketeers and a Longbow (and 4 boats). Since the city is on another land mass, we now get a 2gpt trade route in every city. That's pretty huge, actually, and is why we decided to keep the city.

We should be able to capture Abukir Bay next turn, since it is defended by only a Longbow (though it will probably add another defender or two next turn), and may be able to make a move on another coastal city, depending on how combat goes.

Clearing up this area should allow Sullla to assert absolute control of the sea, since his Heroic Epic city is coastal, and can get a Frigate every turn easily. There were four (outdated) boats in Damme that were sunk when the city was captured.

Speaker · February 22nd, 2012, 09:14

Captured Aboukir Bay last night, and landed the rest of our troops on the hill SW-SW, in range to attack Vigo Bay next turn. I don't think we'll be able to kill it, since Oledavy has had several turns to reinforce it, but we should be able to force him to keep large garrisons in his coastal cities, opening up other avenues for us, and coastal blockade him into nothingness.

Speaker · March 1st, 2012, 21:15

This turn was a real kick in the nuts. I lost 6 battles, 5 of which were 80-85% and the last was 55%. We had a great chance to kill a huge garrison from Rome's front city, moving in a big stack of fast movers, combined with a bunch of catapults off boats, but after losing all the battles, didn't really accomplish much of anything, aside from losing a bunch of units. I hate this game sometimes, when good tactical plays don't work out, and bad plays (promoting musketmen to combat 1) go unpunished. smoke

The good news is we got Rifling this turn, so all my Cuirassier and Musketmen in the queues were auto-upgraded to Cavalry and Rifles, but we won't be attacking anywhere anytime soon, and I may have to start slaving or drafting soon.

Sullla · March 12th, 2012, 13:39

I'd like to type something here about the wisdom I received during a two month sabbatical from Realms Beyond, but the truth is that posting updates on my website for this game is just too much work to bother with doing. It's a lot easier to work through forum threads. And I can see that Realms Beyond has been doing fine without me, with lots of new games going up, so I doubt anyone cares if I'm here posting again.

Anyway, the point is that this game is far too interesting to leave things unreported. We have one of the rare cases of a game that's still undecided going into the Industrial era, and I'm sure that lurkers are frustrated with only getting reports from one team. (I'm not reading other forums, but I can see from post count that 90% of the current activity is in Team 3's forum.) Speaker is too busy with work to post here, and sunrise has his Pitboss #7 game to update. So I guess that leaves me. [Image: smile.gif]

The last thing I posted on my website was our planned attack against WarriorKnight's western cities. That attack failed badly; although we knew full well that we couldn't take his city, we had a chance to attack with odds and kill a lot of Roman units, while getting an extra promotion for our own units in the process. Long story short, we lost six different 80-85% combat results, including four 80% battles in a row. Statistics and all, yadda yadda RNG, I know that you can't assume anything in probability. Nevertheless, we lost 6 battles when we were anticipating losing 1 or 2 of them, and that was enough to swing this tactical fight, so that the unit trade went heavily against us rather than in our favor. As Speaker has said before, you analyze the process rather than the results, and with normal combat luck the trade would have been in our favor. We were a bit unlucky, but oh well, it wasn't that critical of an engagement.

I bring this up because Dave had a bit of the same thing happen to him in the west this turn:

[Image: RBPB6-98s.jpg]

Dave and I have been skirmishing over here for some time; we took the two island cities, tried to get more cities beyond that, and came up just a bit short. The fact that Dave was playing as France really helped him in a couple of cases, since he could use 6-move musketeers instead of 3-move muskets to shuffle around defenders. Now no one can attack anyone, since we can all draft rifles and there are just too many defensive units on the board. But there are still fleets to consider, and we had a fairly significant naval battle here over this past turn.

Dave made a nice play with his workers, using 5 of them to instantly build a fort on his iron resource and move his fleet (bottled up in Trafalgar, under the interface) out into the ocean. I did consider this move, but I didn't expect him to pull it on this particular turn. If you read the combat results in reverse order, you can see what happened: Dave attacked my frigate (protecting the fish resource tile at Map Control). He lost the first frigate, then won with the second, as expected. Then he made a curious decision, and attacked my caravels with his galleon and lost. That was a high-odds battle, I think about 80%, but he would have had 99% with his frigates. It looks like he was fishing for a promotion on the galleon, and got unlucky. So this then opened up Dave to an easy counter: he killed my two caravels, but then I traded 1 frigate for 2 frigates on my turn, taking out one full health frigate and one crippled frigate.

The net result was me trading 2 frigates and 2 caravels for 3 frigates and 1 galleon. Since the caravels were 100% useless by this point in time, that was a really nice exchange for me. Now Dave has to build more frigates before he can come out and challenge my control of the seas again. I have no doubt that he'll do that, but we discover Steam Power next turn, and that means it's time for ironclads. No, really, ironclads! Don't laugh! In these tightly contested waters, they are going to be very important. I have drydocks going up in my port cities right now, and the naval race will soon be on with the next generation of shipbuilding techs.

There's also a fort on the tile north-northwest of Teleport Gank, so we have access to the sea above this one as well. More on this in later posts. We were hoping to attack from an unexpected direction up there with more cavalry, but Team 3's research on Rifling makes that a moot point. Too much defense, no way to attack.

[Image: RBPB6-99s.jpg]

On our northern border, Thoth sent a whole bunch of units to go and pillage Speaker's gems tile and a couple of other tile improvements. We're not really sure why he did that. Speaker's highly promoted cavalry units cleaned that up this turn, killing 6 units and losing 0. Speaker also used a Woodsman II musket to capture two workers, which we'll hopefully bring back into our territory next turn. We'll see. In any case, this frontier is pretty sure as well. The two major conflict areas are on the eastern border with Rome, and the western border with France, both of which have a heavy naval component.

[Image: RBPB6-100s.jpg]

This is where everyone stands on the tech screen. We have all Medieval techs except Divine Right, and all Renaissance techs except Democracy (no State of Liberty allowed) and Military Science. Team 3 has no techs up on us, and is missing 7 techs we have (Music, Theology, Constitution, Corporation, Economics, Liberalism, Military Tradition). Out of those techs, they still need two techs for cuirassiers/cavalry, and four techs for the crucial Assembly Line (Economics/Corporation + Steam Power). That's also assuming they continue to ignore Constitution/Representation, which would really help them with their millions of cities and free Mercantilist specialists.

The wider strategic picture is as follows. This is a very defensive map. It's hard for anyone to attack anyone. Furthermore, all of the teams have played extremely defensively, beelining military stuff ASAP. This is probably best shown by Team 4, which is beelining so hard for Rifling tech it isn't even funny. (They will have Rifling before Education!) Or look at Team 3, which has ignored virtually every economic tech possible in favor of keeping up with us militarily. This will probably cost these teams in the long run, but it makes for a very long and drawn out game.

At this point, our best option is to rush to Assembly Line and build factories/power plants everywhere. (We can also get a lot of value out of levees at Steam Power on the way.) While we're building factories/power plants, we can also tech to Railroads and build rails everywhere, increasing our mobility immensely. Rails make it even easier to assemble huge stacks and defend your territory. So we're hoping to do that for the next 10-15 turns, and then use a massive swarm of infantry + cannons to start running over the weaker powers. There's little chance we can make any headway against Team 3. They have a crapload of military (like crazy, crazy amounts of military due to their endless use of the draft), plus they have defensive cannons to shred invading stacks. Attacking them any further seems unwise. Fortunately, their huge masses of drafted muskets are about to become almost completely useless when we get Assembly Line for infantry. If we're lucky, that will just be a cash drain on their economy and nothing more.

The game therefore comes down to who can annex the other teams as quickly as possible. We know that Team 3 has been fighting with Team 2 a lot, seeing the draft spam from both teams. Depending on how things go, we may need to make a move sooner rather than later. Our hope is that the various attacks we've made on Team 3 will tie down a lot of their forces. There are literally huge garrisons (10+ units) in all of the border cities of Team 3. We know that we're tying up a large number of units on defense. But... they have a TON of units, like I said. We need Team 2 to avoid collapsing for a little while longer, so that we can get our factories into play. The ideal scenario would involve Team 3 slugging it out for a long time with them, with heavy losses on both sides, followed by us slipping in with infantry to obtain most of the rewards. Hopefully?

Team 4's beeline to Rifling makes them a less appealing target, so they probably won't be attacked by us. Once we have Railroads, distance doesn't matter much anymore. 2-3 turns travel time to cross from one corner of my territory to the other end of Speaker's territory. We can concentrate our units and attack whichever team we want. The dismal failure of Team 2 to research anything resembling a military tech likely means they will draw the short straw.

So once again, as said many times before, Team 3 has more cities and more overall land/population, while we have better and faster research. We need to annex more land from one of the weaker teams to clear our path to a victory. We'll finish researching Steam Power next turn, then likely 4t to Assembly Line, and then 3t to Railroad. Probably 10-15 turns before we make a major offensive with infantry, cannons, and cavalry. It's a pretty interesting game, because so rarely do we reach this point on the tech tree with the contest undecided. I think our team does have the advantage, but not overwhelmingly so. If Team 3 could take out another team and swallow their land, they can definitely still win. I think that they have played extremely well thus far.

Questions on things you've been wondering about our team are welcome.

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