Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Caledorn]

If it is possible, please post a warning if these forums are now open to the public that other teams should not read them yet. The threads here still contain sensitive information for some teams.

[Cyneheard]

Anyone going to analyze the mistakes that were made?

1) Bad diplomacy.

2) See #1.

[Krill]

So you're claiming RB made no strategic mistakes?

[WilliamLP]

This team played the game that they wished this was in a godly way, which was something like an adventure or T-Hawk report where you want to shave an extra 3 turns off a cultural victory to score the most points.

The team's strategic thinking and metagame awareness in the game we actually played was poor.

I'll stand by my post (though not phrased very well) from turn 54, soundly derided at the time:

if something increases your chances to lose it is _not_ playing optimally, period. You might not feel that that part of the metagame is right or just, but it's a very real part of it that needs to be taken into account if you're going to play as seriously as possible to win the actual game. This, as opposed to a moral victory where you dominate early Sim City and get wiped out later, and then shug with moral indignation that things aren't fair and nothing could be done or something

The team should not have made any move that led to falling behind in tech. With a target on our backs, we needed rifles and other key military techs before our neighbours. We needed border cities placed and optimized for defense at the expense of economic optimization. In other words, it shouldn't have been so clear to the other teams that we'd fall down like a house of cards in a dogpile.

Attacking the Germans, with the benefit of hindsight, was a bad strategic play that gained little and lost everything.

As bad as that was, the hubris to not stop halfway in that war when we had agreed to, but overextend and raise fears and hatred for our team even more, was even much worse.

The second-order issues, involving personality conflicts and decision making, were interesting too.

[pindicator]

So you're claiming RB made no strategic mistakes?

I would say in hindsight taking over the Germans when we did turned out to be a strategic mistake. I understand the play for it, but it hinged on the assumption that a dogpile was destined to fail. And then once we saw the dogpile was going through we were horrendously slow to react with military. Like glacially slow. Like all of us saying "they're going to attack, thsi is really happening, we better build military" and instead sullla is doing another round of infra. But really that was just the final straw.

[mostly_harmless]

T 198 and final:

Bad RNG for our enemies? No such luck:


Bombarded and collateraled and killed.

Two (three next turn) Scouts holding the fort. That's it folks!


Spy is back in capital after poisoning waters in CFC capital Indira (or was it unrest?, Can't remember). Stealing money was not possible. Dick move? Maybe, but then you could say holding out for the last 10 turns was kind of a dick move as well.

Some closing shots:
The world at war.



Techs:



Any, yes, 5XP short of the next GG. Damn RNG!



Over and out!

mh

[Ellimist]

• Bad goals based on bad assumptions, and an unwillingness or inability to adapt to changing conditions.
  
  
• Ineffective diplomacy as well as making in-game decisions without regard for diplomatic consequences. There's a good chance we could have had a mutually beneficial relationship with CFC if we had negotiated differently with them and hadn't kept giving them one sided deals in their favor.
  
  
• Relying on WPC to do something that we should have known they would be unable to do effectively, as well as making a land-split agreement with them that we already knew wasn't going to happen. Their expectations were way off, and we knew it, but we were okay with that at the time. In hindsight, this would have been the place for us to object and wriggle out of our earlier agreement.

[NobleHelium]

I actually would have deleted the scouts on the final turn, because war weariness goes away immediately, and we gave them three extra experience.

We did not agree to a "land split" with WPC.

[zakalwe]

I guess we should have played the metagame differently, trying to accrue long-term advantages while avoiding the tall poppy syndrome as much as possible. In that sense, eating the Germans might have been the wrong move, since territory is such a blatantly visible advantage. Some of our strategic choices like tech path, foregoing cuirassiers, and tactical dispositions when the dogpile was looming can probably be questioned too, but the bigger issue is how to avoid the dogpile in the first place. If your game plan includes fending off a dogpile it's probably suboptimal to begin with.

[mostly_harmless]

We knew Espionage was on for this game and we completely ignored that side of the metagame.

Because of some failed dogpile in PB2 it was assumed that the the CivPlayers, Apolyton, CFC dogpile would miserably fail ...

Our actual diplo was well executed. Thanks to scooter for keeping a cool head at all times. A couple of diplo paradigms were "off",though. One being the urge to give CFC one-sided deals.

Our C&D was just fantastic! Through kjn's efforts we "just knew". He did not get enough praise I think.

Sullla assumed supreme leadership and threw his vetoes around, driving away good players. And then left when the shit hit the fan, together with 90% of the team. His turn reports were first class, of course.

In the end game a couple of tactical mistakes were made, especially the one where we allowed our main army to be hit by Civplayers Cuirassiers. But I think the game was lost by then anyway.

We went into this game riding arrogantly on a very high horse, excelled at micromanaging our empire and as a result of failing team dynamics fucked up the mid game and lost.

And, no, we did not lose because Mackoti was taking over CFC half way through.

Thanks to everyone who contributed.

mh