[59] Miguelito and Rusten move stacks to berimbau rythms

[RefSteel]

More to the point with this thread though, Miguelito, I'm just really impressed by your game - and the consistent reporting all the way through!  It's certainly far, far more than I would ever have been able to do.

Also, now that this one is in the books, a more serious question for Charriu, brought on by some of the late events in this game:  Is it possible to change the way a Strike works in future versions of the mod, so that (for instance) the penalty is dependent on the amount of gold you'd be dropping below zero each turn instead of the number of turns it's been going on?  It does seem ridiculous that dropping to 0g in the bank and -1gpt for a while can cause growing numbers of units to desert you each turn, whereas spending one turn at 0g and -umptizillion gpt causes no desertion at all.

[Charriu]

Thanks for bringing this up RefSteel. I have read about the issue by now. I have to look into it more, but my first thought was to cancel any gpt deals as soon as one of the paying player goes into strike. I have to give that more thought though, as it certainly can have issues too.

[Ramkhamhaeng]

Thanks for bringing this up RefSteel. I have read about the issue by now. I have to look into it more, but my first thought was to cancel any gpt deals as soon as one of the paying player goes into strike. I have to give that more thought though, as it certainly can have issues too.

Canceling between the turns can be problematic if the receiver of the gold needs this income for finishing a tech, etc.
The receiver get no chance to react…

Maybe we can:
a) Sending a warning message before extra gold is created
b) Allowing creation of extra gold for one turn, but cancel the deal.
c) Subtract extra gold on receiver side one turn later. (Increasing maintenance)

All three variants are giving the receiver one turn to react.

[Miguelito]

I meant to write much earlier. Cheers!

And thank you so much for all the advice, support, and company.

We have a final report still due.

Little victories:


This lets us fire with missiles on those 2 naked transports, which we previously softened with planes.


Sadly lacking one missile. I would assume the one transport that we took out was loaded, although I annotated the wrong number from the pre-strike demo screen and therefore couldn't know.

We upgrade the uber ace:


Amica, in case you're not reading the whole thread - that's the boy who shot down like 4 jet fighters the turn before, him alone. He had started with no more than 3 XP. Yes, air combat results seem a bit arbitrary at times (we also lost a number of jets to simple fighters).

We make a faint thread against the island that Amica occupied from Charriu/Lazteuq/Mjmd:


2 more transports would get in position the turn after. I was pretty doubtful if this was a smart play or we would just get nuked again. Having logged into Ethiopia since I think it would have worked to an extent, probably without affecting much the wider course of the game.

So at this point we were down to that kind of skirmishes, while I was anxiously waiting for where Amica would drop the hammer next.

This was shaping up to become the embarassing bottleneck of our spaceship attempt:


It is costly, but requires just Satellites, so you can always build this right after Apollo Program, which I failed to do due to chaotic planning - basically I underestimated research speed once more -, tunnel vision on stopping Piccadilly, and a bit of burnout. You see that there are 2 chops left, and the bonus from Space Elevator would get online shortly, so 9 turns is realistic, or maybe 8? The fact that I don't know tells you all.

Btw the final part would get chopped out here:


Donovan's former border city. Building the Salon as prereq for a Laboratory


But we'll never know how that would've gone, so off to the post mortem.

The core of the empire:


Farewell. Not included are the Malian acquisitions, which were slowly getting online.

A few of the crown jewels:






I... also had a plan for the second engine, just don't quite remember where


Here I was desperate to get it down another turn, but I wasn't quite seeing how. The world market for metals was sold out, and while we had been getting some Mining resources online by Picc cities coming out of revolt, there was not enough of that due in the next 2 turns. Overall I just started the wonder some 20 turns too late, due to it not being available because of the map settings, and me only alerting the lurkers about it when the Picc war was coming to an end.




This lovely city had kept the complete set of spaceship hammer multipliers and had Mining already spread. I was going to get a spaceship part there. It is possible that Amica would have threatened the city before finishing the part .


I think we were the only ones to cottage our astro island, while everybody else went for vile farms&mills. With emancipation we got it to full bloom, but that completed really just towards the end. But I do claim the title of most awesome astro island of PB59, thank you very much.

Special mention


The only reason we went for Picc actually. thrawn had (temporarily, before I found a more comfortable solution) fixed my system so I could even continue playing, and that was the prize that he demanded. Sadly we had acquired it not in the best of shapes.

Final corporation yields:


Good, but sadly no match for Amica's incredible whip potential. When we were still allied it briefly scratched 40 hammers per city.
We had fallen to third in power, and finally to second in population, presumably because Amica skipped turn 250 and didn't whip





You see nearly all towns are fully grown. Had Emancipation run its course? Mind that the 10% hammer bonus applies to the corporation hammers. But probably caste or serfdom would have done more for us. But we were not going to get a chance to change (unless we managed to sneakily steal Cristo from Amica for a turn ), and it had done tons for us since we adopted it with our fallen-behind economy over 50 turns ago.

The final city list. I used BUG to give you an idea of the city development. green x means the city has the building, blue o that it doesn't, hammer that it's building it and red bar that it can't get it. The coin and hammer numbers are base values before multipliers which imo lets you compare the cities more meaningfully, together with the info on buildings.




more to follow.

[Amicalola]

I enjoyed the post mortem. You are correct that I skipped most of my whips last turn, which would have been a Big One. Something on the order of 2-300 population whipped, I think, because of all the nukes. So my (non-power) demos are probably inflated a little in your pictures, while my power is considerably lower. Of course, every pop was 100 hammers so the demos weren't exactly accurate anyway.

I don't regret ending it when we did, but I still have no idea who would have won. Most of my games tend to slip my mind once the next one starts, but this one feels different. It's weird to realise a civ game had such an impact on me, but I think it's something I'll occasionally wonder about for years.

Edit: Also, congratulations on a masterfully played game. If you had won, you would have deserved it.

[Miguelito]

Thoughts on how the game went:

The good:

• 2 immediate neighbours that we could establish peaceful relations with until we didn't want to anymore. Both were eventually (partially) absorbed, although they were no pushovers by any means - Donovan was the first in game to Engineering and used it, and Elkad stayed up to date on military tech and had many Cha elite units, only overwhelmed eventually by civac's and our numbers. The conquests didn't go as smoothly as in PB54, but we managed them both in one go without seriously debilitating losses. We then found our overseas neighbour Mjmd, who had performed a very convincing start over the first 90 turns, technologically backwards and underdeveloped after 70 turns of grueling war with Ramk, so we had 2 more viable targets and could capitalize on them.
  
• I am quite happy with our diplomatic efforts in this game. We fought just one war that we had not chosen (Charriu's intervention in our Portuguese conquest), and could transform that rather soon into a mutually beneficial partition of land and eventually even ally with Charriu in the continental defense versus Amicalola. We had good relations with Elkad and an excellent border against his Cre/Cha until we shamefully betrayed him . We had huge tensions with civac that I believe were largely unavoidable, but with a mix of very costly deterrence and showing goodwill (or so I like to believe) avoided for the war to ever turn hot, which surely would have put us out of contention immediately. We then gave our thumbsup for his conquest of Ichabod's island, which left him with another conflict zone to care about. He even went to war against Piccadilly with us, although that was pretty much botched on my part (I'm not sure how it could have gone better though. We were always going to need to take Jowy's land, and that inevitably cut civac off). We managed a mutually beneficial trade relationsship and anti Malian alliance with Amica. Despite Amica's despicable eventual cop out, we probably would not have made it without it. After Amica's peace with Picc I was pretty devastated psychologically, but a few turns later managed to extort some concessions from Amica while simultaneously preparing war on them (I do regret though that it didn't occur to me to ask for their 7k gold right after the peace). We managed the joint defense of Lazteuq between him, Charriu and us, despite all of us having warred before against each other, the two of them in an almost game long feud.
  
• I think we found a pretty nice start that played to our strengths, getting to cottages and granaries fast
  
• We went all in on the wonder race to Colossus despite our traits not favouring us much, and got it. Planning that was fun. The wonder got us into a tech lead position in the midgame which netted us Taj, Liberalism, and with that the Economics merchant, as well as very early Guilds and Gunpowder which proved crucial. I am actually not quite sure how we got there - our GNP graph for the time is by no means dominant or even visibly above the others save fora very short period. Maybe it's because there was next to no culture in there but just raw economic power. I was pleased to read that Charriu at least was also competing but we beat him handily (he got Hinduism in turn which he also benefitted a lot from, but that probabl delayed his tech and Ramk snatched the Oracle)
  
• We produced a good number of great persons between the first and second golden age using Pacifism, while we had no adequately spread religion for other civics anyways. Swapping religions repeatedly between Confu for Pacifism and Tao for Theocracy was entertaining.
  
• We grabbed one of the jungle islands and transformed it into a beautiful cottage paradise
  
• For all the pain drafting them cost us, our UU musketeers where absolutely crucial for the zone defense against civac, and proved very useful as well for the Donovan and Mjmd campaigns, who both had focused on pikes . I was lukewarm on France when we picked it, but it turned out pretty great. Even the Salon had some uses.
  
• In our efforts to dissuade civac I found a good use for ironclads
  
• When we eventually decided for war against Piccadilly, we got a huge fleet and army up really quick. From when I started to full steam build up power (of course we also used some of what was on hand already, but really most was new, including nearly all the ships) until Piccadilly's elimination it was just 22 turns!
  
• I had a lot of fun with guided missiles, like when blowing up Picc's Modern Armour suqadron from 4 tiles away.
  
• Got to experience the modern era, which obviously is pretty unique in pitboss. I'd like more of that, maybe through a late era start? I doubt we'll ever get a game this large together.
  
• I really enjoyed the naming theme. It proved difficicult to find good recordings on youtube, so I ceased sharing the songs - although I doubt anybody really cared, but I often had them playing in my head during turns and that felt nice. I was also quite surprised that with 70+ cities I still had not much trouble finding new names.
  

The bad: (own misplays)

• I'm actually quite happy with the first 140 turn (until completing the Donovan conquest). We lost that one cheeky city (Filho de Ogum, later replanted) in Dono's north because I wanted to be extra smart, but outside of that I don't see where I would or should have played differently. This was also the part where Rusten was involved the most, go figure
  
• I mentioned the GPs we successfully produced early on. The downside is that those remained mostly unrealized gains for 50+ turns. when we fired the 2GP GA and spent engineers on Mining HQ and Wall Street (with the latter I'm not sure it was really a smart decision - of course WS was huge with Mining, but with Mining hammers we would also have gotten it up rather quickly, and I didn't factor that in in my assessment at the time). I remember a lot of frustration during the midgame over having all these GPs just sitting around uselessly over dozens of turns.
  
• To make matters worse, the later GP generation - from the Taj GA on, I think, was not at all thought through, and as a result, a mild disaster. There is little excuse for not managing to have a 2GP GA after a long stint in Pacifism, a free GA from Taj, and bagging the Economics merchant. I remember that I had trouble finding a city besides the NE site where we could feasibly produce GPs. This is surprising on a food rich map, but nearly all the cities where so whipped and drafted down for a long time.
  
• Underdeveloped cities. Now I think it was out of necessity because we had to keep competing against civac's immense power, and the military investment paid back with conquests and ensuing long term relevance. But by t200 we had really few banks, salons, and were lacking even basics like forges and libraries (but we did have drydocks!). It could be argued maybe that instead of attacking Mjmd we should have used the relative safety vs. civac to take some breath and develop, or maybe just take the islands only, but I fear we would just have remained mid sized and dropped into irrelevance.
  
• Being not sufficiently paranoid about Charriu. His peace with Lazteuq the turn when we invaded was surprising though, and now I know it was an unlucky coincidence. I think I was not quite prepared for his knights to hit us right afterwards? Anyways, we managed that situation rather well subsequently, I believe.
  
• Entering the industrial/modern era, I repeatedly showed a terrible sense of pace and priority setting. After pushing Lazteuq out of Ramkland (around t205) I decided that further conquest would not be worth the effort. Mind that was ten turns before Amica even started their campaign to subjugate the world. I then entered the space race against terrible odds, lagging already several techs and with the worse economy. Had I gone full steam wealth building at that point we might have snatched the Internet. But of course I felt like we still had to keep up military builds, and the run failed, predictably. And only then Rusten and the circumstances convinced me of doing the overseas attempt against Piccadilly, which ultimately succeeded, if barely. With more sense for the game maybe we would have conquered all of Lazteuq (I don't think Charriu) and built up power from t205 on in order to stop Picc. I certainly would not have abandoned theocracy . However the space race attempt at least got us to a level of weapon technology where we could compete on equal or superior terms against Picc and Amica.
  
• Little excuse for not preparing our own spaceship better during the Mali war, but exhaustion.
  
• Misread Amica's intentions and possibilities repeatedly, severly.
  
• Tactics against Piccadilly were rather bad. I cold rushed 2 nukes at >3k gold each that he managed to render ineffectual. Traded the Shrine/Corp HQ city way too many times. The whole disaster with the canal, where I noticed almost too late how the inland sea city was blocking us, and that the northern canal could in fact work. Overall the whole campaign should have put much more weight on the northern coast. That also would have given civac a much better opportunity to claim some for himself and break some of Piccadilly's stuff on his way. For the final push I placed the forces badly, meaning that we needed more nukes than necessary, and also nearly lost due to nukes being out of position. Really should have one turned SDI to not get hit by Picc'S ICBM.
  

The ugly: (frustrating stuff, which I would think was not really our own fault)

• Having civac as our neighbour's neighbour. In an overall amazing game, he made the first conquest on the map, and by the time we conquered Spain he already had two developed cores. No economy trait and the costs of 2 cores had him behind technologically, but he had an amazing production base with forges everywhere very early, which translated into oppressive power. He also compensated our land units tech edge with his Astro bulb that was quite destructive to our game, forcing us to obsolete Colossus much earlier than we wanted. We could just barely keep up with his power for a long time despite drafting at near full capacity and whipping units heavily on top. This resulted in a cold war with our militaries being the world's top two by an immense margin, while the other continents developed or made useful conquests. I have wondered if there was a way to avoid that confrontation, but likely not. With his traits he needed more conquest, and sadly the western continent appeared too solid for him to do what we did with Mjmd.
  
• I really don't want to take away from Amica's incredible game overall and the last 40? turns in particular, but the way the continent to their west folded has been annoying to read in the reports. Basically facing the juggernaut already coming in they just preferred to keep on fighting each other, actually sending their stacks away from Amica's incoming army on multiple occasions? Correct me if I am wrong or unjust. In comparison we had to deal with Charriu who ended his gamelong blood feud with Laz the turn we invaded his neighbour, and then attacked us through said neighbour's territory, without immediate gain for himself, just to keep us out. Again, Amica's read and especially their understanding on how overwhelmingly fast they could move things was fantasting in this instance. Masterfully recognized and capatilized on the opportunity.
  
• Really should not have get caught by that nuking of Amica's in the end. I knew the peril, I was rushing a bomb shelter, and still I left a fleet and stack exposed.
  

Big What Ifs:

• Could we have stayed true to our friendship with Elkad, and fought civac side by side with him? Doubtful, but now that I read civac's thread from the time he sounds less in control than it seemed to me. But probably we would jsut have mutually spent our forces.
  
• Maybe our life would have been much easier had we gone for Elkad with our first invasion instead of Donovan?
  
• As outlined above, could we have achieved something better with a full military focus from t205 or so on, conquering Lazteuq and assembling the anti Picc force much earlier?
  
• Or alternatively, was there a way to push economy so hard around that time that we would have got the Internet? I think in that case we would have been likely to win space.
  

I enjoyed the post mortem. You are correct that I skipped most of my whips last turn, which would have been a Big One. Something on the order of 2-300 population whipped, I think, because of all the nukes. So my (non-power) demos are probably inflated a little in your pictures, while my power is considerably lower. Of course, every pop was 100 hammers so the demos weren't exactly accurate anyway.

I don't regret ending it when we did, but I still have no idea who would have won. Most of my games tend to slip my mind once the next one starts, but this one feels different. It's weird to realise a civ game had such an impact on me, but I think it's something I'll occasionally wonder about for years.

Edit: Also, congratulations on a masterfully played game. If you had won, you would have deserved it.

Yes, I guess I share some similar feelings, but I have mostly made peace now with the fact that it's going to remain inconclusive, and it still has been an incredible game in its own right, in so many ways.
While I did still enjoy taking the turns until the end, in the weeks since we ended it I have been wondering where I would take the time from if we still were playing
I mean to respond to your outlined endgame strategy yet in your thread. It sounds terrifying! I would trust you that it would have worked, although I have some questions. The question of course being whether it's fast enough. Probably there would have been little I could do to stop it, unless you'd allow me to nuke significant numbers, but what are those at that point?
I think the in last few posts I have abundantly stated my admiration for your showing here. Admittedly you were not really on my radar before t200 or so, but I've since read the threads and you had quite a journey . In the late game you produced a dynamic that I at least had not seen before, and I think has not featured in games at least on RB. Awesome, and terrifying.

[Amicalola]

[*]We went all in on the wonder race to Colossus despite our traits not favouring us much, and got it. Planning that was fun. The wonder got us into a tech lead position in the midgame which netted us Taj, Liberalism, and with that the Economics merchant, as well as very early Guilds and Gunpowder which proved crucial. I am actually not quite sure how we got there - our GNP graph for the time is by no means dominant or even visibly above the others save fora very short period. Maybe it's because there was next to no culture in there but just raw economic power. I was pleased to read that Charriu at least was also competing but we beat him handily (he got Hinduism in turn which he also benefitted a lot from, but that probabl delayed his tech and Ramk snatched the Oracle)

[*]
You did a lot amazingly, but to highlight this - I thought it was insane how quickly you got the Colossus without the Oracle or even IND. Definitely a huge moment for the outcome of the game.