[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea

[Cornflakes]

None of them are even close to this in terms of scale/size and impact.

Since we are considering the scale/size and impact I think we can move on from this situation being a "default ban" requiring immediate lurker intervention. That is my main objection to immediate intervention. This is not a default ban, and SD/Yuri deserve either an explanation of how "this gift" crosses a line drawn in the murk, or give them the benefit of the doubt.

Mjmd is probably right to point out these gifts also crucially had 0 impact on the game outcome. This is the main reason nothing happened - players did not complain. If they had been, say, 10x larger (as my quote here requests an example of) or affected the contenders, yeah it would have resulted in a problem like this one did.

What is the ultimate impact here? Let's be honest, are you going to lose this game because 1000 gold changes hands over the course of 10 turns? The impact is more likely a couple more weeks of long war turns until the others give up. That hurts. I know that pain of war turns, and it is real. And it would be especially frustrating if you think that the other players just won't recognize their defeat.

As far as the impact of the examples I quoted I can speak to the two cases that I personally was involved in (one giving and one receiving):
- 100 gold was worth far more to Jowy at his stage of the game than 1000 to Yuri at this stage, not just a as percentage of economy but turns saved to Construction. And Jowy was a direct land neighbor of Piccadilly, who went on to fall 1 turn short of victory. That sure sounds to me like it was impactful.
- 100 gold to me from Fintourist. I was the rival of a top contender Commodore (who was probably the #2 at the time) and the gift gained me as much or more time to Knights as it gained Yuri to Frigates. How is #1 hurting other contenders with a gold gift much different than other contenders working together to hurt #1 with a gold gift?

I recognize that I was involved in both of these examples that I reference as precedent because I know the most about about what I have been involved in. I'm not unilaterally denying a reload or rollback, I'm just emphasizing that gold gifting is understood by many players to be part of the game, and it's not as clear cut as you make it sound and SD/Yuri deserve either an explanation of what line they crossed and how they were to know that was the line, or give them the benefit of the doubt and work out the details after the game on a ban to prevent bad feelings in the future.

[scooter]

I did make one promise which was to poke fun at Superdeath when appropriate. Anyway, right now it's appropriate.





I opened last turn to this. 17 units dropped off here on this tile by Superdeath. Technically it was 18, but I had a Gren on the hill intended to reinforce Silver Lake which he killed at the cost of a Musket. I have just two Muskets on defense, albeit CG3 D1, so they're beefy. I glanced at this briefly and thought I'd abandon the city. I did have that Galleon with aa pair of Grens on board, but my inclination was to save the Muskets, dry whip a Longbow (which I did), and be done with it. It's an entirely loseable city. And then I thought about it for 30 more seconds and started to wonder if I was fine. (This is also a fun callback to deciding to place this one on a hill for Superdeath insurance.)


See, in the above screenshot it shows 20% defenses. That's because I've got a Galleon and/or Gren selected. And I wonder if Superdeath saw 20% as he transported over with a Frigate and Musket in the stack. However, he has only two Gunpowder units in the stack, and one is wounded, and only 3 Catapults. Also, there's very few actual good hitters here as the Crossbows are not promoted for this. This city is on a hill with Walls + Castle. That means all but two muskets - one of which is wounded - is gonna slam into 100% defenses. I think I'm fine?





This was my response. Shuffle both Grens in off the boat, dry whip a longbow, and huddle in the city. Vodka gave me a strong chance to not take a single loss. The bigger concern was and still is Silver Lake. Yuris is nearly done bombarding the defenses. Now, he still doesn't have enough to take it, but he was getting closer to "could get lucky" territory, not to mention he could reinforce. So I upgraded one of the Crossbows to Gren. I can do that twice more obviously. But once I was confident I could hold Silver Lake another turn, I decided to save One Eye Cat. If Yuris has a monster stack ready to join amphibiously, so be it, but it feels unlikely. Next turn the Airship will tell me.


But none of this is why I am reporting.





*Chef's Kiss*


Just slammed into the city and died. Superdeath actually got a touch lucky here. His two wins were 40% wins. 15 units dead and 2 more stranded at the cost of a Musket and Gren. He never actually got odds on me once. And also his Galleon stack is now 4T away from the other side of his empire.

[Mjmd]

So just to be clear Cornflakes PB82 didn't specify gold gifting is illegal. If you are winning PB82 you are fine with Scooter gifting "waves hands" amounts of gold to someone else? I don't think he will, but why not! With your arguments he could justify any amount of gold! Again, to me its the fact we've never done in this direction. But ya this rules lawyering crap is probably why its past time to just straight ban rather than allow a grey area that people can stretch to whatever they want.

Also, that is some pretty good luck. Not the individual wins, but I can't imagine SD got many hits on your units in those fights in order for them to then again have odds. That triple city defense grenadier did good work. You can tell it was the one getting most of the wins because your other units didn't gain that much exp.

[scooter]

Also, that is some pretty good luck. Not the individual wins, but I can't imagine SD got many hits on your units in those fights in order for them to then again have odds. That triple city defense grenadier did good work. You can tell it was the one getting most of the wins because your other units didn't gain that much exp.

I'm not so sure it was that lucky for me, but I'd have to dig into the details to be sure. But I did a vodka test where I gave him optimistic promos (Cats got barrage and all Maces got CR2 despite not having them in the screenshot), and vodka's average defenders killed was 0.5 and his odds of winning was 0 flat. So 2 defenders dead looks unfortunate for me actually relative to that, though of course vodka can be imprecise. But basically, I would expect a CG3 D1 Gren on a hill with 100% cultural defenses to get some flawless kills. Or two CG3 D1 Muskets with 25% fortify, hill, and 100% culture.

[Tarkeel]

It's actually not even a CG3 Grenadier; but C2 CG1D1. I know from personal experience in PB58 just how nasty they can be to crack, even with significantly better units than what SD has available here. You basically need either cannons or 20 cats per city.

[Mjmd]

Sadly the garrison 3 gren died along with garrison 3 musket. If you look at the before screenshot you'll see the two units he lost. However, if you look at surviving units and exp gained, the survivinggren only gained 3, the musket gained 2, and the longbow gained 1 (looks like there is a barracks?). Unsure if surviving Gren killed 2 or 3 units for that 3 exp, but it means the other gren killed 5-6. Admittedly 3 of those were cats and it probably got the kill for all 3.

In any case a good showing of protective. I doubt this holds without that trait.

[scooter]

It's actually not even a CG3 Grenadier; but C2 CG1D1. I know from personal experience in PB58 just how nasty they can be to crack, even with significantly better units than what SD has available here. You basically need either cannons or 20 cats per city.

Sadly the garrison 3 gren died along with garrison 3 musket. If you look at the before screenshot you'll see the two units he lost. However, if you look at surviving units and exp gained, the survivinggren only gained 3, the musket gained 2, and the longbow gained 1 (looks like there is a barracks?). Unsure if surviving Gren killed 2 or 3 units for that 3 exp, but it means the other gren killed 5-6. Admittedly 3 of those were cats and it probably got the kill for all 3.

Right, yeah sorry, one was CG3 and it died to a coin-flip-ish battle at the very end, while the C2 one still lives, largely because it took fewer fights. But yeah, losing that fight at 60% in my favor was a big bummer because it could have been even more absurd as as a defender with that additional XP. Imagine I slap it with a couple Guerilla promos, or perhaps give it a couple more Drill promos.

In any case a good showing of protective. I doubt this holds without that trait.

Agreed. Yeah PRO has quietly been a huge part of why I've been confident about surviving the inevitable dogpile for so long, at least until the others started massing Gunpowder units. The cheap Walls/Castles plus the CG3 units all add up to cities that can be held with very few defenders. At the very least it makes it very hard to boat them from the fog because you tack on Amphibious penalty to all of this, and you need overwhelming numbers to boat them. So you're forced to land, which undercuts the entire strength of naval attacks which is forking. Once you're forced to land, the versatility of naval defense shines where you can shuttle additional defenders in easily.


Basically what makes naval invasions work is if you can protect your Galleons, you can gain a numbers advantage via forking. 4 Galleons with 12 attackers on board forking 4 cities means the defender must place sufficient numbers in each of the 4 cities. This means your 12 attackers are doing 48 attackers worth of threatening. When you land, not only does this X:1 (where X is # of cities forked) edge go away, but it flips as now your defenders are whatever is in the city and any loadable unit within 4-5 tiles.

[scooter]

As for the gold discussion, the tl;dr is I'm growing bored of it. It was clearly wrong and farcical in a bunch of ways, but just enough disagree that it really doesn't seem to matter. I do appreciate a couple of you stopping by and detailing your thoughts because saying I was "baffled" by the initial non-decision would be understating it. Initially it was more like I felt like I was being trolled, so hearing actual thoughts as opposed to the ones I imagined was probably net-positive. But I am done with the discussion for now.

[Sullla]

One thing that I've learned from running so many Civ4 AI Survivor games is some really arcane tidbits about how the AI is programmed. For example, there's something in the AI coding called BaseAttackOddsChange that dictates how aggressive the AI is about attacking:

The decision to attack a unit or not is made via a comparison of the unit's AttackOdds vs. a threshold individually specificied for all mission test calls (AI_anyAttack, AI_cityAttack). There are a lot of calculations adjusting the odds and thresholds depending on the situation of the combatants. What I read from all this is, that the AttackOdds are similar to the well known combat odds (depending on the strength, damage and bonuses of attacker and defender) + a "dare-devil offset", the AttackOddsChange. Each AI leader recalculates his/her AttackOddsChange each turn during CvPlayerAI::AI_doMilitary() according to:

AttackOddsChange = BaseAttackOddsChange + RNG(AttackOddsChangeRand) + RNG(AttackOddsChangeRand)

So this involves rolling two random numbers (AttackOddsChangeRand which is a 0-8 dice roll for every AI) and then adding in the BaseAttackOddsChange which is a fixed number different for every AI. Most of them have a value of 0 or 2 for this variable with a handful of the more aggressive leaders having a value of 4. Then there's Napoleon and Ragnar who each have a value of 6 making them outliers in the AI pool; in practical terms, this means that both of them will ram stacks into enemy cities at hopeless odds over and over again. We've run enough AI games by now to notice how this makes a big difference in terms of how the AI plays, with most of the better leaders avoiding suicidal attacks and the craziest warmongers picking horrible fights due to how this variable is programmed.

Anyway, I'm bringing this up to provide context for the following conclusion: superdeath is Ragnar. He does not simulate his attacks, he does not look at the odds of success, he sends in everything he has every time regardless of what's happening. (He also infamously complains about bad RNG any time that a 90% dice roll goes against him.) It's honestly mind-boggling to me that a human player would produce a combat log like that; I could see it in a timed online MP game where you have stack attack on, but in a PBEM game with no time pressure? Either he's tilted off the face of the earth or he's deliberately throwing to try and get the game over with faster.

[T-hawk]

As for the gold discussion, the tl;dr is I'm growing bored of it. It was clearly wrong and farcical in a bunch of ways, but just enough disagree that it really doesn't seem to matter. I do appreciate a couple of you stopping by and detailing your thoughts because saying I was "baffled" by the initial non-decision would be understating it. Initially it was more like I felt like I was being trolled, so hearing actual thoughts as opposed to the ones I imagined was probably net-positive. But I am done with the discussion for now.

To push back one more tiny bit, and I don't expect you to reply or continue which is fine - "clearly wrong and farcical" is still an opinion, not an objective standard.