RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[erikg88]

Lurkers, I know y'all can't weigh in on this situation, but I hope after the game ends you'll agree that we weren't the unreasonable ones here.

It's just a game, right? No need for the righteous self-justification -- Jowy's playing his game as he wishes, and I think it shows a lack of class to disparage the guy for doing so.

[Speaker]

A photo montage for you guys:

Here is Greece's land. They have 3 cities.

They have 4 (!) 5-food tiles within close proximity to their land, which are not being worked.

They build a settler, which should (in theory) improve their output by 25%. Settlers are very expensive early in the game. You do not want to waste them. They need to add production and research, or, at the least, provide you with happiness or strategic resources you did not yet have.


Notice that our 4th city, Fredericksburg, provided us with Gold, allowing our happiness cap to be raised, and with two foods, including the Sheep in the first ring, quickly can grow and contribute either military or technology (or both with slavery), as we please.

Now consider Greece's fourth city, Thebes.

In my group of MP-players, this sort of city is known affectionately as a "Cool Game" plant, which is defined by:
1) Lack of defenders
2) Forward direction with a complete lack of roads
3) Poor city location where the first priority is to grab land
4) Trickle of defenders to the city

Not only does it not have any food in its first ring, it's only resource overall is a jungle-covered Sugar, which they can't hope to connect for quite a long time. This city will not contribute any sort of manufacturing or technology, and since it is so prone due to its forward location, will require extra military units to defend it, so it will actually cost more than its worth, since Greece will need to prioritize military builds in its other cities, at the expense of libraries, granaries, and more workers and settlers. Also, it will cost 8 worker turns to road to the city, which could be 2 cottages or 2 2/3 forest chops instead.

Now consider the context of the game:
1) Greece's neighbor to their East (Byzantium) is totally crippled, and expects to die soon. There is tons of great land between them to be claimed.
2) Greece's neighbor to the South (us) has played in a non-aggressive fashion, has 25% more cities and much greater development and GNP, and actually has more power. India is the king of development the early game. You don't want to fight with India.
3) Greece has excellent unworked food resources in close proximity to their land, and many forests still to chop inside their land, but must use their workers to road to the front now.

Conclusions
A war is absolutely not in Greece's best interests.
Greece has excellent land in close proximity which it is not working.
Greece has wasted 100 hammers by building a useless city which it must build extra defenders to protect. What they should have done is plant directly East of the Deer resource, giving them a 5f 1h tile immediately and bringing in the Rice and Stone at 20% borders, with several forests to chop to speed development, and in such a location that it requires just one or two defenders to protect. This would allow them to build more workers out of Sparta and Athens, instead of Archers and Phalanx, and maybe help them catch up to us a bit.

Considering all this context and all these factors, I don't feel bad saying that the planting of Thebes might be the biggest example of pure I have ever seen in a Civ4 multiplayer game, and I have played approximately 600 games. They are ruining their game right here, for no good purpose.

Sorry Jowy and Yazclick when you later read this, but this is where your game ended.

[Sullla]

I love that series of pictures above!

Anyway, it was an eventful turn. Jowy logged in after I was in the game, and wanted to discuss our current situation. Because this was an important chat, I went to the trouble of screenshotting it. Read each post from bottom to top:









Overall, it went pretty well. Jowy has been freaked because none of our cities went south (which I guess makes sense, although not one of them was particularly close to him) and because we didn't respond quicker to his latest email. I did try to explain that we have two people to discuss things with... not to mention that Jowy left like five of our emails unanswered, and didn't even give us 24 hours to respond to this latest one!

Anyway, I think we can both agree on an extension of the NAP, with Jowy even letting us settle at White. He wanted a guarantee that we wouldn't grab some iron spot to the east of Thebes, which was fine with me. (We've never had any plans to go there.) Remember that we really DON'T want to fight with horse archers unless we have to; let's tech up to maces and knights while continuing to tech and build, then do our stomping then!

Let me get in the rest of the turn first, then turn to the diplomacy:



- Here's the situation in the north. We'll plant White next turn, which I'm planning on calling Hampton Roads. All our workers and settler are covered by axes at the moment. The new axe/spear pair out of Antietam are probably best stationed in Chancellorsville right now.

- We had borders expand at Fredericksburg this turn, so our workers are busy pasturing the cows and then mining the gold resource. Borders expand next turn at Chancellorsville.

- I had Chancellorsville overflow into an archer. I left the turn unfinished, so that we can switch to axe, chariot, or even barracks as desired. Let me know if you have a better idea here, Speaker.

- If we get the NAP inked with Jowy, I think we should go back to our plan to research towards Monarchy tech next. We won't have a burning need for horse archers if we have NAPs with both neighbors.

- Aside from Jowy founding Thebes, Nakor (Crydee) and Broker (Pusan) both added new cities too. Most teams have four cities at the moment - we'll lead the pack as first to city #5 again next turn. Check out the Excel file for more details:

http://www.cassiopeiathedog.net/Images/P.../RBPB2.xls

Now, here's the all-important message I propose sending to Jowy:

Dear Jowy,

I'm very glad that we were able to chat in-game and work out some of the disagreements that have come up. As useful as email can be, it doesn't always convey how each side feels.

First of all, we'd like to accept the 20 turn Non-Aggression Pact laid out in your last email, to extend until Turn 95. As we discussed in-game today, Speaker and I have decided to settle the fish/silks location for our next city. In return, we will promise not to settle the location east of Thebes; you are welcome to take your time moving there, we won't try to take that land.

Furthermore, we will do you one better: as part of the new NAP, we can promise that our next two cities will go south towards Dantski. I'm not sure that you believed me when I said that the land down there has jungle and Calendar resources, but it's the truth! We needed additional techs to go there, and we'll be moving in that direction tech-wise in the near future.

To tell the truth, there's been a lot of sabre-rattling over in our thread about our recent disagreements, but I think that with this new NAP + settling agreement we can get back to the earlier spirit of cooperation that existed between our teams.

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Let me know what you think of that, Speaker. I believe we're better off sticking with our original plan of teching up and kicking ass later, rather than risking things on a horse archer attack. Even though we could probably do it, the whole thing would hurt us a lot in the long term. Or maybe that's just my peaceful SP side talking...

[antisocialmunky]

In Apolyton, you let the crazy civ live and look where that got you: a war with weedy RPers and Imperio

Oh well, crisis adverted for now.

[Sullla]

But we did win that game, after all. And the principle is largely the same: wait out the early period of the game, keep teching and getting stronger, if you have to fight do so at a later time when you have a real advantage. Realms Beyond would have lost if it had tried to fight Templars in 1000BC. When we did fight, around 1000AD, we had a major edge in military technology. (Plus, things won't be as bad in this game; even if we would face a 2 vs. 1 with Jowy and Dantski, the latter would have to worry about getting hit from behind by Nakor. Nothing like that existed in the Apolyton game.)

Speaker and I talked over the situation, and we've got a good idea of what to do moving forward. We'd like to keep growing and teching forward, pushing towards Monarchy and Hereditary Rule (maybe landing Judaism along the way if we're lucky!) and then grow our capital up to massive size working lots of cottages. HR is perfect for that, not to mention our Academy and later Bureaucracy...

In the mean time, I sent off the message to Jowy. There's some other diplo to deal with, but I'll do that later tonight.

[antisocialmunky]

I and the other lurkers are probably only wanting a war just to see how a real time MP war plays out. Good luck whichever path you go with.

Also, I think your conversation picks 2 and 3 are swapped or something is out of order.

[Speaker]

Also, I think your conversation picks 2 and 3 are swapped or something is out of order.

It is a little confusing, but you need to read from the bottom up. The in-game chat puts the newest chat line at the top.

[antisocialmunky]

Oh okay, awesome. I feel stupid now

[Speaker]

I have prepared this treatise for the benefit of you, our wonderful lurkers. Ignore the fact that we have NAPs with each of our neighbors. The point of this exercise is to teach you about line of sight, blind spots, and always leaving yourself with an out.

The Sentry Net

Here's a picture of our capital, and the space between us and Dantski. It looks innocent enough, right?



Three chariots starting on Blue dot could possibly capture our capital. Five would definitely. I have diagrammed here the dreaded "double move," which can be quite a formidable play in a multiplayer game, for the unwary player. But as I will show you, you can mitigate most of the danger from any double move through proper planning and a sound sentry net.

Yes, we have a NAP with Dantski, and have tracked his builds using Sullla's handy spreadsheet, and yes, he doesn't have a horse connected, but as the game goes on and on, our guesses become less and less exact, and units could be gifted or allowed to pass through his land from an ally. And, of course, in a more fluid game type with a turn timer that is shorter than 24 hours, you wouldn't have time to track builds every turn. Remember my mantra of "always leave yourself an out!"


Units on hills see 2 tiles.
Forests, hills, and peaks block sight.

Eventually, this will be how our sentry net looks, to give us the best possible intelligence on any troop movements from the south. The big dots are the location of our unit, and the small dots are all the tiles that unit can see. Note that a single unit on the (big) Red dot will protect us from being double moved from Djenne at Gettysburg. A second unit at Yellow dot will remove most chance of a double move from the center of the map. And a third unit at green dot will make it so we can see every single across the map.

Our first priority will be to get some sort of unit, even just a warrior or archer down to the Red dot. We would also be well-served to get one spear into Gettysburg soonish. Being on a hill with a 40% culture bonus, a single fortified spear could take out 2-3 chariots. We will also build 5 or so archers in the near future to hang out in Gettysburg and look spiffy, to increase its happy cap with Hereditary Rule, and they will defend pretty well against any mounted unit as well.

Here's the situation in the North, with Greece. These pictures are not perfectly aligned, but hopefully it is clear enough that they are meant to be viewed together.

Expanded borders at the city we will found at the White dot will give us line of sight to all the tiles with a small white circle.

A single unit at Blue dot will reveal most of the rest of the land behind Thebes.

The sentry at the Pink dot should maybe go one tile SW of where I have it, which would completely reveal all the land between us and Greece. Its current location gives us a little more forewarning in case Athlete got cute and tried to send some chariots at us. We'll want some sort of unit out there eventually, though it's not a priority at the moment of course.

Note that the only tile that can see into Sparta is marked with a black dot. If it had been planted on a hill, it would be revealed by pretty much any tile immediately outside of its borders. Also, notice that Sparta is completely empty this turn (though Sullla says it has been whipped, and probably is finishing a military build this turn). If our chariot (on the deer) was N-NE, on top of the axe (also 2 workers under there), we could kill that city in one move. As we are located now, we could hit it with a double move, though we'd need a few more chariots to be sure to get it.

Of course, the point is moot, since we just agreed upon a new NAP with Greece, but imagine if we hadn't, or if we were backstabbing bastids...

I'll be happy to answer any questions you guys might have. While putting up a sentry net against the AI is pointless, since it prefers the brute force, SOD approach, human beings are a lot sneakier, and tend to attack out of the space you don't expect them to. Creating a perfect sentry net (the further out from your land, the better!) allows you to gain a turn or two of time, which gives you the ability to leave units in more flexible positions, to offer protection to another front, to an ally or teammate, or just skimp on military builds, with units in your queue.

The utterly broken Spy unit that was introduced in BtS partially removed this intricate and delicate aspect of the game, which you can see requires quite a bit of dexterity to master, and makes it a lot more difficult to attack sneakily. I am glad that we have banned them in this game, as most MP games do. While spies in enemy land at least have a chance of being caught (though it's just a silly dice roll whether they do, or not), spies in neutral land create an unstoppable sentry net. With physical military or scouting units, at least you have the option to kill your enemy's sentry units, or beat them to the best and most defensive tiles. I don't know what the developers were thinking with spy units, to be honest. They are completely broken in MP.

[Shoot the Moon]

What visibility do your cultural borders give? Is it as if a unit was on all the tiles, or is there some other rule?

And thanks for the insights, they are really helpful!