[SPOILERS] Dazed and scooter play Stalin of Vikings and make a big mess

[dazedroyalty]

Random thought that I don't know how it will affect this game:

I'm wondering we (RB) have become too anti war in games. Yes, it's true that a full out war early on is almost always counter productive to long term benefits. I think the early game vendetta is a bad idea all the time. But, on the other hand, a well planned surgical strike/war early game could be a great play. I'm trying not to use specific examples because this post would be awkward with lots of spoilers in it, but I think there are some pretty clear examples from recent games of when an early strike either paid off or could pay off well. Even in a non-AW game, there are times when I think hurting someone else's growth even at the cost of personal growth is still worth it.

I don't think anyone would actually argue that a judicious early war can be a good thing. Rather, what I was thinking about earlier was simply the fact that we've gotten into a rut of not going to war in games that are not AW. The culture right now leans away from early war by default. So, there is a window of opportunity for players in games right now to make a smart early strike. Basically, a stack of 2 movers (4-5) that could move in quickly and fork a couple early cities. For example, if the guy next door on a relatively small map builds the Mids, there's an opportunity there because that kind of aggressive play in a non-AW game is so unusual here.

I am not thinking this has any particular influence on this game, per se, but it's a thought I've been having and this seems like the best thread to get it out. It's not fully developed but I just have the intution that given the current "best practices" of RB MP, there's a window of opportunity to take advantage that will close once a few players use it.

[Serdoa]

Dazed, I think that is a misconception. The "anti-war"-stance is imo not because players simply didn't want to go to war, but because it makes sense. Hurting your own growth only for the sake of hurting someone elses as well, is normally only benefitting your opponents. Yes, you might raze a city of your opponent, but that does cost you something. You talk about 4-5 2-movers. Chariots won't cut it (1 Spear might be with some luck enough to hold you off, 1 Spear + 1 Archer and your 5 Chariots are just fodder), so you need HA. Thats 200 hammers (quick speed) we talk here, just to raze one city. And everyone should be able to have some spears ready before you raze the next one - if not, you probably shouldn't harass him in the first place, as he is so far behind that it is a waste of your time.

I agree with you though that poking your opponents is a good thing and should be done more often. But one should always keep in mind that the overall goal is to win the game, not to hurt someone else. And in 95% of the cases that means not to go to war. And if you do, then you'd better have a plan how that is going to help you win this game - only hurting one opponent out of 4 isn't.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I love early war.

[SevenSpirits]

There are two reasons to attack someone.

1) To hurt them.
2) Spoils of war.

Both are valid. However there is not much benefit to hurting someone in a game with many players, as you of course know. People generally keep enough of a defense that this reason is insufficient except in certain circumstances that emulate a 2-player game, such as them being on the brink of victory, or the two of you sharing an island with no one else around, or it actually being a 2-player game.

Spoils of war are generally a much better reason. If your available land is limited enough that you can't just build more settlers to grow your empire, taking over someone else's land can be extremely valuable. There are also bonuses of capture gold, pillage gold, experience, great general points, and potentially being able to extort items for peace.

Finally there are the costs, and they are big. You must spend resources to get some sort of military advantage, in military tech and/or army size. The price is steep, as your advantage must be overwhelming. And if you do not kill your target you will have to continue spending resources in the future, as you'll likely bother them very much.

The reasons early wars suck are:
1) The opportunity cost of getting the good early military techs (like HBR) are gigantic compared to those in later eras.
2) The opportunity cost of building units at the beginning of the game is immense at the beginning, when all the good land is still available to be settled, and so many resources are unclaimed and unimproved.
3) The travel distances between players are the greatest at the beginning of the game.
4) Most recent games have been on handmade maps with incredibly good places to settle, plenty of land, and quick speed (and often plains hill capitals). And most importantly they have easily traversible land which you can't claim just by placing a blocking city, because everyone has reasonable access to multiple other players.

Land really is the strongest reason to go to war. Our games recently have had people going to war about when they run out of land to settle normally, and this is to be expected. In a game on a random map like this, war can be strong for claiming land even early because there is a higher chance that you will be able to take all the land of the player you kill.

[scooter]

Excellent discussion.

I think Seven said it pretty well. I get what Dazed was getting at though as he mentioned it the other day - not necessarily the full-out war should be more frequent early, but that games here at RB are trending more and more towards everyone running a VERY light farmer's gambit until Knights pretty much. It's getting more and more silly, and there comes a point where there should be an adjustment in play-style to punish that kind of play. Take PB4 for instance - LP blew past everyone because he ran the lightest military and he secured NAPs with everyone. Because of his diplo, his play was smart. However, when you start getting into no talking games which is quickly becoming the standard and people are still playing the same way, punishing that style of play could be trivial when they don't have chat/email at their disposal to feel out an attack.

To expound upon that, in no-talking games you don't take diplo hits for making a raid on someone. In a talking game, the opponent is likely to hold a grudge and at best you're likely to take a -1 with the other players. In a no-talking game your opponent can't tell anyone you attacked, and not only that, you never had a chance to lie to them (since they'll inevitably have been asking if you are coming and what are you supposed to say), so they're less likely to take it personally. All that means the intangible cost of attacking has gone down significantly from the PB1, PB2, and single-digit PBEM games. The tangible cost is still there of course, but that's always been only half the battle.

This effect is magnified greatly in the type of game we're playing here. We're playing on an unbalanced random map where we can't talk to each other - similar to PB7 except it's AW over there. From watching PB7 and some recent PBEMs though, people still want to play things like we're in diplo land where you can build 7 cities, 12 workers, and 5 warriors and be fine. The investment to hurt someone like that is trivial and frequently pays for itself, and it's magnified on Normal speed + slavery nerf so it's even harder to react. Don't underestimate the slavery nerf here - it's going to be significantly harder to whip out emergency armies in this game. I don't think it's spoilerish to say we've seen how some hit&run stuff can have a big impact in PBEM32, and I'd guess that this game is even more ripe for that kind of thing. Also look to PB7 where Mackseven/LP bettered their positions significantly with an early offensive war, although the circumstances were certainly quite different there.

The point I think Dazed was making is that it's far easier now to capitalize on these early offensive wars than it was 2 years ago because we are playing the game differently now - true farmer's gambit is standard... A smart player will keep that in mind and understand that his neighbor really does have nothing, and it'll now be much harder to react. The theory here is that a couple players really capitalizing on that may swing the pendulum back towards being more cautious militarily in the early game as standard. It'll be interesting to see if anything like that actually happens.

[dazedroyalty]

Excellent discussion.

I think Seven said it pretty well. I get what Dazed was getting at though as he mentioned it the other day - not necessarily the full-out war should be more frequent early, but that games here at RB are trending more and more towards everyone running a VERY light farmer's gambit until Knights pretty much.

This! I'm not advocating early war being beneficial as a rule. Rather, I'm thinking that because of the current trend of how people have been playing games, there is a brief window right now where early, small scale war will be more beneficial than normal. Also, I think the early war as it relates to meta-game (slowing down someone with lots of potential) often gets downplayed because there is not a quantifiable way to prove it was effective.

Even a pillage war/choke against a player that just landed the Mids or Henge/Oracle or something strong like that could be worth the investment or a few units. (An axe/spear/archer) combo could pillage/choke for a long time if wisely deployed.

I definitely don't advocate war for war's sake (a la lurkers everywhere). But the guy running the farmer's gambit needs to be reminded its a gambit! I mean, even going worker first is a gambit. Look what happened to Plako (RIP)!

[dazedroyalty]

Well, apparently Brick hasn't explored his west yet! So we get the hut! Yay!



We settled Sign of Four:



Inside Scarlet:



Inside Sign of Four:



I know you asked for other pictures but I forgot to take them. Sorry!

[scooter]

We are the second civ to get our second city. Not bad. Plains hill certainly helped there. Quite a few people will beat us to our third city so let's enjoy this for now . Anyways, time for me to start figuring out the micro plan.

Dazed - if you ever get another chance, the following info would still be useful:

1) Number of hammers invested into the worker [EDIT: Nevermind, I can figure it out myself. We're only get 2hpt but we invested 10, so we got 8 overflow and we're at 18/60]
2) Number of beakers invested into Masonry
3) The turn you're getting this info on (whether it's today on this turn or tomorrow next turn) so I can sync it with my plans.

For the curious lurkers on tile managment:

1) Yes - we realize pigs + copper is better for a worker than crabs/pigs, but we need the commerce right now so it's worth it.

2) At Sign of Four, we went back and forth on whether it was quicker to max-hammer the WB working the Stone or to grow to size 2 and whip. WB costs 30h and stone would be 4hpt, so it would complete in 8T. Growing to 2 at Normal means filling 22food at 3fpt surplus, which means 8T. We would then whip the 9th turn. In this case, the WB comes out 1T faster for Stone, but the FP gives us 8 beakers which in our minor tech crunch likely means getting Masonry 1T sooner which is significant for us. Also, whipping the WB on T9 means we'll have 9/30 in the box so we'll get 9 + 1 base so 10h of overflow into a worker which will be aided by a chop. So the Stone plan gets us a WB 1T sooner so it gets +1f while the whip plan gets us around 8c and 9h of overflow (give or take about two for both values, I'm not being precise here). So whip it is. The increased research time is really the biggest part.

Quick question for the lurkers: Why exactly do we have trade routes here? I thought you need Sailing to trade on coasts and rivers?

[mackoti]

Touching culture.

[scooter]

Touching culture.

To take this a step further, would just having a road (and of course quarry) on the stone be good enough to hook it to the capital? Or would I need a full set of roads for that? Because I noticed the crabs are already hooked to Sign of Four.