Oxy changes his naming scheme to Community... and inexplicably doesn't get cancelled

[Cheater Hater]

Well, the end is even closer than it was at the start of this war--plako finally moved his mammoth stack off the hill and next to the capital. The pictures are here--I hit it with basically everything I had (everything that wasn't CG2, or my Medic Knight), and did pretty well considering the overwhelming odds (and that I already burned a lot of my Cats in secondary conflicts). Now the question is how many turns are left--PB26 has started it appears
(P.S: If you're wondering why I left xenu with 2 Cats near Shirley, those were accidentally unloaded last turn and xenu told me not to kill them (since we really shouldn't reload over it ), and I was way nicer than xenu deserved )
(P.P.S: Why does the lurker civ need a gold mine? )

[Commodore]

Why does the lurker civ need a gold mine?

Believe it or not, having a billion great spies gets expensive.

[Ceiliazul]

I think most players here understand that a new turnplayer is a pivot point in strategy and diplo relations. If you wanted to signal a peaceful border to one of your neighbors, how would you go about it?

CheaterHater, youre not dead yet, but since you posted in xenus thread I guess youre spoiled... is this the "subtle hint about an undefended city?"

I was trying to spur your thinking and your actions...

Your question in Xenu's thread about what he would have done if you launched a naval conquest of HAKland is the most insightful thing ive seen from you. That is the ONLY reason you might have avoided OWNING that empire. Seriously, you would have demolished hak with 5 galleys and your existing army... if you could communicate peace with Xenu.

Other ways to signal peace:
Trade stuff
Offer fish for fish, etc.
Lower defenses, especially pulling troops back near the front so he can still see them
Gift a defender (spear or whatever) to him.

[Cheater Hater]

I think most players here understand that a new turnplayer is a pivot point in strategy and diplo relations. If you wanted to signal a peaceful border to one of your neighbors, how would you go about it?

CheaterHater, youre not dead yet, but since you posted in xenus thread I guess youre spoiled... is this the "subtle hint about an undefended city?"

I was trying to spur your thinking and your actions...

Your question in Xenu's thread about what he would have done if you launched a naval conquest of HAKland is the most insightful thing ive seen from you. That is the ONLY reason you might have avoided OWNING that empire. Seriously, you would have demolished hak with 5 galleys and your existing army... if you could communicate peace with Xenu.

Other ways to signal peace:
Trade stuff
Offer fish for fish, etc.
Lower defenses, especially pulling troops back near the front so he can still see them
Gift a defender (spear or whatever) to him.

(I only had a 0.8 Rifle left when I spoiled myself--if plako didn't take the city then something was wrong with me (and xenu would have burned it ))
Yes, that was the hint I was talking about in my string of xenu posts--I still don't think you can signify a peaceful border in an AI diplo game when there isn't a NAP forcing that peace. Suggestions like removing defenses honestly just seem stupid, especially coming in cold to a situation. And isn't stuff like Fish for Fish against the spirit of AI diplo anyway?

Really, you think I only needed five Galleys full of Knights/Cats to demolish HAK? Remember, I could only see two cities, and had no clue what else he had (or even what his landmass looked like) due to my lack of scouting--of course, what I could have done was use the Galley I started with to scout, but that might have looked aggressive. I also got off the naval invasion plan when BaII discouraged it--I assumed that the person who had been with the civ the longest knew better than I did

[Ceiliazul]

Score and graphs put crosshairs on HAK, but I do understand your dilemma. Deff scouting would have helped.

Barrett luck next time!

[spacetyrantxenu]

OK, so for some reason I wrote up some response posts offline when I read through this thread after I was eliminated a few weeks ago and then forgot to post them. I think I had intended to go back and add quotes from your thread instead of just post numbers but that hasn't happened. Your post over in PB23 about my infinite knight ammo galley reloads reminded me I hadn't published this....! Anyway, thread necro alert! Sorry for the delay, you probably don't even care to have this conversation at this point.

Re: Post #139 from the PB18 thread

If the bug was common I wasn't aware of it. I haven't administered a forum before, it's all new territory for me, too. I just contacted you about what I saw. And if I recall our exchange correctly all this time later, I think I told you that I believed you, and I really do, I don't think you cheated and read my thread. I hope you can understand why I thought I had to at least inquire about it, though. It would have been foolishly naive of me to automatically disregard at least the possibility of wrongdoing. I had to at least ask the question.

Sorry, I didn't follow PBEM58. By that time I had kind of lost interest in PBEM games with only a few players and was by and large only lurking the larger pitboss games where there's a lot more interaction between more players. There are exceptions for some particular PBEMs that caught my attention for one reason or another, but I don't think I followed 58 and am definitely not familiar (or have forgotten if I did know) with the situation there.

I understand your sentiment about openness, but I definitely did not intend to make that incident public because I didn't have proof you had cheated. I believe that all of our players at RB are fair and honorable, until proven otherwise. One incident can be explained by anything, a misclick, a forum bug, someone else browsing using your computer -- I understand these things can happen. But if they happen to the same person more than once or twice that begins to look more like a pattern of abuse, and that's when I would get more active with persuading the person to correct the behavior, because at that point it would almost certainly appear to me, based on the evidence, to be more likely to have been deliberate behavior and not simply a series of accidents. You were absolutely in the "probably an accident/error" phase not in the "OMG he's a f-ing cheater MUST destroy reputation so no one will ever play with him again" phase.

Oops, just read the next post #140 where Bob kind of explained it for me. OK!

Post #141: About being next to someone who overbuilds military to their long term detriment...Try holding down that center position with a smaller military and see what happens. Oxy was gearing up to kill me before he quit, I had to react to that. And plako's army was bigger than both of ours by that point. Have to keep up. Yes I built a lot of power early on and yes that's something I tend to do, but not having a deterrant force from a geographically surrounded position would have been even more irresponsible than overbuilding. You guys didn't even get the bad end of the stick until you attacked me -- I was harassing other neighbors with that extra power up until then (TBS for security, Wetbandit for land, Q because of both terrible defense and to relieve cultural pressure).

As to "what's the point?", when you've lost you have to find other goals or you'll just be bored. I'm sorry my goals made the game less fun for you, but it kept me logging in and playing my turns. In any game where people compete unto death, at some point things are going to be less fun. I was definitely in the throes of that agony when plako declared on me and I realized all was lost. It was then a matter of finding a fun way to deal with the situation. I'm probably remembering the situation a lot more fondly now than I reported it at the time (I'm sure my thread wasn't kind to read) but trying to solve the puzzle each turn to maximize my survival, save units, and prepare to coutner attack, balancing those objectives was at least interesting and better than just dying and being done with it for me. That was the point, for me.

Post #151 - You thought I deleted all those units? No sir, they evacuated to the galleys. Through the magic of chain loading and unloading I could disperse units among all the galleys that were in the area. I'm sure I reported it in my thread, it's been a while and I don't remember exactly what I did. But yeah, one turn I realized I couldn't take Annie (drafting saved your bacon down there) so I pillaged what I could (fundraising!), the next turn I got back on the boats before your catapults could annihilate the stack. Because I knew how long I had in the area, I had a spy under your catapult stack and had counted the tiles across your territory, so I knew I had X number of turns to hit your south and then either lose my stack or get out if I could. Facing the catapults in your culture was not really an option because with Engineering even one movers are more mobile than my knights, I couldn't hope to outmanuver you.

Post #169, I totally understand your frustration but I had hoped that wouldn't be your reaction to losing the Great General. Like Duncan being razed before, the lesson should be to always be mindful of what's on your coast. Earlier in the game I had dropped off a random archer SW of Jeff, didn't I capture and delete a worker in that case? I was trading a 25 hammer archer for a 60 hammer worker, that was a win for me. Killing the GG had nothing to do with kingmaking, I was intending to fight you until I died (you can debate the merit/sanity/ethicality of that, certainly), but as long as I was going to fight you why not give up a unit to kill a GG? That's, at minimum, saving me from fighting 20 XP somewhere down the line, or more if you settled it and produced more than 10 units. It wasn't any more or less malicious than anything else I was doing, I punished a bad play as any other player would have. I'm pretty sure you'll be more careful about leaving units hanging out near the coast in the future, although that's a hard way to learn that lesson.

As for the rest...I know you wrote the post while angry, I've done my share of that. Obviously I wasn't going to win the game, but I wasn't kingmaking, I was fighting a permanent war of revenge. If you go back far enough Oxy threw the first punch (razing the barb city I had just captured) but I let it go, in the interests of not spitefully destroying both of us. But he/geography set you on the course to inevitable war, and you declared war, not me. If plako had declared war on me and you had opportunistically attacked my rear, I'm going to guess you would have got a lot more of the land in that scenario because I would have held plako responsible in that case and sworn a vendetta/grudge war against him instead of you, and would have spent most of my power accordingly. I fought you both off for as long as I could, to maximize the period of time I could hold any cities with population remaining to be converted into units. After a city couldn't do that (or couldn't be held without risking a lot of units), I'd let it go. In the west, anyway. In the east I held the line against you everywhere I could, all the time. It may not have been fair of me, but I don't think it was uncalled for. It's just war. I was delighted that you only gained two cities from it in the end. That probably means I'm an asshole but it also means that I met my limited war objective once I knew I was a dead man walking.

You may have disagreed with my spending hammers building up a navy, or supporting my last city, but I had the evacuation plan in mind while I was fighting on both fronts. Your power and plako's combine was way more than I could hope to counter in a purely continental war. Spending those hammers on more catapults, knights, or whatever wouldn't have mattered, at most maybe it would have saved me a few more turns. However, all those galleys ultimately did let me play out a much longer game, still have fun, and achieve more of my new goals. I couldn't have done most of what I did without being able to evacuate so many of my units. Wetbandit would have just pushed me off the continent and I'd have been done. That wouldn't have been any fun for me. The navy was an investment that paid off repeatedly over time. You may not have liked it, but you should have destroyed it to remove the threat. On a watery map (or one like this one with so many attack vectors by sea) building a navy is really important. I learned that in PB8 when I was too small to have a navy and ended up at the mercy of everyone around me. Yes, you had bad luck that someone gifted me a frigate but you could have killed it with a few galleons and got after my old rickety wooden boats long before I got a chance to attack you in the last campaign. That's getting far ahead for now though, I still have 80 posts to read as of now. Anyway, I do regret how hard you took the setback with the GG but I'd obviously kill it or any other great person I could during a war with anyone, any time.

That said, I support your decision to write whatever you want and not censor yourself. I've wanted to flip the table countless times in these damn games, yet I still play. When it isn't agonizingly painful, this game really is fun!

Post #240: I maintained the grudge war against you rather than attacking bigger fish because, for one, attacking big fish gets you killed, and, more importantly, that WOULD be kingmaking. I had ample opportunity to raze a number of Jojo's cities, but he turned that into an opportunity and became my biggest supporter on the map. Did you ever see the amount of free resources he was giving me? He bought my loyalty, I needed those resources. Yes, I could have attacked him and done the yay anarchy pirate, arrrr! thing, but to me he was most valuable as an ally for resources and (literally) as a safe harbor for the fleet. It wasn't an accident that I was hiding in his waters before I fired the teleport to attack Annie. He had plenty of galleons and frigates to kill my little wooden boats if he had wanted to, but he had bought me off cheaply with spare resources, he knew I wasn't a threat.

On the other side of that argument, after you were eliminated I had to find a new objective. Granted, Wetbandit/plako didn't let me get very far with it but I was going to gear up to attack Ruff next, since he was reachable, not an ally, and was not any kind of contender in the game. If I did him harm it would just be a war, not tipping the scales in terms of people winning or losing. While Jojo isn't winning this game he is going to place very well, so me undermining that at this stage of the game would have been senseless, even by my standards.

I'm glad you liked the seemingly infinite knight reloads--I wasn't sure if you'd detect me reloading after attacking Annie or not, I didn't think you would but I hoped that you'd assume the boats were empty or a diversion after that. I'd have to go back to my screenshots to double check but I think I reloaded a knight for every knight I lost in the attack on Annie. So the boats were mostly full by the time I sailed up your east coast. Anyway, you can get a total count of my units in that fleet because I think only one knight survived the adventure by the end.

[Commodore]

Xenu, just a note, PBEM 58 is totally worth the read. That was one batshit crazy game.

[Cheater Hater]

I don't mind xenu, I like having this discussion whenever.
"Overbuilding military": This goes back to my universal Prisoner's Dilemma theory--everything else being equal, if you don't have to spend the hammers on military those hammers can be used for other economic things, giving you (and your neighbors) more tech, making you better than neighbors who end up fighting/cold-warring early. If your opponent overbuilds military, you either get conquered and lose right away or match the army and fall behind people who don't have to build an army. I still don't know how I'm supposed to balance that--I guess the answer is be Protective and/or Aggressive and be able to match people with fewer troops? I still say you massively overbuilt boats, but that might just be me underbuilding them in general?

The rant: You can't say you're not kingmaking, since that's the literal definition: you clearly had no chance and were deciding who won the inevitable war between me and plako. Yes, I had vastly overstated my chances of being relevant in the game, but that still doesn't change the fact that I had more of a shot than you did. If this gave plako a chance to win you can expect that FinHarry, TBS and BGN would rightly raise a fuss, just like BGN probably should have raised more of a fuss than he did over Krill's BS unit gifts (and btw, his topic does say he gifted you the Frigate, which gives me a beef with him too).

Yes, I'm sure you had more fun playing pirate than you would have just dying (though I'd argue if you didn't have to support that offshore city you might have been able to get out more units and become less appetizing). This also wasn't the worst place to do it, since this game wasn't expected to be completed, and you were messing with people who couldn't win. Still, look at it from my perspective: I'm stuck on a peninsula, coming into a fresh situation to try to keep the game running (which was my only reason to even be in this game--I only got put on the original signup list by throwing out a suggestion, and then I didn't want to withdraw and have the game not happen because of me), with a million Knights, and a partner who shot down any thoughts of invading HAK across the water. What am I supposed to do? Apparently the answer is "wait 10 turns so your crazy neighbor declares an unending blood war on his other neighbor instead of you".

Was there really that much crazy stuff in PBEM58 Commodore? The main thing I remember was getting saved in the big war when I was certainly doomed, along with my T40 city snipe (and horrible defense there-of); was there anything else?