Gavagai, the God-Emperor

[Gavagai]

I wonder if Joey realizes how many submarines are parked among his transports. Also, I think very soon I will have everything in place to crush him into a total oblivion: mostly, I only need several nukes. The question is if I want to do it as Gawdzak is still there and I just don't have a good angle to attack him; though it seems that Gawdzak's economy is noticably weaker than mine and Joey's.

2metra sent me an Iron for Iron offer. After much hesitation I sent it back to him, also adding 10 gold for 10 gold. Ten turns later I will have golden age and will be able to jump into a Police State. However, I'm still very undecided if I want to go to war at all...

[Gavagai]

Today in the morning, just before getting away from home to work, I got this message from Joey:

Hello,

Due to some events in the game, I declared war on you this turn. Unfortunately, the dice were in your favor today, and the attack did not go as I had hoped. Thus, I sent you a peace treaty, or at least I think I did. Its contents should be 4000g (I give) for a 10T peace treaty. If I did not actually send it, consider it sent; I'm sure you would cancel to look around anyways. I'd log in again, but a.) that would cancel the treaty offer and b.) I really need a drink... =/

You're welcome to log in whenever, to either look around or send the treaty back, so long as you don't move any units of course.

Good luck either way,
Joey

[Gavagai]

This (the part "attack did not go as I had hoped") reveals way too much information for a no-diplo game but I can't really make myself care. After all, Joey obviously has already drunk pretty lot. I had a literally a minute or two before I had to run but civstats showed that Joey still was able to raze a city and I logged in to check which one: of course, it was Bakka, National Epic city, which was going to give me an Engineer for my GA in about five turns.

Another thing I checked was the position of his main fleet: it was within the reach of my main fleet; OK.

What to say? Well, I feel a really strong urge to portray myself as an innocent victim; after all this is what we, Russians, were doing after 22.06.1941 and with a great success. However... well, I can understand what "events in the game" Joey is talking about. I positioned my units pretty aggressively, especially after my power exceeded Joey's and Joey started his 2metra war. Also, it looks like Joey stambled upon my submarine fleet in the south (at least, it looks like he killed some of the subs, though not all of them). May be it made him think that I'm planning to attack him and he decided to strike pre-emptively.

Was I planning to attack him? Most likely no. I felt comfortable to have this option on table but while I felt that I can win without wars, Joey was safe. Of course, I wasn't planning to attack without to switching to Police State and that wasn't possible until my GA. And most surely I wouldn't even think of attacking if Joey just repositioned his main fleet to safety - a thing he could easily do. Still, I accept my part of responsibility for these events. Basically the game went as I predicted long time ago: Gawdzak is quietly teching (I think, he currently has all his cities building commerce and infra) while me and Joey are engaged in an arms race. The trust which Joey killed during the first war had never been rebuilt. I was thinking hard about just opening up myself, pulling everything back from our border, inviting Joey to do the same, but I just couldn't really bring myself to do it; I was going to be winning and Joey had already shown the propensity to go to war in a desperate situations. Still, it was most possibly the right thing to do. I think, Gawdzak has done something like that.

What will I now? Well, it has become pretty straightforward. I will kill off Joey's military assets, reoffer peace (and pray that he takes it as I have nothing to deal with WW and I'm going to kill more than a hundred units on foreign soil next turn only; this, btw, is the only thing saving Joey from a complete obliteration). After that I would switch most of my cities to building research and try to win the space race with Gawdzak by peaceful means. I think, I still should be able to do that, though Gawdzak is doing something with his production: it is swifltly rising and already is pretty close to mine (most likely, he had some unbuilt power plants...). His GNP, however, unimpressive even with a lot of (of this I'm pretty sure) commerce builds. I'm pretty sure I can beat him handily in this regard after I switch my civ into a research mode.

If Gawdzak wins this game, I won't object much. He played his endgame perfectly, especially the "diplo" part; I, on the other hand, have made my mistakes.

[Gavagai]

Ah, one other thing: Joey is still in this ridiculous war with 2metra. He took 2 cities from him and razed them. What was the point of that? To reiterate, their relations is one of the most mysterious things in this game for me.

[Gavagai]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Successful strategies must also be forgiving. Though players will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to defect. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.

Everyone knows this rule but following it is haaaaard...

[Old Harry]

And agreed that diplo was way over the line.

[Gavagai]

I wish Joey to burn in hell.

[Gavagai]

That's terrible, I'm in the mood of wrighting an update but don't have screenshots at hand which I made yesterday. And really, I need screenshots to explain what happened.

So, let's use a very old one:

[Gavagai]

This is an island where the main battle took place. To the very east you may spot a Joey's fort which was already there back then. He kept his main fleet (which, at peak, was a little below 100 combat ships) right to the west from it. There always were quite a few transports under this fleet and they could hit Elysia, Amarah Prime, Bakka and Deliverance (with circumnavigation and Nav1). By contrast, my fleet was 1N from Deliverance and could hit exactly nothing. This asymmetry understandably was making me uncomfortable.

There always was an option to put my fleet in the lake at the center of the island. From there I could reach his fleet and three of his cities without putting myself at risk. Of course, he would have an option to raze Bakka and Amarah and trap it. That's why I was hesitating to actually put my ships there. But after some deliberations I decided to go for it and to give Amarah an unbreakable defense (about thirty infantries, a handful of knights and some other stuff; I remember there were 49 units total). It was only possible because Joey had very few missiles and little air presence. After he had got more, I would had to drop this plan and to pull my fleet away.

(That was one of the reasons I even considered attacking Joey at first place: in equilibrium situation he was going to have a significant advantage with this deployment and it made sense to use the window when he was vulnerable.)

I expected Joey to react in kind by putting his ships behind the fort; that would remove the pressure from Bakka and Deliverance and would also make it impossible for him to trap my fleet. On the other hand, he would still have the ability to reach two of my cities and would have his ships in safety. That seemed like a stable arrangement but he didn't want it, I have no idea why. He opted to do nothing and to keep his ships in place.

That put me in a very awkward situation: I could obliterate his fleet or I could wait until he had enough air power to pressure me away from the lake. That surely put a strong incentive on me to pre-emptively attack. I wonder, if he realized that.

[Gavagai]

That was the background; what happened previous turn is that Joey did exactly what I was afraid he would do. He tried to raze both my island cities and to trap my fleet. In his rambling message he referred to "dices in my favor". That, actually, was a scary thing to hear as, to my knowledge, my defence wasn't dice dependent. When I logged in, I was pleased to discover that Joey was wrong and I was correct. RNG was perfectly normal, Joey lost a little more 65% battles than he was expected to but won one pretty low-odds battle to compensate. He never really had a chance to capture Amarah, barring very bad luck on my part (when I did calculations back then, I figured that he should have and average chance of about 58% to win which wasn't going to happen).

I now think that here is what happened: Joey was already drank when playing his turn and stumbled upon my submarine net in the south. This tipped him into what can safely be called a ragequit. Another thing which he could have discovered is that 2metra accepted my iron for iron deal. Really... WHAT. THE. FUCK. I only noticed it myself this turn. 2metra, I hope you would read this and here is my personal message for you: this kind of offers are not supposed to accepted. I understand that you wanted to scare off Joey but you have chosen to do it at the expense of screwing me over big way. Me, your supposed ally.