[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[scooter]

Mackoti defended himself, so I made peace and wheeled to see if REM could do the same. Plus he refused my offer to gang on Mackoti, so too late, missed your chance. I think he's going to fend me off too, though.


On that note, I'm probably done reporting this game, so feel free to spoil yourselves and read the rest. I'll continue trying to better my position and not try to do something ridiculous just to end things, but I'm not going to continue putting serious effort into this game. I think the week of no turns killed what little bit of interest I had left, and my chances to win have been 0 for awhile now.


Also, it's not concession time for the leaders, but I am officially fine with it once one of them change their minds.

[Epoxy]

Good luck going from here, it was fun reporting on your game. Here is a compilation of all The Daily Roll bulletins.

THE DAILY ROLL
Impartial reporting since 12 BC

ARCHIVE

Issue No.	Date	Turns	Title	Summary
1	2016-08-28	185	Serfs or Slaves	Choice: serfdom or slavery?
2	2016-09-06	186	Mack is Back	Lengthy delay owing to Mackoti missing in action.
3	2016-09-07	187	Scooter's Greatest Hits	Scooter decides on a city naming scheme.
4	2016-09-08	188–189	The First Pop	Someone expands their borders. What could it possibly mean?
5	2016-09-09	190–191	The Dutch Succumb	Slavery becomes universal.
6	2016-09-10	192–193	It's Mack	A neighbour to the east in unveiled.
7	2016-09-11	194–196	The Other Side of the Hill	Someone makes a ploy against Aztec expansion.
8	2016-09-12	197–198	New Plans	A new city site is drawn up.
9	2016-09-13	199–200	Happy Settler Day	The first settler sprouts out of the ground.
10	2016-09-13	201	In the Loop	Map trades galore.
11	2016-09-14	202	They Accept	The 8/18 Project takes shape.
12	2016-09-15	203	Alhazard is Toast	Some not very nice thoughts about the Ottoman state of affairs.
13	2016-09-16	204	The Jungle Doe Effect	Catastrophe.
14	2016-09-19	205–208	The Big Three	Aggrandisement.
15	2016-09-19	209–210	The Forked Road	The Statue of Liberty.
16	2016-09-20	211	There Can Be Only One	Who will land the Taj Mahal?
17	2016-09-24	212–215	The Most Dangerous Enemy	It's the Khmer Empire.
18	2016-09-26	216–218	Not Enough Workers	More labour is wanting.
19	2016-09-27	219	Short but Wide	The Aztecs have no need for metropolises with this kind of turnover.
20	2016-09-28	220	The Killing Time	Research Research Research
21	2016-09-30	221–222	They Refuse	None shall pass.
22	2016-10-03	223–224	War is Unforeseeable	Is war unforeseeable?
23	2016-10-04	225–226	East and West	This was initially titled 'First Come, First Served'.
24	2016-10-06	226–227	England Takes Two	England settles two cities in quick succession.
25	2016-10-06	228	The Line is Drawn	The first issue of The Daily Roll with two paragraphs.
26	2016-10-07	229	For Whom the Bell Chimes	The Aztecs start a golden age.
27	2016-10-11	230–233	The Isthmus Campaign	War!
28	2016-10-11	234	The Plot Thickens	Byzantium demarcates the eastern border and peace is signed.
29	2016-10-13	235–236	The Great Merchant That Could	Kerfuffle.
30	2016-10-14	237	First Past the Post	A great scientist is born.
31	2016-10-18	238–242	The Lion's Mouth	The Dutch provoke the Byzantines' ire with an aggressive plant.
32	2016-10-20	243	The Penny Drops	Byzantium has a thirst for power.
33	2016-10-23	244–246	A Bitter Future	The game becomes zero-sum.
34	2016-10-25	247–248	Reason Prevails	The Statue of Liberty will be boosted by a great engineer.
35	2016-10-26	249–250	The Ottomans Muster	Caught unawares without slavery on hand, the Ottomans have their hands full.
36	2016-10-29	251–252	Just Like That	The Ottoman capital falls.
37	2016-11-01	253–255	A New Rope	The Ottomans are left destitute on an island.
38	2016-11-02	256	Hatch a Plan	With their superior espionage, the Aztecs feel secure in their chances for the Kremlin.
39	2016-11-05	257–260	The Game is On	But someone else is also in the running.
40	2016-11-09	261–262	Numbers Don't Lie	Invasion! The Khmer Empire attacks the Netherlands.
41	2016-11-15	262–265	The Dutch Strike Back	No one is happy. Except Byzantium
42	2016-11-24	266–267	Spinners and Losers	Unable to spin their way back up, the Aztecs await new opportunities.

[scooter]

Thanks for the daily roll updates! They were a fun feature.

[Epoxy]

Thanks for the daily roll updates! They were a fun feature.

Thanks!

[Nekira Sudacne]

They were fun!

But Scooter--as someone who has been deadlurking quite interestedly from eairly on, I am curious for any thoughts/theories on when the game went off the rails, and why you feel the position is hopeless, even though you are still #3 at least. I don't know, because, uh, you havn't posted much in quite a while

Also, if you have well and truely given up, why not play kingmaker? Decide who of the two you want to to not-win, then whip yourself silly to cripple them. You picked Aztec so you could do a whip-fest of an army, I will be severely disapointed if you don't go out in a blaze of glory! So ask yourself; Who has made the mistake of Annoying you the most? They must pay before the final bell tolls...

[scooter]

I debated on kingmaking, but in general I really dislike it when people do that. I actually declared on both Mackoti and REM just to keep them honest because they were defending islands with longbows, and when they covered things off I backed off. Those were both extremely half-hearted pokes, but if they had cheated too much it would have cost them. But honestly, when chances of winning and interest level both get this close to 0, I'd rather phone it in.

But Scooter--as someone who has been deadlurking quite interestedly from eairly on, I am curious for any thoughts/theories on when the game went off the rails, and why you feel the position is hopeless, even though you are still #3 at least. I don't know, because, uh, you havn't posted much in quite a while

Well for one, I think IMP just wasn't that good. I've had the best position among IMP leaders and it hasn't been that close. (FWIW Plako is closing the gap and will continue to do so, but that's more a function of my lack of interest and the realities of the map.) Reasons:

1) The map screwed me in some ways. The big difference between PB33 and PB35 is that 33 had contested regions that were very desirable. This one did not. The contested regions were among the weakest which is why they mostly got settled last. There was one exception (that not everyone had), and Mackoti found it by beelining his starting explorer straight to it. Notice how on the map everyone basically settled their own wedge and nothing else? Yeah. That's why I hate these types of map setups. The main advantage of IMP is that you can (and have to!) claim more than your fair share. How exactly was I supposed to do that here? The other IMP players couldn't find a way either, and one of them was Plako. I tried to compensate by pushing some infrastructure with my saved hammers, and that did help a lot, but it simply wasn't enough.

2) I didn't catch a huge break like the two ahead of me. Mackoti got to be next to Alhazard who wasn't building settlers or getting military techs. I didn't. Phracts helped him, but I would have rushed for Cuirs and done the same if I was next to him too. (Sure, I could have attacked the Dutch, but those are good players. REM's first stab at it failed massively because they're good players. Don't fight a land war against a competent opponent.) REM on the other hand got both Taj and the religious wonders. I expected somebody else (Plako) to get Taj, but that gave him a massive early boost. I fully expected someone to risk a polluted GPP pool to race Plako to Taj, but apparently Plako didn't.

3) To further #2, my big chance to catch that huge break the others caught would have been landing Communism/Kremlin because REM kept Mackoti honest and forced him to defend himself. When that didn't happen, my window closed. Since then I've been mostly on autopilot.

So... I blame bad luck. This was definitely winnable from T0 so that doesn't absolve me from any mistakes, but I think I got the hardest position of anyone yet again with my main trait nerfed by the map and my direct neighbors being everyone except the one player who lagged behind. There are plenty of others things that I could nitpick (and I'm sure the lurker thread will) that weren't perfect, but my chances of victory at T0 were lower than REM's or Mackoti's were at T0. When you play against players of that skill level, good luck trying to overcome any kind of edge like that.

[Sullla]

I hate to blame the map as well, but I have to agree with scooter. This turned out to be a bad map for Imperialistic trait. Everyone had their own clearly defined homelands, and the connecting points between them were very narrow and full of poor land (jungle/desert). It became clear early on that everyone was going to get their own starting area, and it would be nearly impossible for anyone to claim a share of someone else's starting area - the map simply did not make it viable. Making matters worse, those one-tile choke points on the landbridges made it way too easy to block off expansion, which mackoti astutely was able to do by fortifying on a jungle hill tile with an explorer and then declaring war. There was absolutely nothing that we could do to get past that unit in the early game. Credit mackoti for seeing it, but it was also very frustrating that he could fortify one cheap unit and block off a large section of the map for dozens of turns on end. One tile chokepoints are a terrible fit for someone with Imperialistic trait. Once scooter couldn't get anything beyond the initial starting area, the game was effectively over. The extra islands weren't enough to make up for it. It was a real pain to see that that was going to happen from a very early point in time and not be able to do anything about it because of the way the geography of this game shook out.

The other painful aspect of this game was the particular starting position, being the only team that did not start next to Alhazard. It was clear from a very early date that Alhazard was going to struggle in this game, and we were the only ones who had zero chance to take advantage of that fact. We were next to mackoti and REM, the two game leaders, as well as the two Imperialistic teams. Oledavy and plako are both much too good at Civ4 to be soft targets for expansion, even with both of them not playing especially strong setups in this particular game. So this game played out as so many others have: access to the weaker teams was the most important factor, and mackoti used his cataphracts to snowball his position beautifully.

As scooter said, the last factor was excellent players pulling off wonders that they should not have been able to land: REM should not have been able to get the religious wonders and Taj, while mackoti should not have been able to pull off his conquest and also get Communism/Kremlin. The other Philosophical teams should have been able to stop REM at #1, and Alhazard should have been able to put up enough of a defense to stop mackoti at #2. Not win the war, but delay him long enough that mackoti couldn't get the tech prizes.

Anyway, I don't want to be too harsh on the setup for this game. The map itself was very well done, it simply was a bad setup for an Imperialistic leader. (Maybe make the contested zones a little more viable though? And not have those one-tile chokepoints in the future.) Where the players start in each game is random and certainly nothing that can be controlled. For what it's worth, I thought we played a very nice opening in this game and could have had a very good chance to win with a different map and with different results taking place out in the fog beyond our control. This was just one of those game where things didn't line up correctly. You always need some luck to win, and this game all of the things outside our control went the wrong way. It happens. I still enjoyed the game until I was distracted by the busy season for my work and then Civ6's release.

I've remained unspoiled for this game and will probably remain so until it ends. I'll be curious to read what the lurker thread thinks after the game ends though. What exactly could we have done differently in this game? I feel like there weren't a lot of options available to us to do something else to achieve victory. I might be missing something though. Regardless of how's it been proving to play out, I hope you had fun scooter. I enjoyed the parts of the game that I was involved with.

[scooter]

FWIW, I'm not arguing our game was perfect, and I don't think Sullla is suggesting as such either (I agree with his comments). I can think of plenty of things that could have been done differently. But I think REM and Mackoti have both made large mistakes in this game too, arguably worse than me, but the setup favored them so it didn't cost them as badly. Simple as that.

Plainly put: the field was tilted towards two players (one in particular) who are better at Civ than me. With that in mind, I was never going to win this thing, so scrounging up the energy to do a detailed post-mortem feels futile here. Especially when I know the lurkers will oblige in that area . I'm pretty content with the game played, and if I catch a break or two or get a more favorable map, I'm still very much in this. I've played enough games to know when the setup favored me (PB13) and when it hurt me (PB5) to know that it's easy to look smart or dumb when things beyond your control impact the game. If I ever play another Civ4 Ren game I'll definitely revisit my game here with a more critical eye.


To be clear, I did enjoy most of this game! I highly recommend the Ren setup. I'm just calling a spade a spade and moving on.

[Nekira Sudacne]

That's fair, I wasn't asking for a detailed post-mortum (especailly as the game isn't technically over yet!), but I wanted some final thoughts as to why you were effectively going on auto pilot and ceeding the game. And yea, I can see what you said. That kind of concerned me at the time. dispite being Imp you were never able to get a real land edge, and that hurt bad, and you didn't get a lucky break anywhere else.

With that in mind, sinse you don't intend to post here further, I suppose I should declare i'm offically de-deadlurking. Might as well follow a thread that's still updating, sinse I am curious how the game finnally ends

[shallow_thought]

Thanks, as always, for the reporting. Epoxy definitely gets Most Valued Lurker prize for the daily roll (counting Sullla as a teammate rather than a lurker).

You definitely deserve a break on neighbours! Maybe next time...