RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Good game. Fitting that it all ends how it started (pic). Might post some more stuff later, depends on how well I can avoid posting spoilers. Not taking any chances with that.

I'm looking forward to reading your thread (after the game is over). I hope to find a post mortem analysis which includes insights from what you've read here.

[Sullla]

Moved our workers and made two build changes:

- Swapped Antietam off catapult and onto worker (3t). We really need more of them, and Antietam is the best place to get workers at the moment.

- Swapped Atlanta off theatre and onto lighthouse. We actually don't have a great need for theatre here: it's not on the border with Kathlete, there's no culture pressure, the food tiles are both in the first-ring (so not a great hurry to expand borders) and we already have Judaism in the city, so Atlanta will expand borders in 10 turns regardless. Instead, let's go for the growth bonus by making a lighthouse our first build. The other good option is forge first to power future builds/whips - either one would be my recommendation.

Diplomatically, we got this back from Korea:

Dear Killer Angels,

Thank you for your support. It is highly appreciated.

Our galleys are not close by currently, but I'll send one that should be close to your cities around the time we get Guilds that should be ~5 turns. with a stack of close to 10 Knights in 10T we should be able to do sizeable damage. We're also getting next Great Person in 2 turns and if it is merchant trade mission would enable building cheaper HAs and upgrading them, but there is only ~30% odds for Merchant.

I had a chat with slaze and I think he has chosen his side. However it seems he feels sympathy towards us and is going to continue attack against Whosit. In my opinion having Slaze to concentrate on war against Whosit is best for both of us. It is mportant that we don't need to sign cheap peace with Whosit (where your units help) and can continue our common war effort with Slaze. It keeps us close enough and also keeps him away from dogpiling you. Worst option is that Whosit signs peace with slaze and they combine forces with Kathlete, when we would be against at least 4 nations.

Regards,
plako

The info about slaze was most important there. plako confirmed that slaze is basically declaring his hostility to our team. But that means that we don't need to worry about appeasing him any more, so we can do a 180 flip and now look into signing a Non-Aggression Pact with Kathlete! Despite what Speaker posted above, he suggested this after calming down from the initial pillaging anger. So let's rework that message from yesterday that wasn't sent:

Dear Rebel Alliance,

Apologies for making use of your accidental post, but the information was directly involved with our team, and quite important. I daresay that if we had accidentally emailed you our attack plans against Jowy, you probably would have taken some kind of action too! :)

We did agree that we wouldn't share emails, however a forum post isn't the same thing. If you want us to promise not to share any more accidental posts in the wrong place, sure, we'll promise that. The cat is unfortunately out of the bag on this past incident though.

Ironically, this sort of benefits you in a way, because if slaze wants to turn and stab us in the back, we have no real motive for going after you. The whole goal there was to help slaze in his war - if he wants to be our enemy, then you become the enemy of our enemy, and you know what they say about that. Perhaps we can agree on some kind of Non-Aggression Pact after all. (We were only really refusing to sign one because slaze asked us to.)

If you are still interested in an NAP, like you said in your last email, we're open to offers. But as a sign of good faith we have to ask you to stop pillaging around our new cities, which is damaging our relations. Thanks. Hope to hear back from you soon.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

No more pictures tonight, I'm in a bit of a hurry. If the turn hasn't rolled over, I'll post something tomorrow. LOL moment of the turn: Dantski has completed the Statue of Zeus. What's this guy doing?!?

[Speaker]

This came from Ottomans:

Hello Killer Angels,

I can not blame you for making use of the information my post
provided. What is it that I've read in your reports before? Once
spoiled it's no use pretending you're not? While it's disappointing
it's not beyond comprehension why you would use it/share it around.

Can you please answer me this and let me know who you've shared it
with? I'm under the impression by talking with the other teams that
only the HRE and Rome don't know about it. I could be mistaken but
atleast please clarify what teams you've shared the post with. It
would be much appreciated as a sign of good faith, akin to me stopping
my pillaging around you're newly acquired cities.

I will require an agreement on a new NAP prior to T168 before I can
decidely stop pillaging though. This particular NAP can be a short one
so it gives us time to negotiate our future. How about until T180
(inclusive) while we discuss some medium (to potentially longer) term
plans. This gives me time to properly protect my western border (if
I'm going to need to) and will ensure I don't have knights on my
doorstep on T171 because I agreed to stop pillaging but didn't protect
myself.

After I overcame my sorrow about making that mistake, I've been giving
the situation a lot of thought and came to the same conclusion as you
re: enemy of my enemy. It could behoove us greatly to work closer
together. Let's begin by working out a peaceful agreement and I think
it could open the door for more to come.

Athlete
The Rebel Alliance

[timmy827]

I was all but ready to tell Kathlete that he had violated our NAP and start razing his cities. Man, did he push me this turn.

Sullla talked me off the edge of the building and made me see rationally. Yes, Kathlete will feel the full brunt of my military...when the time is right. He will get his. Oh yes.

Darn, irrational (but understandable) rage would have been a lot more fun from the lurker point of view.

[Sullla]

So are we agreed on accepting this, Speaker? While I'm sure that Kathlete only wants peace to set up a future attack, we're in the same position, and since we have more cities and tech faster than he does, delay should be to our advantage. If you see me online today, let's chat briefly to confirm on our response.

Kathlete continues to hold the turn without ending it, so I guess we have plenty of time to cover this.

[Speaker]

Yes, shall we ask him to make it T190, our "standard" 20 turns? I agree that we can make better use of the time than he can.

[Sullla]

OK then:

Dear Rebel Alliance,

We have no problem telling you who we shared your accidental post with, as a sign of good faith. Your instincts are right, we pasted it into an email sent to Inca, Korea, and Romali. Our goal wasn't to expose sensitive info, but rather to call slaze to account and expose whatever deception he had in mind. It was important that other teams friendly to us know what he was planning to do.

We'd like to accept your provisional Non-Aggression Pact for Turn 180 (inclusive) while discussing longer term plans. As part of that deal, we'll request again that your units refrain from pillaging around our future cities. Our general preference in the past has been for 20 or 30 turn NAP agreements, so hopefully we can discuss something in the Turn 190 or Turn 200 range.

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

I still want to slam athlete for his continued insistance that we've just been "lucky", but we'll leave that out for now. Give it time and we'll see what happens.

While we're going back and forth with teams that dislike us, what would you think of sending something like this to Nakor:

Dear Nakor and DMOC of Holy Rome,

Hey, we'd like to thank you again for your many attempts to chase us up for conversation, and apologize for being so aloof. All that I can say is that our focus was on other teams and other parts of the world, and your emails were a bit of a secondary concern for us. Now that we are back at peace again, we wanted to send you back something more concrete.

Let me be honest: we are not going to sign a Non-Aggression Pact with your team at this point. But I hope you won't take that as a sign of hostility; it's our team policy not to sign lots of NAPs with other teams so as to remain flexible. (At the moment, I think we only have one active NAP.) I'm sure that you've seen plenty of examples in this game already of teams that signed NAPs and then wish that they hadn't done so later on. We'd like to open things up a bit with your team, while still reserving the right for both of our teams to go our separate ways if either one of us finds it necessary.

You've mentioned settling arrangement for the center island a couple of times - we have a chariot doing a circuit of the region currently, scouting out the land for us. When that's finished, and we have a full view of the area, then we can get back to you on that issue. If you'd like, we could also talk about potentially signing Open Borders, with a no-scouting clause for units so that neither side would be able to sell map info around to other teams. I know that Nakor had mentioned a desire for OB several times before.

Anyway, just wanted to respond to your many attempts to thaw relations, and let you know that they are appreciated.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

I sent off the Kathlete message; we can discuss whether or not to send something along these lines to Nakor. Since we are planning for another period of peaceful building, I'd probably be in favor of building some bridges there, at least temporarily.

[Speaker]

A few screenshots from the turn that just flipped.


Bleh, really bad game mechanic. Yay, waste of 40 hammers.


Two-pop slaved a Theatre, to apply maximum overflow into the National Epic, which will get the Marble + Forge + Organized Religion bonus.


Great Artist from Music.

[Shoot the Moon]

What are the plans with the Great Artist?

[Sullla]

Little bit of a turn update:



Here's the event logger showing the failed Jewish missionary in Chikamauga (at 90% odds, argh) and more importantly that slaze has signed peace with Kathlete. We never got a response back from the last message to slaze either, so it appears to be a straight swapping of sides and/or backstab. Due to this fact, I sent off a short message to plako and Dantski:

Dear plako, Broker, and Dantski,

slaze signed peace with Kathlete this turn, which pretty much confirms that he is switching sides and going over to the Kathlete/Nakor/Whosit group. I would suggest that we stop including him in group emails.

If Dantski is able to provide updates on Nakor's research, we can swap our Espionage over to Kathlete and take over on research watch there. What do you think?

Sullla
The Killer Angels

Going back to the earlier picture, we had to cash in a second chop into Chikamauga to finish the theatre (Jowy had chopped 2/3 of a forest, which allowed us to get done so fast). So Chikamauga will finish theatre next turn, and so will the Wilderness (just visibile at the top of the screen), and Spotsylvania will get a theatre as well the following turn with a forest chop. So all of these cities should have their borders expanding very quickly, to help secure our new frontier.

Kathlete hasn't responded to our email NAP offer yet. They did stop pillaging though, so I expect that it was accepted. We'll see if the NAP extends beyond Turn 180 (Kathlete's offer) to Turn 190-200 (our offer). If it's just Turn 180, expect the plan to be Kathlete's army joining with slaze's forces to attack us on Turn 181, giving them ten turns to walk the Incan army around the circle. Hopefully that won't happen, guess we'll see...

That's a major reason why we're going for Engineering tech next (5t), which opens up three-road movement, pikes, and castles. Yes, castles - dirt cheap with stone, and creating nearly impregnable defenses against pre-Gunpowder units. Castles are pretty much brokenly powerful in Beyond the Sword, so with our many enemies and expectation of an attack in the future, we plan to build walls/castles on any vulnerable front. Should go a long way towards helping us stay safe if an attack would come.

We're also planning on building the Mausoleum in Chancellorsville once it finishes its grocer - that hopefully answers Shoot the Moon's question about what to do with the Great Artist, saving him for a Golden Age. We'll be getting a lot of Great People once the National Epic is up and running, so we should expect to have several Golden Ages. Mausoleum will help our civ a lot if we can get it. I'm guessing that it's not a high priority for any of the other teams, guess we'll see!


The GNP graph, which makes it clear that Nakor and ourselves are the biggest teching powers. Kathlete also looks pretty good, but keep in mind his big spike is a 100% deficit binge on Civil Service fueled by the 400 gold that Jowy gifted before dying. plako also has a pretty good research rate, however they've been saving gold for a while and now have 600 in the treasury, which makes them look weaker than normal. Always have to use some discretion when looking at this graph.

That's even more true now, considering how culture factors into the GNP number. Currently, Speaker and I are building lots of theatres, which will increase our GNP due to their culture. Of course, that doesn't increase our research rate, so you can see how the confusion comes in. (For the same reason, Creative civs always get slightly overvalued by the GNP chart, especially in the early game with their free culture.) Anyway, it's still good enough for a rough estimation of the other teams.

Grocers completing and the Forbidden Palace (6t) should get us to break-even at 50% science, and then banks after that will hopefully push us higher yet. Wait until we start getting some value out of the former Greek cities instead of just maintenance costs!