41 Vice: Commodicator/Pindore

[pindicator]

Is it called then? I don't see anything in the tech thread yet. But if Gav thought that our position was strong then no wonder he didn't try to join in against Rusten. Too bad he's wrong; our econ was lagging Rusten and our power was eclipsed. We are spent militarily, there's literally nothing left to stop Rusten from landing on Superdead Island now that he's so quickly replaced the frigates we killed. And even if we were at parity at the sea it would be hard to prevent landings on so widespread of a island.

[pindicator]

Pindicator's (Premature?) Post Mortem


That was a fun game!  Commodore and I have been talking about the game off and on throughout the day, celebrating the parts done right, asking ourselves what we could have done better (or at least done differently).  And while I hope he's going to give us one more Commodoresque big recap posts full of witty nicknames and meme-like pictures, I do have a few thoughts about the key moments of the game that I'd like to get down before it officially ends and I get bogged down in reading all the threads.  


DUAL ISLAND -  Superdeath dual to the death super island death fest!  That was a fun way to start the game as Mali, lucky for us and unlucky for poor SD over there.  I was worried that the war was taking too long, that we were digging too deep an economic hole, but on the whole I think Commodore had the right idea: spam him with skirmishers until he's dead.

NOT ENOUGH SCOUTING - I think more map knowledge would have really changed how we played the middle turns of this game.  If we had realized just where Rusten was and where his reach lay it's really likely that we would not have stretched up north to El Pindore Norte and instead had gone for Umr.  

GUILDS - This was the big turning point of the game in my mind.  We were ahead of Rusten, arguably, at this point:  better MFG, our civ coming off of the golden age, and probably the brief moment where we were ahead in tech.  Being the first to workshops was huge, but what we decided to do with Guilds unfortunately did not pay off like we were hoping.  We figured we had to attack DZ, but Gav beat us to the punch, and then we got concerned about Gav being a potential large threat after taking all the wonders of DZ, so we take Pindore Norte which ended up being a huge drain on the economy and taking forever to get built up; it may have also been the final nail in poor BGN's hope coffin, and with all his dreams buried he set off on his own version of the 4th Crusade and pretty much sealed the game for Rusten.  Not that we didn't help ourselves here either: by letting Rusten get a foothold in on southern DZ-land we thought it would entice Gav to join in against the big threat of the game.  Instead it seems Gav thought we were the threat?  Which leads me to the next one...

RELYING ON OTHERS TO READ THE META GAME CORRECTLY - If you want it done right you've got to do it yourself!  But really Rusten should have been punished for going about and playing this like a single player game.  Everyone could have ganged up on him at some point, but nobody ever seemed willing to.  We hoped to lead that charge ourselves at the end, but when we raised that banner up high nobody came a-calling.  It was, in hindsight, a big mistake of ours to expect people to behave in a certain way.  People won't ever behave predictably, even when you think they aren't acting in their own best interest: there could be additional information you're missing, there could be information they're missing, or they could just be making mistakes.  It's too much a hope of everything lining up correctly to put your faith in that.  Maybe at high levels of play with people you really know well, but even the one player we thought we knew well enough to predict didn't end up doing much at all for attacking.

SO WHAT SHOULD WE HAVE DONE INSTEAD OF ATTACK DZ? - I think if I were to go back I would have rather we put all those hammers we sunk into knights into developing the economy.  For all the galleons and knights we built we only ended up snagging 4 mediocre cities far-flung from our core and costing more than their share in coin for maintenance.  If we stay closer to home and consolidated, maybe grab Umr and try to keep Rusten out of the area (with that improved scouting I spoke about), maybe we can position ourselves to be more competitive in the late-game economy and have more of a chance down the line.

ATTACKING RUSTEN - I think we made the right call.  By this point in the game his economy was flying, ours was faltering, and the longer we waited the farther away he would have been.  We really needed other people to join in; they didn't.  It was still the best chance.

NAMING THINGS - I don't think there's any doubt that RealmsBeyond's most natural storyteller is Mr. 'Dore.  The natural names that came from our exploits is something that Civ 6's Feature Names wishes it could be:  places like Superdead Island, El Pindore Norte, and the Barbaries helped give the game a bit of life and energy that helped make planning a little more fun.

GREAT PEOPLE - Commodore and I disagree here but I think Literature came way, way, way too late.  Golden ages are the best thing you can do with a large empire and we wanted to have as many of them as possible.  Instead we got ... 8 turns.  We spent 4 scientists on bulbs, which were short-term gains that needed to pay off in the short term.  The astronomy one led to the ill-faited attack on Pindore Norte; and the Chemistry one was out of necessity.  Rusten had already shown frigates and probably would have wrecked havoc on us earlier if we didn't have them.  But all those great people needed to have a plan on how to generate so many of them, and unfortunately we did not have that well enough in place.  So on turn 200 at the end we're still waiting on our second golden age; this in turn delayed switching into the uber powerful Mercantilism and delayed the push on to Rep.  Not the first game where I wished I had better great people production.

CASTLES ARE COOL - Build them everywhere with Stone and PRO.  A pity that Krill realized this and killed the PRO bonus, but that's probably for the best.  They are still probably worth building with stone: 75h for a free trade route is still Cothon levels of decent.  That's what kept our over-stretched, under-courthoused economy afloat.

NEXT GAME! - I'm pretty excited about playing civ again.  Thank you Commodore for helping bring that back, and thank you all for a fun game!

[superdeath]

You gonna start up the next pitboss pind?
/cracks knuckles.


I still wish we could have worked something out peacefully.. but

[darrelljs]

One or more players has not conceded, so the game will continue.

Darrell

[Commodore]

Darn. Might want to summarize that consensus to Rusten, let him know he can play his turn.

I'm pretty sure Cairo is to blame. He's One More Tech Away from actually for real doing something this time.

[pindicator]

Whomever the holdout is will concede within 20 turns. Maybe even 10 if Rusten really puts the hammer to us.

[pindicator]

I can't remember last time I played past turn 200. We're on 202 now. And this is the best picture I could find to show why the game is really over



Do people not see this? Oh yeah, and he leads all the demos too.


Our military is paper thin now. On Superdead island we have less units than the units of Rusten's we can see on Silver island. We actually have a few more frigates in the area, but I stupidly moved them out of position -- remember to move ALL your scouting units first kids -- and now if he wants to he can move his death fleet in from by Gavagai to go straight after Dallas. It's still a ballsy move by his part, but he should feel emboldened with that power graph.



I've got everything producing boats, because in 3 turns we'll get our GA and Nationalism.

[Commodore]

Eh, unless those six-move galleons have a half dozen incredible super-units, Dallas is okay this turn.

[Krill]

Looks like everyone has weighed in. We done dun?

Plenty of time for postgame analysis, but I sure hope everyone else can see it's over. Gavagai's peace treaty gives Rusten ten solid turns of beating us up with his new tech; it was bad enough before but with grenadiers and ships of the line we're going to be dead in double time. Police State is a huge deal; I wish it showed up in the demos. Gavagai was the only one who came within a shout of our production; Cairo is going to keep on being One More Tech away from the right stuff (he's near rifles, poor man, but protective grenadiers don't care). Appreciate Naufragar scrapping away, but he's not going anywhere without frigates.

Krill, it feels like grenadiers and cannon are a strictly better path than rifles, any comment?

The line I should have held most of all? Requesting 120-140 tiles per player max. Ridiculous numbers of cities are ridiculous.

To answer this post actually requires going over a few different points.

I think the best starting point is the number of cities and number of tiles bit.

This was a Standard size map with low sea level. If I had altered it to a high sea level, then there would be around 1200 tiles total: 150 tiles per player. A Small size map with low sea level gives around 800 tiles per player, of 100 per player. Given that every single city is going to be coastal on either of these maps, that's still going to give proportionally more cities than some of the higher player number games will give because the land tiles per city number is going to be lower.

But I don't think that this is a fair point. I don't agree that it's the number of cities to manage that's the problem. It's how to defend that number of cities when we reach galleons and frigates, because every single turn requires constant and perfect scouting or it's possible to make a game losing decision.

This then feeds into the "problem" of the tech path, pushing up to Mil Sci and Steel, because these are the techs needed to defend those cities. The bulb path through Astro, the push to Frigates all feeds into that tech path being a "One Right Choice". Rifling doesn't get a look in but Nationalism and drafting do help. The changes to Privateers in 2.0.9.2 do change this calculus slightly but I'd say they don't make do everything.

You know what I want to test? You know what I think will make this a hell of a lot easier to play, and far less stressful?

Make ocean tiles cost 2 or even 3 movement points and play around with the mobility promotion, and base movement on ships. Look at putting 2 sentry promotions onto privateers to have better vision, if that is necessary. Solve the problem of requiring perfect vigilance, and warfare in these times becomes manageable.

This game came to a head at knights and galleons. This is about right IMO for the number of players in this game, on an ancient era start. Given the lack of remaining turns, techs that gave per turn bonuses like PP and Rep Parts were never going to pay back the cost. In other games this might not be the case: A 12 or 15 player game may go onto Inf, and another PB18 game can go all the way to space and culture and a real domination game. Given the mod has to also work for these game settings I don't think it's an unreasonable position to be in.

[Hitru]

GG Comm and Pindi! You played really strong game. Those 6 movers had 6 units in them, but we probably would have landed later with all units. If we would not had city visibility in Nauf and saw your galleons coming this might have been a very different game.

Is there any specific reason why you delayed Banking (and Nat in lesser extent) for so long? Looking at the size on your empire earlier earlier GA with change to merc looks like a strong play.