Gaspar & Noble make their triumphant? return; mostly just get asked about "The List"

[Gaspar]

TOP 5 THINGS I'M RECONSIDERING DOING IN THIS GAME

1. Rushing to Cataphracts
2. Researching Guilds at the Fastest Speed Possible
3. Attacking People with Cataphracts as Fast as Possible
4. Building Stables
5. Building Cataphracts

I'm going to post in general for a replacement for you.

[Miguelito]

Dug up the part that I remembered...

So, have you found mongolia already? Because it looks like zulu in your screenshots...

Screw it, we're chariot rushing zulu

Quite frankly I'm a little amazed Krill didn't go with: "Typical American, doesn't know the difference between Zulu and Mongolia"

Who can tell all them South Americans apart, anyway?

... which I found hilarious at the time.
Had forgotten about Washington on (multiple!) dinosaurs though, so good thing to go back to it.

[Brian Shanahan]

TOP 5 THINGS I'M RECONSIDERING DOING IN THIS GAME

1. Rushing to Cataphracts
2. Researching Guilds at the Fastest Speed Possible
3. Attacking People with Cataphracts as Fast as Possible
4. Building Stables
5. Building Cataphracts

I'm going to post in general for a replacement for you.

Ooh, ooh, ooh! Pick me! PICK ME!!!

I'm useless but I make up for it by being utterly lazy.

[Fintourist]

TOP 5 SALTIEST MOMENTS

Hey, this is a good one, I have a lot of salt! 

1. Great artist kingmaking: GermanJoey made an against-the-rules Great Artist gift to TBS so that he would get cultural victory before we reach space in PB18. TBS was a gentleman, we played it out and achieved victory condition at the same time, but this whole thing and the aftermath, for a long time, ruined one of the most epic RB games for me
   
2. The 99.99989 %. Not sure if this counts as salt as this is about RNG and not about another player. But I just have to bring this up, because I have never felt as physically ill as during the Pitboss 49. If I simplify slightly, these were the odds for me to eliminate Elkad in PB49, but instead one single spear single-handedly deleted my whole military. I actually do believe that this is the most ridiculous RNG sequence in RB history. (Please tell me if something beats this)
   
3. Monkey shit episode: We took or razed a city from suttree in PB13, which eventually led to him throwing all his units against us and basically gifting his cities to mackoti. Coupled with probably the worst start (vs competition) that I've had in my games here this did lead to a pretty painful first Pitboss for me an OH.. Btw, I think this might be partially related to a phenomenon that I think we are witnessing at times in our games. It is more respectable and acceptable to lose against a highly-rated opponent (mackoti) vs. some random newbies (me and OH)
   
4. Toku roleplay: WilliamLP decided in Pitboss 38 that his fun personal goal in this 20+ player game could be trying to prevent his neighbor (us) from winning. At least it was already turn 40.. Ugh.
   
5. Unbeatable frigates: In my first PBEM there was a phase where I had a stack of Frigates staring at a stack of Frigates from Sareln. During his turns he sometimes did not take a fight, but I think two or three times he took a single 30+ % fight and won every time. I mean, this can happen naturally and did not really matter as the game was almost already won.. But I already prefer Pitboss over PBEM just that I do not have to speculate about this kind of stuff (or be tempted to change something next time when I lose a whole army to a single unit)
   

Looking at the above list.. Why do we actually play these games.. 

[Fintourist]

Fintourist!  I see you in the lurker thread!  Come hither and comment.

Whoops, I did not notice this earlier, but here I am! I've been spamming some random comments in the lurker thread for your future entertainment though..

[NobleHelium]

[*]The 99.99989 %. Not sure if this counts as salt as this is about RNG and not about another player. But I just have to bring this up, because I have never felt as physically ill as during the Pitboss 49. If I simplify slightly, these were the odds for me to eliminate Elkad in PB49, but instead one single spear single-handedly deleted my whole military. I actually do believe that this is the most ridiculous RNG sequence in RB history. (Please tell me if something beats this)

This doesn't beat it, but I came across this again recently: https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid373408

I actually underestimated the odds, they're a little bigger because GP odds are calculated by distinct sources of GP points and not the actual amounts. It was closer to 1% or so. Shows how many games we've played on RB that such black swan events have occurred.

[Fintourist]

[*]The 99.99989 %. Not sure if this counts as salt as this is about RNG and not about another player. But I just have to bring this up, because I have never felt as physically ill as during the Pitboss 49. If I simplify slightly, these were the odds for me to eliminate Elkad in PB49, but instead one single spear single-handedly deleted my whole military. I actually do believe that this is the most ridiculous RNG sequence in RB history. (Please tell me if something beats this)

[*]
This doesn't beat it, but I came across this again recently: https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid373408

I actually underestimated the odds, they're a little bigger because GP odds are calculated by distinct sources of GP points and not the actual amounts.  It was closer to 1% or so.  Shows how many games we've played on RB that such black swan events have occurred.

I had forgotten this! OH probably has not.. Definitely a good one 

[NobleHelium]

Played turns 82-85.

We settled Putrid Cloister in the north.  We are in fact going to fight SD over the fish.  His city turned out to be Macau and not Tianjin which was very confusing to me because Macau is a much older city but he still hasn't gotten a border pop.  There is a monument in the city though.



We are first to Currency, which means we can check other people's gold in diplomacy.



Bob is burning gold, so we can't see his GPT.  More on him next report, perhaps.  Anyway...it appears we are teching at more than twice the speed of everyone else. I am starting to think we have more cottage turns worked than everyone else combined.  We have one village, two hamlets, two cottages about to become hamlets, and a new cottage.  We barely saw any cottages with our scout when we were cutting a path westward, but I can't say we scouted all that much land with him before he met his end.  Partially because the map does not have much land to begin with.



Other than that we finished a few forges and are going to build some more units as we get closer to our treaty expiration with Serdoa. His power has been mostly flat recently and ours is creeping up to his level. He is in some sort of standoff with Rusten while remaining at war - perhaps he is waiting for a settler to settle some sort of contested city before he's willing to contemplate peace. Or perhaps he has already settled it (there was that turn when he settled two cities at once, including his nearby island city) but Rusten isn't willing to give him peace in return.



SD also briefly declared war on Lewwyn and killed a couple units, then they signed a treaty. One of the units killed was Lewwyn's scout, but SD had to have killed something else as well given the war weariness value.

[NobleHelium]

By the way pin, the map is much better than the dumpster fires made by GKC and especially SD recently. The biggest flaw is of course the overall size. After that you were too ambitious in trying to have a balanced map without mirroring it (I partially blame Gaspar for this because he said balanced but not mirrored whereas I said that I would be happy to have a mirrored map if it meant a balanced one). And it would've been much better to make a toroidal map where you wouldn't have people in the middle of the continent with double the number of neighbors as people on the side of the continent.

[Brian Shanahan]

I am very surprised at the lack of entertainment in this thread lately.

I can get my own bread, now I demand my circus!