[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

Yeah, hypothetical AI_Ginger would make this a mop-up laugher for us. It's not necessarily easy to destroy a peer strength AI with a large empire in this game, but it's way, way easier than with a human player. Some combination of our other three major rivals would probably be compelled to pile in to prevent us from casually and inexpensively chewing our way through AI-controlled Ottoman lands and becoming unstoppable.

I am beyond curious to learn what the heck Ginger did, and why. What a whacky thing this has become.

[ljubljana]

rules question: i assume that ginger declared war on me at the start of this turn from their comment in the tech thread, but i have not received a PM and they haven't ended turn.... i'm not supposed to log in until they do end turn, right? that's what i've been doing

rules question 2: the current order during the turn so far is this



if i wait until ginger ends turn before playing, what would be the turn order in a zulus + ginger + greenline war? unfortunately it matters a LOT, because ginger will probably want to gift cities back to greenline after taking them from us so their attackers will be safe behind sumerian culture, which they can only do if the gift can be accepted before we get to move...

if they moved some units, then quit to desktop after getting bad rolls, and still have attacks to do in the rest of their turn, i'm really not sure what i think the order should be...

[xist10]

1) IMO bad form from Ginger, no war declaration per PM.
2) Assuming 1 is true, then Bad form from ginger. War turn should be played in one setting. Or at least a PM that I need a bit more time.
3) Wait till Ginger ends it turn - ask for a pause (or the permission to play even without an end turn from Ginger) if this needs to much time.
4) Play order between different players on the same side is mostly foreign to me. I see the benefits, but I’m not sure if this negates the cost (always a 3+ way split). Regardless, look at 2). I think the easiest way would be to settle on Greenline-Ginger ? This should be changed with the play times.

[ljubljana]

thanks xist! i have been guilty of 2) too (i don't know how we're supposed to sim attacks during war turns without multiple logins....) and given the circumstances i don't really mind. i probably will ask for a turn order eventually though, it really impacts our decision-making if all this neutral culture could suddenly turn sumerian between turns

[ljubljana]

Turn 193 - Zululand

ok, well, ginger ended turn so time to rip the bandaid off.... although i gotta prepare yall, i am highly likely to take a break after i check out the position to come to grips with the loss of our realistic ability to contend in this game... and to decide whether our strategy from this point forward should be focused on fractional win percent maximizing or on punishing the stabbers



they lost 7 guys, including a few cavalry, which i guess are what got 80% odds on the formation cuirs, and killed, yeah, roughly 20 of our own cuirs, leaving us with 33. they won every single other battle, and almost rage-quit because they lost seven.... out of ~27 combats..... at 80% odds...... and, let me say it again (and i'm wondering if they are even talking about this in their thread?) two turns into a fish deal with our city attached, and, as williams keeps reminding me, only 13t into a peace deal that i interpreted as having a 30-turn duration as well. so, flat-out lying in diplo, and then threatening to derail the game when they lost.... a more or less expected number of combats in doing so? Readers Take Note 

damn, i mean.... i know we're in a good position that demands that they attack us soon, and i was the aggressor in a past war, but is there precedent for this kind of thing? i KNOW there isn't from ginger because i read all their damn threads before deciding to take them at their word... you spend six months investing hour-long turns into something, finally claw your way into contention, and then it all crumbles away because someone decides to torch their OUT OF game reputation in a fit of pique over god knows what? sheesh.... it's a good thing this is just my first civ4 game and not my first RB game overall or i'd be seriously tempted not to come back for another one

ok, rant over, and from here i'll be pragmatic. and if it does turn out that, in lurkers' estimation, i did do something either knowingly or unknowingly that makes this seem reasonable, of course i recant all of that and owe them a huge apology. i still like ginger as a person and have mad respect for their skill as a player, and in some ways it's kind of an honor to have pissed off the gamelong favorite enough to resort to this in order to win. 

but for now.... see yall in 24 hours 

[williams482]

It's absolutely baffling behavior, made more baffling that Civac was able to talk them out of ragequiting (so it presumably isn't affected by an external time crunch or other IRL situation that would push a cooler head away from continuing to play). I wonder what that discussion looked like...

And of course I'm even more baffled at what all the preceding discussions looked like, because the rage Ginger must have built up to not only execute this BRUTAL stab in the first place, but also get so wildly worked up over some pretty typical combat losses, seems totally disproportionate to what I'm seeing from our side of the isle. We attacked them three turns after a 10t NAP expired, so they're attacking us two turns after a 28t NAP started? Never mind the attempted peace treaty NAP, regarding which I am no longer prepared to give the benefit of the doubt as far as them understanding it.

I'm reminded of a not-dissimilar stab TheArchduke delivered to Ljubljana in PBEM20, mirrored down to the minutia of a very metagame hygiene conscious player throwing away that reputation over a city of extremely marginal value which absolutely did not improve their situation in that game either. I don't think Ljub did anything in that game that really merited the stab beyond some pretty standard early game fighting, which lines up pretty well with our take on the previous Ginger war. Surprising, effective, but neither oathbreaking (by standard community NAP conventions as I understand them) nor crippling to their chances of victory.

Is that relevant to this game? I can't imagine how it would be, but weird that it happened twice.

Anyway, I'm real ticked off at Ginger and leaning towards the "they cannot be allowed to profit by this" side of the scale, but I'm not the turnplayer who has to carry the emotional burden of executing that plan.

[ljubljana]

i will say in defense of TAD, who i love dearly: i looked over their thread in pretty close detail after that game ended, and as far as i can tell, revenge for the earlier war played no part in their choice of attack target, nor did any kind of personal vendetta. and i'm not suuure i really consider accepting the city without a DoF to have been a stab, in retrospect.... civ6 doesn't really have conventions for that kind of thing, and it was a risk i thought about when i sent a city gift and DoF deal separately, as is required by game mechanic for some reason. it also didn't have much strategic impact either, as the city was pretty much worthless at that point.... so while i'm not sure i would have done it, i don't really think it was outside the bounds of good behavior, given that they were already planning to attack anyways which is easy for me to say years after the fact, of course

and i will say in defense of ginger, who..... well, i'm mad at them, but i also still love them dearly (if you are on this forum and we've interacted this is probably true of you too, ESPECIALLY if we have spent a long period of time locked in mutually-destructive warfare with one another): this stab, while it might be outside the bounds of good behavior, is NOT strategically insignificant. the position dictates that they must attack us at some point if they're going to win, and i think this is the perfect time to do so, before we've consolidated any sumerian gains and while they can strip away quite a few cities with minimal investment and losses. mjmd benefits most from it i think, but i'm pretty sure ginger's odds go up as well and by a not-insignificant amount. admittedly they maybe should have waited exactly one more turn (at which point we would have been IN ANARCHY revolting OUT OF slavery ) but other than that it's quite well-executed and they did extract a really impressive hammer trade out of not waiting. if they're out here viewing civ on RB as an iterated game (as i do) and are willing to use their reputation as a resource if they can trade it for net positive expected wins (as i am not), it's not a bad time for them to cash out, especially if they don't expect to play many more games here going forward

as for this:



i actually do have a theory..... i.... a little bit suspect that my overeager, report-everything-you-can-think-of posting style (which is one-half sirian tribute and one-half analytical writing practice, and, okay, one-half well-documented obsessive tendencies as well) is easy to resent if you're not on the inside of it. there were shades of this in CMF's PBEM22 report; they are above actually going out of their way to hurt me in-game because of it of course, but they did correctly tunnel onto the psychological manipulation that it opened me up to, and if there WAS some satisfaction they got out of seeing Eager McBeaver blow their game up and faceplant as a result, i understand that and would not want to deny it to them. were the roles reversed and i had way more IRL time constraints than an opponent and nonetheless got THEM to waste all that extra time spiraling, i'd definitely feel that way, at least

but in IV, things may be a bit more serious than that.... i get the sense that the perception that the winners of these games tend to be whoever among the top-tier players a) gets the best neighbor luck and b) has the most free time they are willing to devote to obsessive microanalysis is pretty widespread. it would not surprise me to learn that part of ginger's reasoning comes from looking at my hundred-page thread, and at my multi-hour turns, and concluding that access to that kind of time and energy has equated to an enormous advantage in-game relative to my skill level, as measured in decision quality per unit time input. in that case, in order for these games to actually go to the best players and not to degenerate into a mutually-destructive-IRL contest of who is willing to sink the most time into them, maybe ginger has their own "metagame hygeine" reasons that make it imperative for me not to profit from that. not only would it not surprise me if that's their reasoning, i might even think that reasoning is pretty defensible and indeed correct  i wonder if it might be better both for the integrity of these games AND for that of their players if we played them under a chess timer.... or perhaps we should try running such a game to see if it leads to a better experience...

now... does that mean i should CHANGE my reporting style to avoid falling into such a case? maybe for winprob, but i probably don't have it in me and that's okay

PB74 spoilers:

this theme has been revisited quite a bit in discussions of plemo's extension requests while already being a perennial favorite, and, well, you can see how it's impacted their situation in THAT game... maybe that's not quite me in this case because, while i have been very lucky in this game so far and definitely have the most free time for civ, i'm also WAY less skilled than the others and have made a shitton of pretty serious mistakes and so that only adds up to contention. but i think that in some ways the situations have a similar vibe

(and speaking of sirian.... remind me what happened to new zululand at the end of the story? ah yes.... devoured by a dark-green menace)

and as for you, williams: well, maybe this goes without saying but i can't thank you enough for sticking around all this time <3 this would be a LOT harder without someone in my corner to ragepost with and it means a lot to me  and now that you have witnessed the intensity of wrath that i'm apparently capable of, maybe it can mean something for me to say that the intensity of my appreciation is comparable. you had better start prepping yourself to get invited to my wedding in 10 years (if i have one) (which is unlikely) (but if i do !!!)

[ljubljana]

well, heartbroken doesn't begin to describe it. but step one from here is pretty straightforward:



pillage the shit out of the roads surrounding magnus. with terrain here this rough, and with mjmd having closed their borders to ginger during their recent war  there is no way for them to attack the city from the fog, and approaching with a big stack opens them up to collateral. not to mention there were 4 cats in our stack 2S of magnus last turn, who are precious and who i think should be safe now, or as safe as one can be in such circumstances

step 2 is to try to save as many of the pillaging cuirs in the east as we can. but first we take the one kill that ginger has allowed us this turn



poor chariot will have to be deleted, so not a good hammer exchange for us. however, we do not know how many scouts they brought, under-building scouts is a common mistake (one i have made myself in all my wars this game...) and in theory each kill of this form is one step closer to the point where they will have to start either wastefully scouting with cuirs or not scouting at all. and it should give us some insight into their deploy after yesterday's massacre as well



the stack S of the chariot is wounded guys, SW-W is healthy but only 12 strong. that's just 21 visible units so at least one major stack is missing still.... but it can't be further west of this, i think, as the leading stack was 1E of CS Rush last turn. but the big important thing that's missing is.... even one combat worker..... makes sense, i think they needed them to road in the SE, but this implies to me that they only brought the 3 i saw last turn for this operation, not really enough in the face of the kind of pillaging i intend to do from here



i did whip a decent number of cuirs.... not really enough to replace our losses, but enough to hit the mid-40s again i think. sadly we are really whipped down still, another reason why this is a very good attack timing by them



settled on this as a "good enough" place to regroup.... in range of magnus attackers, in range of work ethic survivors if ginger moves after greenline (just LOVE that stupid turn order shit is going to be hugely impactful in this war by the way.....), and maybe close enough to attack anyone who comes at no hill start too if we REALLY push it. those guys on the isolated plains farm were too far south to escape safely this turn, but i believe only the one cuir furthest to the north can hit them this turn and that guy doesn't get odds against the top defender (formation cuir)

finally, i asked everyone for copper/copper and war with ginger just for symbolic value  and.... i will swallow my pride and offer ginger white peace. i highly doubt they will take it but if they are as tilted as they purport to be in the tech thread, i imagine we are supposed to be fishing for rage-induced (or panic-induced?) mistakes here. i am confident that 10 turns of peace would benefit us from here even if it allows them to get most or all of greenline's 5 remaining cities. that allows us to consolidate culturally, gives them a land border with mjmd instead of us, and would make it plausible that they could be the dogpile target instead of us (well, the 2v1 target with mjmd if we promise them a LONG NAP in asking for that 2v1....). and it would preserve 3-4 of our own cities that we otherwise definitely cannot hold (work ethic, NHS, longship spam, and then RFT could go either way i think) and give us a decent shot to at least end up with the capital.

the question is, do we throw in a city in the bargain (let's say work ethic, which has just 3 muskets and a pike inside behind 25% defenses).... it's a size-1 nothingburger so it doesn't hurt us much to lose it, and it helps the border defensibility issues for ginger if they conquer what's left of greenline, so it might improve the odds of them accepting, maybe even significantly. on the other hand, it would be giving ginger peace concessions after what just happened..... do i have it in me, emotionally, to do that after a turn like that one? actually i think i do; i still feel REAL BAD but not enough to throw away winprob over it, i think. but.... the metagame hygeine implications of doing so are pretty pernicious, not to mention the implications in terms of my stabbability in future games (go ahead guys! fuck me over as brutally as you can think of, i'll give you cities if you do it!)

sigh. of course i feel pretty miserable but i think there is still a path to winning from here, although it is MUCH much narrower than it was a turn ago. it basically runs like this:

1. get peace with ginger somehow, probably after either tricking them into a stackwipe around the magnus/RFT area or proving over the board that they can't make further progress with what they currently have. this must happen in the next 10t though, after that our blessedly-recently-renewed NAPs with mjmd and nauf will expire and they can pile on, at which point we're donezo

2. finish off sumeria

3. rebuild an economy as quickly as possible with merc/serfdom and, i don't know, some degree of regrowth that we don't immediately draft away, not that i really know how that's going to happen....

4, and this is the new step: try to get mjmd to join us in taking ginger's sumerian gains away

5. tech on more cities than everyone else

it's really implausible now.... in terms of win chances i rate mjmd as a huge favorite (possibly huge enough to justify concession), then ginger in second way behind them, and us and superdeath way behind ginger. but it's not inconceivable, which i guess means we're still bound by good behavior to play the moves that we think will make it most likely...

yeah, there is no way they are taking white peace without a concession i think, unless they are so tilted as to do really grossly irrational shit (possible! but i think not likely). i believe even taking peace WITH a city attached would be a pretty big blunder for them when they could easily roll us back another line of cities from here (albeit ones they would probably have to gift over to sumeria in so doing). but in their current state of, i guess, near-panic over pretty normal combat losses (although, tbh i was a little unfair to them earlier; since much of what they were doing last turn was cleaning up injured cuirs they probably DID get a pretty bad break from the dice, i think a good portion of the 20 combats they won were total walkovers), maybe that's a blunder they could trick themselves into making if they're pissed off enough. i'm throwing up in my mouth a little as i type this (i wish this was a joke) but they can have work ethic for peace. and we can stick to the moral high ground of having played what we think is the best move in expectation in THIS game even after receiving such a vicious stab

the silver medal in the stab-recipient olympics is awarded to those who burn down their whole games to successfully drag the betrayer down with them. the gold medal goes to those who win anyways..... things are looking pretty bleak but i think if we can get peace REALLY quickly, before our NAPs expire and the other sharks pile on, we still have a chance here. 24 hours ago this wasn't true, but this morning i think i'm juuuuust barely cold enough to offer generous peace terms to someone i'm beyond furious with to try to make that happen

and then, as a note to future stabbers who may see me as a loot bag: i am offering ginger a city for peace here, but that does not mean i am not now committed to screwing them over for the duration on this one..... instead, i think that accepting would be a serious mistake for them, so in offering i believe i am creating a chance for them to screw themselves over, more seriously than we are capable of achieving militarily and more generally, my plan is to go for the Ultimate Vengeance of actually winning for as long as i think it is possible.... but you had better believe that the instant i think it is NOT possible (and we are not that far away from such a point) my goal will shift to the Still Significant Vengeance of making sure ginger does not win so does this mean i can be beaten for loot? maybe.... but only if you can look yourself in the eye and state that you believe it's actually correct here for ginger to TAKE the loot

[ljubljana]

oh and check this out:



greenline is apparently not on board with using the turn order to better coordinate with ginger, and has moved first! this means that any greenline cities that ginger might retake on their turn will be exposed to recapture on our turn before they can gift them away, and we should have enough forces in the area to do so at either work ethic or NHS unless they really pile the full stack in

[El Grillo]

as a note to future stabbers who may see me as a loot bag

Consider me duly deterred Best of luck!