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[No Players] Where the Lurkers Take Their Holidays
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Congrats Mjmd. You played the last part of the game very well. Can't really tell about early game.
I bottled this up pretty badly. Sorry Ljub (although Ginger was quite vexed with you.) Don't think there was much of a chance regardless but I should have given it a better shot. Last turns destruction of one of Mjmd's fleets helped a bit. Was quite frustrated before that.
September 30th, 2024, 11:54
(This post was last modified: September 30th, 2024, 12:15 by ljubljana.)
 (September 30th, 2024, 11:22)civac2 Wrote: Sorry Ljub (although Ginger was quite vexed with you.) i don't think you owe me any kind of apology - thank you for playing out a game you did not sign up for with the dedication that you did! and um, as for ginger being vexed with me, i can imagine..... i am not looking forward to getting to that part of yall's thread. sorry if i caused you two undue stress or irritation.... and i definitely owe yall an apology for not getting aboard the dogpile train. for a while it was "don't want to betray my ally"-itis and then "fear of inevitable stab by long-term hostile ottoman superpower"-itis, but in the end i couldn't find a way to do it without immediately losing 3-5 cities to them, and didn't think my rifle/cav stacks could hurt them enough to justify it. i should have at least closed borders and stopped trading with them, obviously. unconscionable, and i deeply apologize. anyways, it's been a joy yall. exhausting, but a joy, and thank you for going through this with me  
I haven't read everything, but I'm going to do a quick nuke discussion here, instead of in PB81 sign up thread. I think people are definitely over rating them.
Some factors this game in particular. 1) I got all the late game things. I got cereal mills, mining inc (although I think creative in some games is also fine, but my resources weren't quite there), kremlin, AND a moved back a tech Cristo. In pb66 I started 5 ICBMs and had cereal mills and Kremlin. When I lost Kremlin I completed 0 of them. If one person gets all the late game stuff (except for SoL) you kind of expect them to be able to do more things. Plemo had mining inc and Cristo in PB66 and I think he produced 4 ICBMs? (my memory is a bit hazy but I think only 4 were used on me in any case). 2) On the subject of mining inc specifically I think part of why they were so good this game was the map. I haven't fully gone into it, but this looks like a pretty random base. ![[Image: n8yJGjU.png]](https://i.imgur.com/n8yJGjU.png) This is just mine and Gavs lands. 6 coppers, 5 irons, and 6 coal. I wasn't as heavy on the gold or silver like some of the starts, but there were quite a few of those too. Now I think one of those metals Gav might have popped, but still that is a lot of mining inc resources from just two empires. I did identify this as a key map component early on. I saved my engineer for a long time (T173 to T218) instead of launching a 3rd GA MUCH sooner specifically because of this. It also definitely hurt my tech rate. I think for larger maps expected to go to the late game map makings should account for that a bit in amount corp resources. For PB66 my territory would have been crap for mining inc, but Plemo had like 5 coppers just in his starting territory. 3) DON'T STACK YOUR UNITS!!! Even with my overabundance of ICBMs (in my opinion) I never nuked Naufs stacks. He stopped me razing two of SD cities. I could have prevented, but I didn't because of how absurdly expensive they are. IF SD had just split his stack into 5 I probably never would have invaded. The only reason I was thinking of doing is because when he had 3 stacks his main stack was 2 tiles (IE ICBM in middle range) of our main border city which also had a medium size stack. Cairo in PB59 got nuked quite badly because he stacked his units. I don't think putting your stacks into 6 separate groups is that burdensome. Now at sea it is more burdensome. I lived through this even more in PB66. However, you already have to do this in naval combat to a large degree because of battleship collateral. Even before nukes were online I dared not put any stacks on the front line that could engage with more than 3 ships. From experience you actually worry the most about where you put your transports and carriers. The other part of my SD invasion success is I got 4 transports (assuming fully loaded) of Civacs tanks. But transports and carriers can lag behind so that isn't too hard either. 4) I think this brings up the main argument for why have nukes in the game. Even with the map powered corps and huge tech lead I had almost no shot of invading SD if he just had 5-6 stacks of units not also right by a border city. I mentioned in my thread, but if you want an actual wincon then sure nukes are bad. But most of us get tired of these games long before then. I could have had 10 more turns of peace with Ljub but I was just kind of done already. Nukes provide an avenue to an end. Although they can also lead to come backs and stalemate. Even though Plemo out produced me on nukes in PB66 I think I used mine better. He razed cities, but I captured territory and destroyed stacks. 5) This brings up Scooters point from PB81. Are they fun? I don't particularly like sitting around with nothing happening and no hope of anything happening, so from that perspective to me yes. While my empire was nuked to obsolescence in PB66 I still had fun playing with them even if there was also pain. (I mean there is always pain in civ4 from losing stuff, so I don't think this is just nukes, its something you have to learn to deal with playing civ4 multiplayer in general). It adds complexity to the late game, which to me is fun.
2: I still think corp HQs should be nerfed to 2g/city; they are still a huge benefit but not instant-spread to every city. I do agree with your sentiment that total metals and crops should be somewhat balanced, but this is harder than it looks.
5: I think ICBMs in particular can be un-fun, especially since they can kill great people.
is anyone still around with the ability to make changes to the mod? i like tarkeel's 2g/city change (frankly, mining inc seemed very worthwhile for my zulus even while i was making ZERO gold/turn from it, though admittedly that was with ikhandas and a similar number of resources to what mjmd had), and also think that modding nukes to not kill great people or national wonders would be a very simple change that would remove much of what made facing them uniquely frustrating in this game...
I think the problem from the lurker perspective was never the fact, that nukes were on.
I think the primary point was the unlimited range of the ICBM. You can more or less play around on tactical nukes. Try to hit them first (own nukes and/or commandos) or retreat 5 tiles and hit in the next turn, when the enemy is outside his own culture). But against ICBM is this not really possible. Not stacking your units is not a valid counterplay. - And from my position, the possible problem from the ICBM is not the unit damage, but the city damage. Nukes still destroy improvements and buildings, or ? A lucky ICBM can damage the cultural effort for one city (a few cathedral destroyed and most towns ruined), even if conventional forces (or tactical nukes) have no way to reach this city. And bomb shelters only help with the buildings, not the improvements. @ljubljana Short answer yes. Long answer maybe, Corp HQ and ICBM should be both only a XML change, which is simple. Other things need Python or even DLL changes, which is a lot more complicated. Even if Python is more or less understanding the code from others.
yeah, re culture: one or two ICBMs by civac at mjmd's capital would have really changed the outlook of the lategame. especially since i had a commando morale paratrooper from the fascism GG sitting around ready to jump over and raze it if the defenders were ever cleared out
 i kept vaguely trying to signal this to civac but not sure if the message ever got through in a way that was comprehensible.... but to be fair, i'm also not sure how they were going to build an ICBM other than exhaustively slowly over 15 turns in a 100 hammer city  nuking them out of their fourth GA really killed the last plausible avenues for stopping the culture try. worst-case they could have at least flipped to slavery for 5t and whipped a few ICBMs out, but the first-mover advantage mjmd had, combined with the ability to kill great people, meant that their initial ICBM wave could stop civac from ever being able to produce any ICBMs at all..... from a position of tech parity between the two of them, that seemed like too much of a swing to me (though admittedly many of the relevant circumstances were perhaps particular to this game)
oh i had somewhere around 25 too - as zephyrion was pumping endless waves of commando cavs the whole game, so too was aksum pumping endless commando rifles (and then infantry, and then paratroopers).... too bad we didn't get the chance to smash our stacks into one another and see which one wins
 this game has to take the record for "most commandos massed without ever accomplishing anything".... i think out of all of ours and superdeath's nearly 100 total commandos, the only one to actually take a city was.... mjmd's one commando tank..... it is perhaps questionable from a balance standpoint that it seems to be ubiquitously considered correct to get a commando factory online with your first GGs as quickly as possible if playing either AGG or CHA... and that players without one of these traits have essentially zero ability to do this in a realistic timeframe..... this game overall has led me to concur with ginger's evaluation (as expressed through unit names) that CHA in particular is one of, if not the best CtH trait |
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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
