RBP2 Lurker Discussion Thread - No Players!

[sunrise089]

I'd say that as of now, Spullla is now the odds-on favourite to win this thing once again

I'm not sure when they stopped being the odds-on favorite

This whole CoW campaign was an unmitigated disaster throughout, and all of the involved civs should really try to learn from the solid string of mistakes we've witnessed. For all the talk of the Ottoman diplo efforts, which were very good at a strategic level, the tactical coordination has been at best a D- throughout the coalition.

I don't know how much detail regoarrarr or Dreylin posted about our 3-way attack on Exploit in RBP1, but that was an example of how to do a mediocre job planning a war. Let me explain:

Good way to plan a war: Apolyton demogame backstab
*Strategic planning 50 turns out
*Tactical planning 5-10 turns out
*100% of available units in-theater by the DoW turn
*Complex 'hit-from-3-directions' battleplan
*~10 players on Teamspeak during the attack discussion combat order and unit promotions

Mediocre way to plan a war: Indian-Spanish-Sumerian attack on Inca in RBP1
*Strategic planning 10 turns out
*Tactical planning 2-3 turns out
*90% of available units in-theater by the DoW turn (units were slaved to be available for the T191 invasion turn but not every build in every city that could have been hurried was hurried)
*Simple 'all-in' battleplan with mild misdirection
*Most days all three participants logged on to GChat simultaneously to discuss the current turns' plans

The cool thing however is that due to the law of diminishing returns we had almost the same level of effectiveness in both instances. I'm sure we missed a few opportunities, and our opponent certain cooperated, but the main goals of attacking when and where we wanted to with some tactical surprise and no obvious moves was accomplished. I don't bring this up to brag, but rather to point out that with a half dozen emails sent prior to the war, the dedication to actually follow the plan the emails spelled out, and maybe an hour per day during the war we could approach the level of success of the hundreds of man-hours that went into the RB-Imperio war.

Now lets look at the CoW:

Poor way to plan a war: CoW attack on India
*No coherent strategic plan - The composition of forces and the DoW turns changed almost through the first DoW.
*No discernible tactical coordination whatsoever. Units arrived across a ~10t window, moved seemingly at random, stacks didn't merge, and defensive terrain wasn't utilized.
*Fewer than 50% of units in-theater at the initial DoW.
*2/3 of the total committed units lost their element of surprise by allowing Indian units to spot them because of either open borders or not understanding visibility rules (!)
*Little coordination amongst participants, so no ability to catch moves

Overall I can forgive lots of little mistakes - after all many people are new to MP civ. But not taking the time to actually discuss the attack plans in detail with each other and allow your allies to help point out potential mistakes and oversights is pretty inexcusable IMHO.