[PLAYER THREAD] Brian's Awesome Thread of Awesomeness

[shallow_thought]

it's really fecked up my worker schedule having had both workers being deleted in the last turn or two. 

The Illians are really annoying to play against simply because of Samhain and the Deepening later on in the tree.

Urgh. I'd noticed the lost scout but not the workers. That's going to really hurt; I guess knowing it was coming Bing could protect his, and I don't know if anyone else was hit as hard.

Yeah, I try to avoid playing against the Illians in SP; the list of annoyances (vanilla World Spell, anything you conquer from them being useless, tiles turning to ice at random all the way to the end of the game) is just too much.

[Brian Shanahan]

it's really fecked up my worker schedule having had both workers being deleted in the last turn or two. 

The Illians are really annoying to play against simply because of Samhain and the Deepening later on in the tree.

Urgh. I'd noticed the lost scout but not the workers. That's going to really hurt; I guess knowing it was coming Bing could protect his, and I don't know if anyone else was hit as hard.

Yeah, I try to avoid playing against the Illians in SP; the list of annoyances (vanilla World Spell, anything you conquer from them being useless, tiles turning to ice at random all the way to the end of the game) is just too much.

I lost my capital to the barbs. Seriously considering just vacating my other city and letting them have it.

[Jabah]

any chance of getting it back (or a pretty picture so we could share your despair...)

[shallow_thought]

I saw the save earlier but chose to say nothing .

You will notice the health left on the barb unit that actually did the capture.



A few turns ago, before Q's power spike made it pointless to look at the graph, we had just as much mililtary as anyone else in the world. I suspect that we've suffered from both being already under barb pressure before the Illians started playing silly beggars, being very unlucky with the frostling spawns and being unlucky with the actual combat rolls.

It will be interesting to see if Bing had actually considered the potential impact of Samhain on a game where warriors can't use bronze (I cannot be certain, but assume that it would have been a priority if available from the start), or whether this is just a side-effect of a determined push on The White Hand.

Brian, feel free to blame my dedlurking in your biography. The correlation is there.

[Jabah]

The killer wolf rider was already C3, it should be able to promote again

[Brian Shanahan]

any chance of getting it back (or a pretty picture so we could share your despair...)

As shallow_thought just showed, with a frostling archer, a regular gobbo and an uber-frostling wolf rider, I've little to no chance. With the barb pressure that Mt. Erebus is under, it's about a six turn build for a warrior, and I'm well away from stuff like slavery that would improve that build process.

Probably the only thing I could have done differently was to make sure to connect the horses immediately and start pumping them out. But to go that way I'd have had to anticipate that Bing was going to build Samhain (something I never do, as it's as bad for the Illians as everybody else) and really restrict my growth otherwise.

[Brian Shanahan]

Turn played, I expect to be out of the game next turn.

I pulled the two warriors out of the city and well the barbs can have it. I just let it percolate in the back of my mind and in the end I said that there was no point delaying the inevitable.

Post-mortem:

Where I went wrong, not anticipating that Bing would, essentially, beeline Samhain. If I had I would have made sure to hook up the horses and produce a few. Another thing that I could have done was pull my world-spell as soon as I realised that Samhain had been triggered, which would have given me some space to build up a few more units and actually be ready to take the hit when it came (realising that I could have done that c. 4 turns ago is really what persuaded me to let go of the game).

In terms of general play I don't think I was doing too badly. Apart from the barbs hitting me so hard I was just about ready to rex hard, get out another four or so cities and place myself well for the mid game.

Recommendation:
Ban Samhain, with it the Illians can simply wreck a player's game (as likely their own as anybody else's), and it's too random. The Deepening can be fair annoying, but that happens at the end of the mid-game and you can work towards it in a number of ways, but Samhain (especially with the extra techs we had to start) is just too early to prepare for.

[shallow_thought]

Fair enough. I drafted a few posts yesterday thinking through options but in the end I had no enthusiam for any of them.

Yeah, with hindsight triggering Sanctuary as soon as Samhain hit was the only option (but a poor one at that). In an SP game you can prioritise survival now, but in MP you have to take some risks; if you're too cautious you're guaranteeing failure later. But I think the workers went on the very first turn, and would not have been saved?

I feel a chunk of this was pure bad luck - I think we still have a warrior hanging around unmolested in Bing's land who has seen no post-Samhain action.

[Brian Shanahan]

Fair enough. I drafted a few posts yesterday thinking through options but in the end I had no enthusiam for any of them.

Yeah, with hindsight triggering Sanctuary as soon as Samhain hit was the only option (but a poor one at that). In an SP game you can prioritise survival now, but in MP you have to take some risks; if you're too cautious you're guaranteeing failure later. But I think the workers went on the very first turn, and would not have been saved?

I feel a chunk of this was pure bad luck - I think we still have a warrior hanging around unmolested in Bing's land who has seen no post-Samhain action.

Quite possibly not if I had decided to play on. I landed the warrior between two frostling warriors trying to get him back home, which was the final reason why I decided to bow out.