Finishing up with Holy Rome's thread:
- I think the start was worker -> warrior -> warrior -> work boat -> settler. This is one of the other disadvantages of a Hunting/scout civilization: because you don't have a warrior for defense, you really have to build two warriors before settler for safety. That slows down the opening compared to those who start with a warrior.
- Not sure why Dantski signed NAPs with both your team and mine, given that he had the #1 Power rating by a good margin and the second-best choking unique unit in the game. I'm not saying Dantski should have gone to war with either of us then, just that he could have been in a stronger position by keeping his options open. Your team's decision to rush to Krondor was really risky, and could have blown up in your face in "Byzantine" fashion had Dantski chosen to act more aggressively. It ended up working great, of course. (The biggest difference was that Krondor had copper connected ASAP, as compared to Paris needing to expand borders TWICE.)
![[Image: Civ4ScreenShot0015.jpg]](http://i875.photobucket.com/albums/ab317/darius_hre/Civ4ScreenShot0015.jpg)
- The whole play does feel reminiscent of "Pink Dot" from the Apolyton game!
- Losing Hinduism in a coin flip was a bad break, although your team did get Confucianism eventually to compensate. Why did you think that India was the one who landed the religion (?) You kept insisting we had the religion even after meeting us, for some reason.
![[Image: Realmsbeyondpitbosspreliminarymap.jpg]](http://i272.photobucket.com/albums/jj197/DMOC_album/Realmsbeyondpitbosspreliminarymap.jpg)
- This map is awesome. It's definitely an advantage knowing the map scripts, and being able to guess the geography from local map info.
- I'm a little surprised that your team had this deal worked out to provide axes to Korea, and then very quickly shifted gears and chose to support Rome instead. I would have thought that propping up someone else, so that you didn't have Aggressive Rome on your border, would have made more strategic sense. Of course, Whosit turned out to be a great ally, but I'm not sure you could have known that at the time. In a different world, he very easily could have been attacking you instead of India or Inca.
![[Image: Civ4ScreenShot0034.jpg]](http://i875.photobucket.com/albums/ab317/darius_hre/Civ4ScreenShot0034.jpg)
- Copper or no, these cities were rather exposed in the early game. It's a good thing Dantski had no intentions of attacking early! Props on having a strong road network, which helped mitigate the problem.
- Something I noticed in this thread and nearly every other one: discussion about building the Oracle. While it can be used to powerful effect, in a game like this it's almost a bit of a sucker's build unless you're Industrious or have marble. For the same cost in shields, you could have a settler AND a worker - I know what I would prefer most of the time... I was also amused at how Nakor/DMOC continued to discuss building the Oracle even after it had already been finished by Byzantium. Oopsie!
- Ummm, I agree? I think your team completely out played Dantski diplomatically in the early game. You were able to settle nearly all of the land near his capital, despite him being Imperialistic and having skirmishers. In return he gained... ummm, what did he gain again? Not much. Very well played on your end, certainly. (On the other end, luck really broke your way with Korea being more or less completely unable to settle in your direction because of Rome. Fortunate!)
![[Image: Civ4ScreenShot0929.jpg]](http://i272.photobucket.com/albums/jj197/DMOC_album/Civ4ScreenShot0929.jpg)
- With no disrespect intended, what was going on here?
DMOC was right to whip the city off that unimproved grassland, but for a non-barracks spear (???) Not building a granary after the monument was... not optimal. If these are the kinds of choices teams were making to attack India, it was definitely not worth it!
- About the way that the diplomacy went down with my team before attacking... Look, there's always some give and take with diplomacy. No one is going to be 100% truthful all the time. It's natural to write things like, "I'm not sure we have the units to assist you militarily" when of course you do, and simply don't want to get involved. Everyone should expect some degree of untruthfulness.
However, there's lying and then there's LYING. What you did with our team was enter into a long-running, calculated series of exchanges where you posed as our ally and friend, while secretly planning to attack us. All the while, you were stealing information from our team and feeding it to our enemies who were in the process of attacking. Not only that, you made agreements with our team that were false and you had no intention of keeping, such as telling us that you were initiating an NAP cool-down with Dantski and planned to attack in ten turns. As I said after reading athlete's thread, I don't want to get too preachy here, but this whole sequence was a slimy, *LOW* blow to my team. I'm sure that both Nakor and DMOC are great people in real life, but... I think it was pretty distasteful. We certainly never trusted Holy Rome at any point in time throughout the remainder of this game.
Nakor, why did you think that you could be friends with India again after the war was over? Think about it: if the roles were reversed, how would you have felt in our shoes? If your team had played the diplomacy differently, and just said something like, "we'd like to help but we can't get involved because of Aggressive Rome on our doorstep," we would have at least understood. It was the decision to falsely pose as an ally, while actually serving as a double agent, which made me so angry at the time. Nakor's cavalier attitude in the email exchanges, mentioning several times how much "fun" the whole thing was, doesn't exactly look good either. I suppose I'll just say that it's a lot more fun when you're the one doing the backstabbing than when you're taking the knife in the back.
I appreciated that DMOC wanted to play things more honestly. Thank you for that, DMOC.
- I do think it's a fascinating "what if" scenario considering how things would have been different if Holy Rome had accepted our proposal. Dantski would have been dead, and presumably we would have had an India/Holy Rome/Inca (?) coalition in place for a long time. I'm not sure if that would have been better or worse for Holy Rome than what actually did happen. Dantski would have been the big loser, Jowy the big winner (since he wouldn't have been hit by India immediately) in that alternate world.
- I simply do not understand why Dantski renewed his NAP with Holy Rome immediately after switching sides. That... doesn't make any sense. He created four enemies, and then passively sat back and did nothing with his large army when he could have crippled Holy Rome with ease. Seriously, huh? I guess Dantski felt guilty, but if he was motivated by that, then he shouldn't have switched sides at all...
- I was amused by the constant paranoia that India was planning to help Dantski attack Holy Rome. It's something that we barely talked about at all in our thread. Unlike so many of the other teams in this game, we saw no purpose in attack a team that wasn't our neighbor. What would we gain? Cities that were so far away they were crippling in maintenance costs and couldn't be defended? It's funny to me how Holy Rome kept veering back and forth between "India's going to attack", "now we're on good terms with India", "no, they're going to attack again!" The way that we bluffed a completely non-existent attack to get a (badly needed!) 100 gold from Holy Rome was one of my favorite moments of the whole game.
Of course, we DID attack eventually, so maybe you weren't completely paranoid either.
- Your team didn't post much on the war against Korea, which seemed to reflect the mindset that you weren't particularly interested in that conflict. I'm surprised that you didn't do more to assist Whosit, considering how close your teams were. I mean, you basically left him out there to die, when you probably could have stopped Korea with a serious effort. Not much of a "Mutual Protection Pact". Any regrets in retrospect?
- Interesting that you whipped the Mausoleum to completion. If you had not done so, we probably would have landed the wonder first. Good decision! Ironic that apparently you were building it mostly for the culture, heh.
- Congrats on landing the Taj Mahal again. The Mausoleum/Taj double Golden Age was probably your finest play of the game. Due to our war against Jowy, we had to make military-based tech choices which made it impossible for us to reach Liberalism first. And you did a great job of building/chopping/whipping the wonder before we could reach Nationalism to compete.
- There's barely any mention in your thread of all the gold Whosit was gifting you every turn until he died. He gave you about 1000 gold by my rough estimate. athlete later gave you close to double that. Sure did a lot to boost all those 100% research screenshots.
- We felt like your team waited way too long to declare war on Dantski. It seemed like you could have crushed his mostly-medieval army much earlier with a determined effort. That would have at least forced us into a tough decision: destroy the Ottomans or let Romali be destroyed. Pretty sure we would have chosen the former in that scenario! As it was, we were almost done with athlete by the time you actually declared war, which gave us enough time to march over and save his capital, then counter-attack.
- Well, that was amusing.![[Image: biggrin.gif]](http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Smilies/biggrin.gif)
- I didn't know that your team was suffering war weariness unhappiness from the Dantski war. Culture slider to 20%? Wow. No wonder Holy Rome's research fell off so badly at the end of the game... Wish you'd posted at least one screenshot from the ending period.
Anyway, it was a (mostly) fun game, and I wish that it hadn't ended the way it did. When your army was stuck inside Dantski's borders, with us being able to use all the roads due to Open Borders, all those units were sitting ducks. They had no chance, not your fault. And elsewhere, because you had so many island cities, and had neglected Astronomy tech until it was too late, we were able to push frigates/galleons and cripple half your empire. Speaker didn't think we could actually take any of your core island cities, but heck, we could completely shut down your economy - which we did. Combined with our Golden Age revolt into State Property/Universal Suffrage (to take place the next turn that we never reached), we would have had an overwhelming production and research edge. Just a matter of time until we reached the next generation of military tech and then started rolling through your cities.
You guys did a great job on the economic side of things, and Darius/Holy Rome worked great there for this map. Militarily, it didn't go so well. I really think you waited too long to make your move, as all of your allies were already dead by the time you got involved. Even if you had gotten slaze and plako to join you, it was already too late to beat us by Turn 225. Thanks for the memorable game!
- I think the start was worker -> warrior -> warrior -> work boat -> settler. This is one of the other disadvantages of a Hunting/scout civilization: because you don't have a warrior for defense, you really have to build two warriors before settler for safety. That slows down the opening compared to those who start with a warrior.
- Not sure why Dantski signed NAPs with both your team and mine, given that he had the #1 Power rating by a good margin and the second-best choking unique unit in the game. I'm not saying Dantski should have gone to war with either of us then, just that he could have been in a stronger position by keeping his options open. Your team's decision to rush to Krondor was really risky, and could have blown up in your face in "Byzantine" fashion had Dantski chosen to act more aggressively. It ended up working great, of course. (The biggest difference was that Krondor had copper connected ASAP, as compared to Paris needing to expand borders TWICE.)
- The whole play does feel reminiscent of "Pink Dot" from the Apolyton game!
- Losing Hinduism in a coin flip was a bad break, although your team did get Confucianism eventually to compensate. Why did you think that India was the one who landed the religion (?) You kept insisting we had the religion even after meeting us, for some reason.
- This map is awesome. It's definitely an advantage knowing the map scripts, and being able to guess the geography from local map info.
- I'm a little surprised that your team had this deal worked out to provide axes to Korea, and then very quickly shifted gears and chose to support Rome instead. I would have thought that propping up someone else, so that you didn't have Aggressive Rome on your border, would have made more strategic sense. Of course, Whosit turned out to be a great ally, but I'm not sure you could have known that at the time. In a different world, he very easily could have been attacking you instead of India or Inca.
- Copper or no, these cities were rather exposed in the early game. It's a good thing Dantski had no intentions of attacking early! Props on having a strong road network, which helped mitigate the problem.
- Something I noticed in this thread and nearly every other one: discussion about building the Oracle. While it can be used to powerful effect, in a game like this it's almost a bit of a sucker's build unless you're Industrious or have marble. For the same cost in shields, you could have a settler AND a worker - I know what I would prefer most of the time... I was also amused at how Nakor/DMOC continued to discuss building the Oracle even after it had already been finished by Byzantium. Oopsie!
Dantski to Holy Rome Wrote:Also you have no doubt noticed that one of your neighbours looks like they are about to face a horde of Praets, while the other hasn't settled towards you. Seems like settling towards Spulla again and letting you grab the lions share of the land would be a tad foolish on my part.
- Ummm, I agree? I think your team completely out played Dantski diplomatically in the early game. You were able to settle nearly all of the land near his capital, despite him being Imperialistic and having skirmishers. In return he gained... ummm, what did he gain again? Not much. Very well played on your end, certainly. (On the other end, luck really broke your way with Korea being more or less completely unable to settle in your direction because of Rome. Fortunate!)
- With no disrespect intended, what was going on here?
DMOC was right to whip the city off that unimproved grassland, but for a non-barracks spear (???) Not building a granary after the monument was... not optimal. If these are the kinds of choices teams were making to attack India, it was definitely not worth it!- About the way that the diplomacy went down with my team before attacking... Look, there's always some give and take with diplomacy. No one is going to be 100% truthful all the time. It's natural to write things like, "I'm not sure we have the units to assist you militarily" when of course you do, and simply don't want to get involved. Everyone should expect some degree of untruthfulness.
However, there's lying and then there's LYING. What you did with our team was enter into a long-running, calculated series of exchanges where you posed as our ally and friend, while secretly planning to attack us. All the while, you were stealing information from our team and feeding it to our enemies who were in the process of attacking. Not only that, you made agreements with our team that were false and you had no intention of keeping, such as telling us that you were initiating an NAP cool-down with Dantski and planned to attack in ten turns. As I said after reading athlete's thread, I don't want to get too preachy here, but this whole sequence was a slimy, *LOW* blow to my team. I'm sure that both Nakor and DMOC are great people in real life, but... I think it was pretty distasteful. We certainly never trusted Holy Rome at any point in time throughout the remainder of this game.
Nakor, why did you think that you could be friends with India again after the war was over? Think about it: if the roles were reversed, how would you have felt in our shoes? If your team had played the diplomacy differently, and just said something like, "we'd like to help but we can't get involved because of Aggressive Rome on our doorstep," we would have at least understood. It was the decision to falsely pose as an ally, while actually serving as a double agent, which made me so angry at the time. Nakor's cavalier attitude in the email exchanges, mentioning several times how much "fun" the whole thing was, doesn't exactly look good either. I suppose I'll just say that it's a lot more fun when you're the one doing the backstabbing than when you're taking the knife in the back.
I appreciated that DMOC wanted to play things more honestly. Thank you for that, DMOC.
- I do think it's a fascinating "what if" scenario considering how things would have been different if Holy Rome had accepted our proposal. Dantski would have been dead, and presumably we would have had an India/Holy Rome/Inca (?) coalition in place for a long time. I'm not sure if that would have been better or worse for Holy Rome than what actually did happen. Dantski would have been the big loser, Jowy the big winner (since he wouldn't have been hit by India immediately) in that alternate world.
- I simply do not understand why Dantski renewed his NAP with Holy Rome immediately after switching sides. That... doesn't make any sense. He created four enemies, and then passively sat back and did nothing with his large army when he could have crippled Holy Rome with ease. Seriously, huh?
I guess Dantski felt guilty, but if he was motivated by that, then he shouldn't have switched sides at all...Quote:I read the mail, and we definitely need to find some way to get as many praetorians as we can in the following turns. We will almost certainly be the victim of a Romali war on turn 135, with India joining in on 150. India could also give a lot of their forces to Romali too, which wouldn't surprise me at all.
- I was amused by the constant paranoia that India was planning to help Dantski attack Holy Rome.
It's something that we barely talked about at all in our thread. Unlike so many of the other teams in this game, we saw no purpose in attack a team that wasn't our neighbor. What would we gain? Cities that were so far away they were crippling in maintenance costs and couldn't be defended? It's funny to me how Holy Rome kept veering back and forth between "India's going to attack", "now we're on good terms with India", "no, they're going to attack again!" The way that we bluffed a completely non-existent attack to get a (badly needed!) 100 gold from Holy Rome was one of my favorite moments of the whole game.Of course, we DID attack eventually, so maybe you weren't completely paranoid either.
- Your team didn't post much on the war against Korea, which seemed to reflect the mindset that you weren't particularly interested in that conflict. I'm surprised that you didn't do more to assist Whosit, considering how close your teams were. I mean, you basically left him out there to die, when you probably could have stopped Korea with a serious effort. Not much of a "Mutual Protection Pact". Any regrets in retrospect?
- Interesting that you whipped the Mausoleum to completion. If you had not done so, we probably would have landed the wonder first. Good decision! Ironic that apparently you were building it mostly for the culture, heh.
- Congrats on landing the Taj Mahal again. The Mausoleum/Taj double Golden Age was probably your finest play of the game. Due to our war against Jowy, we had to make military-based tech choices which made it impossible for us to reach Liberalism first. And you did a great job of building/chopping/whipping the wonder before we could reach Nationalism to compete.
- There's barely any mention in your thread of all the gold Whosit was gifting you every turn until he died. He gave you about 1000 gold by my rough estimate. athlete later gave you close to double that. Sure did a lot to boost all those 100% research screenshots.
- We felt like your team waited way too long to declare war on Dantski. It seemed like you could have crushed his mostly-medieval army much earlier with a determined effort. That would have at least forced us into a tough decision: destroy the Ottomans or let Romali be destroyed. Pretty sure we would have chosen the former in that scenario! As it was, we were almost done with athlete by the time you actually declared war, which gave us enough time to march over and save his capital, then counter-attack.
Nakor Wrote:Let's hope India won't bother with sending aid. They probably know they can't do much.
- Well, that was amusing.
- I didn't know that your team was suffering war weariness unhappiness from the Dantski war. Culture slider to 20%? Wow. No wonder Holy Rome's research fell off so badly at the end of the game... Wish you'd posted at least one screenshot from the ending period.
Anyway, it was a (mostly) fun game, and I wish that it hadn't ended the way it did. When your army was stuck inside Dantski's borders, with us being able to use all the roads due to Open Borders, all those units were sitting ducks. They had no chance, not your fault. And elsewhere, because you had so many island cities, and had neglected Astronomy tech until it was too late, we were able to push frigates/galleons and cripple half your empire. Speaker didn't think we could actually take any of your core island cities, but heck, we could completely shut down your economy - which we did. Combined with our Golden Age revolt into State Property/Universal Suffrage (to take place the next turn that we never reached), we would have had an overwhelming production and research edge. Just a matter of time until we reached the next generation of military tech and then started rolling through your cities.
You guys did a great job on the economic side of things, and Darius/Holy Rome worked great there for this map. Militarily, it didn't go so well. I really think you waited too long to make your move, as all of your allies were already dead by the time you got involved. Even if you had gotten slaze and plako to join you, it was already too late to beat us by Turn 225. Thanks for the memorable game!
![[Image: smile.gif]](http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Smilies/smile.gif)
