You should keep posting Bluey episodes when you found new cities so I have recommendations. You got me and me 3 young children watching it before bed time. I've watched it before, but it had been a bit so was a good reminder it existed.
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[SPOILERS] scooter Reruns Bluey
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This is starting to feel weirdly personal. WTF is the point of all this.
 What are we doing here? Am I being trolled? This is the most pointless exercise I've seen in ages. Thoth is well over a dozen tiles away from my capital. In between me and him are around 12 viable city sites, including a pre-placed uber barb city that would be incredibly valuable to take early that is a direct buff to Boudica to any player with brains. So instead of building a 148h settler, he spent 125h on Galley + Sword + Axe to burn a city absolutely miles away from him. He has 3 cities, somehow still less than me, and 2 less than pindicator, and instead he's just role-playing Vikings for giggles I guess? At least I can squint and understand "Commodore is actually a low-key really bad strategic player" and understand that his choices are a side effect of his general well-documented inability to evaluate risk/rewards of aggression. Thoth's choice here boggles the mind and I can only rationalize it as a role-play thing. I'm pretty comfortable stating that his choice here actively worsened his chances of winning significantly. In fact it's so bad that it sort of makes Commodore's choices retroactively less crazy, because all this means is that Commodore will run over my cities pretty effortlessly, while Thoth will get none of them because, again, he's miles away! I'm genuinely asking for someone to help me understand what he thinks he's gaining out of this so I can carry on knowing I'm not getting personally targeted for some unknown reason, because that's about the only way I can rationalize this right now. It's also not as if I'm in some unassailable position. Last turn I was 4th in food, 4th in hammers, ahead of only, you guessed it, Thoth. I'm in 4th place, my gambit was fun but not really that OP, and I'm getting people coming at me like I'm PBEM17 Novice or something. Being in 4th in food/mfg with IMP is bad! Like, they are damaging their long-term potential to stop me, specifically, in the short term for reasons unknown. This is why I'm having trouble puzzling this one out. I assume at this stage that this was not a fluke, and they did some degree of AI Diplo coordination. It's easy enough to do. That tells me why Commodore would be fine doing what he did. It's still a bad play as it lets Pindicator run away with the game totally unchecked, but I can see why he thinks he did a good thing. Thoth is just baffling. You cannot convince me this was a better use of 125h than 85% of a settler or taking the barbarian city first while I was busy to turbo his growth curve. He still has fewer cities than me after I lost 2 in one turn. Anyway, if you think I'm going overboard, look at the game state right now. We're at T38 with a field of 5 players that are all within about a standard deviation of each other in skill. If you had to take over one of these 5 civs and win this game as if your life depended on it, whose position would you pick? I suspect the unanimous answer would be Pindicator's position. He's going to get 2 of the barb cities, all the land within it, and neighbor a player in Yuris that is probably the least threatening player playing the least threatening leader/civ combo. To have that happen in under 40T on a pretty balanced map is bonkers and can really only happen with some very weird choices. So uh, can anyone rationalize this for me in a way that is less personal and has some sort of reason to it? I'm definitely not playing a turn tonight. I probably will resume tomorrow sometime before the timer runs out. Side note: the cruel thing is I had another Trireme 1T from completing, and it was earmarked to check on Thoth next because I was suspicious of his lack of city settling. (March 6th, 2024, 19:42)scooter Wrote: Thoth's choice here boggles the mind and I can only rationalize it as a role-play thing. Someone please tell me if this is actually the reason, and I'll quit out of the game, because if this is what's actually going on it's insanely disrespectful. I don't think that's what's happening even though it looks like it, but please let me know if that's the case. If he's just playing incredibly stupidly, then that's fine. I mean, it's super annoying, but people make mistakes. I fail-rushed a player in a game once, it happens. (I felt pretty bad about that one honestly even though it came incredibly close to succeeding and I only tried it because it was a good angle for it.) 
To me it looked like fighty players gonna fight 'cause that's the leader and civ they picked and the kinda game they were looking for. I don't think it's personal, I think you just got screwed by map luck. Whoever was between them, Comm was going to try to coordinate a dogpile, and Thoth would be cool with it. If Pindi winds up being the beneficiary, oh well. Maybe they think they can dogpile him too.
I'm not sure how much anyone can say that isn't spoilery?
I think I can say this much from a neutral point of view, since it's nothing you haven't seen directly. It didn't cost Thoth 125 hammers - he lost only one swordsman for 40, and the capture gold alone is worth close to that. To all but take a neighbor out of the game is worth that. Same for Commodore - he lost only one unit to raze your barb city, and got some capture gold - to set back a neighbor by that much is worth that. I do think they each made rational moves in their own interest and that it wasn't any kind of directed spite. (March 6th, 2024, 21:08)Zed-F Wrote: To me it looked like fighty players gonna fight 'cause that's the leader and civ they picked and the kinda game they were looking for. I don't think it's personal, I think you just got screwed by map luck. Whoever was between them, Comm was going to try to coordinate a dogpile, and Thoth would be cool with it. If Pindi winds up being the beneficiary, oh well. Maybe they think they can dogpile him too. (March 6th, 2024, 21:10)T-hawk Wrote: I do think they each made rational moves in their own interest and that it wasn't any kind of directed spite. Probably more or less accurate. (March 6th, 2024, 21:10)T-hawk Wrote: I think I can say this much from a neutral point of view, since it's nothing you haven't seen directly. It didn't cost Thoth 125 hammers - he lost only one swordsman for 40, and the capture gold alone is worth close to that. To all but take a neighbor out of the game is worth that. Same for Commodore - he lost only one unit to raze your barb city, and got some capture gold - to set back a neighbor by that much is worth that. However, I just don't think this is really true? Here's the thing - knocking me out of the game early is good for all four players, but only two are paying to do it. Commodore will probably make gains from it, but it remains to be seen if he gives it all back in the form of Pindicator on the other side. Thoth though I don't think what you've said is true at all. The thing about the 125h isn't about worker + raze gold, which does help, but it's the opportunity cost. In this time he could have had a settler, and also settlers pay for themselves in the form of building new cities. Would Thoth be better off with this raze gold + worker, or would he be better off with another city? I don't think that's close at all, especially because it costs travel time in both directions, which is a real cost too. The time to travel the units to me, and then the time to ferry the worker home is time a new city could have been growing. Keep in mind new cities are much stronger here with instant Granaries, so their payback timelines are much faster. And if you want proof, consider how you'd rank their in-game positions right now. Commodore, Pindicator, and Yuris have all had 5 cities with Granaries for several turns by now. Thoth is still stuck on 3 somehow, which is hard to do when you start with 2. His chances of victory are basically the same as mine right now (aka 0) because he's going to be ages behind in the snowball. Vikings are only scary at relative tech parity, it's important to remember. Anyway, I'm going with stupid > malice on the Vikings front. Congrats in advance to Pindicator, I'm going to give you a lot of crap if you don't take this tap-in victory. (March 6th, 2024, 00:49)Mjmd Wrote: You should keep posting Bluey episodes when you found new cities so I have recommendations. You got me and me 3 young children watching it before bed time. I've watched it before, but it had been a bit so was a good reminder it existed. Well, since I don't think I'll be founding new cities very much, I'll do one that I did settle in 74 but was well beyond the point where I stopped reporting. This one because it's a good one, and the full episode exists on youtube, but also I have a small story for it. So the first time this was on in our house, I was out of the room briefly, so I could loosely hear it, but I could not see it. Late in the episode there's a music track that plays, and I could very faintly hear it. And I could have sworn I heard the theme music for Morrowind, which obviously confused me because I was under the impression Bluey was on the tv. I came in to investigate, and at this point I realized the Morrowind theme song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJD-Ufi1jGk), especially around the 37 second mark sounds quite like Gustav Holst's Jupiter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz0b4STz1lo) around the 3:25 mark. This very brief fragment that they share triggered that part of my brain in a funny way, and now I've linked the two in my head. Anyway, Jupiter features here beautifully, and it's a great choice on a great episode. |
