[SPOILERS] scooter and Lewwyn troll lurkers

[scooter]

A chat about the sorry state of things with Lewwyn (featuring Cyneheard). Worth reading in my opinion.

scooter
or we could outline a sim where we're opening barracks first and all go with it publicly
see how long we can trick people into thinking we're doing something ridiculous
that sounds kind of fun actually
Lewwyn
barracks first FTW!!!11!!!!1!
scooter
i could keep a sandbox where I post new screenshots of our fake opening
long cons ftw
Lewwyn
yes please
scooter
I kinda seriously want to do that now
maybe we have an idea more believable than barracks first?
Lewwyn
are you going to make a sandbox?
scooter
i want lurkers to mock us in the lurker thread and everything
Lewwyn
maybe warrior first
scooter
"warrior first because of the hunting/worker offset"
Lewwyn
can we play a shadow game
scooter
for 7t then swap tow orker
lol
Lewwyn
in the thread
and then keep a blog with our real posts?
scooter
yeah seriously, lets do it. we could do it for a good 20T or so
yes
ok we have to do this
Lewwyn
a la Krill?
scooter
yeah. or at least a log somewhere
it'll break down a bit when we make contact probably. well we'll just have to carefully crop images
Lewwyn
you have to "overrule" me in the morning since the WB build is already visable in the last pic I took
scooter
ok
Lewwyn
we still have to tech hunting first
but after that maybe WHeel>pottery
lol
scooter
how about this. i need to go to bed in the near future. but before I do that, I'll make a dumb sandbox, send it to you guys
we can use that for any simming we need as well as our shadow game
Lewwyn
I'm going to start writing up real posts via email for us
scooter
yeah let's keep them in an email thread with forums tags and all
whenever we decide to reveal we can do a dump of real reports
Lewwyn
we should email each other and then copy them into a word document
scooter
yeah
Cyneheard
this is going to be hilarious.
An insane amount of work, but hilarious.
I want to see how quickly the lurker thread picks up on it
scooter
well theres nothing else to do in the early turns haha. i love this
Cyneheard
if no one else does good C&D...
scooter
yeah wonder if anyone will call us out on it
what settings should i use for our sandbox
Cyneheard
"And scooter grew to size 2 this turn"
"And we finished a worker this turn"
scooter
heh
well that should be moderately close since we're going wb first and reporting warrior first
fyi i'm not going to worry about maintenance stuff in this sandbox
i dont expect we'll use it after settling our first city
Lewwyn
oh man
we say we have 2 warriors first
scooter
we could even fake some pictures of us rushing someone
Lewwyn
"we're going to find an opponent and destroy them
scooter
hahaha
TECH ARCHERY FIRST. haha
Cyneheard
"because we are Commodore Reborn"
scooter
hunting-archery opening. i mean we have agri/fishing already. "we plan on using the archers to kill a second neighbor"
Lewwyn
we have to write in thread now
and start the discussion about how we're going to play this game for fun
and have a back and forth between us
scooter
depends on if we want to sell warrior first as a serious opening or if we want to be like "yeah we're gonna go wreck somebody screw winning"
the former is a little more subtle. latter is more likely to kick up the stir we want
Cyneheard
Latter.
Lewwyn
ok I posted
Cyneheard
Let's go Commodore somebody.
scooter
DIDNT PICK TOKU FOR NUTHIN
ok one problem withthe sandbox
Lewwyn
style trumps all?
scooter
the giveaway will be the scoreboard on the side
Lewwyn
hmmm
scooter
could always just copy and paste the scoreboard onto there manually
but thats messy and detectable
Lewwyn
hahaha
scooter
but it might be our best option haha
because if we do it in SP, nobody else will be there until we meet them right?
Lewwyn
can we play withwe can WB in a scout, make contact
Cyneheard
like I said, an insane amount of work
scooter
may be too much for tonight for me lol
Lewwyn
you can shrink the score I think
scooter
you can click on your name in-game and make them go away yeah
but that would draw attention
Lewwyn
photoshopping the score in is okay as long as its over flog
and other times we can pull the interface down
scooter
yeah thats the hard part. thats the only way it works
yeah
Lewwyn
so some shots will have the score
scooter
trying to think of any other wrinkles
oh
pitboss timer
actually where is it on your screenshot
i dont see it at all
haha is timer off? looks like it on civstats
Lewwyn
you need to play a bit of the straight man scooter in thread
scooter
yeah i was thinking that
i need to say nah nah and you need to have to push me
Lewwyn
I'll quote you saying you're not winning anyway lol
Cyneheard
and since clearly I've turned into the Story Man of RB
scooter
haha yeah, not until i object but yes thats your counter
Cyneheard
I don't give a shit about winning
Lewwyn
oh and I do all my sims in my head
sooo
we don't need to posts pics for those sims
scooter
yeah. well plus if we're just screwing around would we really be simming
Lewwyn
we can use a real screenie of this turn
just switch it to warrior build take the shot then switch it back for now
scooter
posted in thread
oh duh, yeah
future turns its a little harder because you have to have progress
Lewwyn
and maybe the next couple turns
scooter
guys watch, ASM will support the warrior rush having no clue we're joking
i think he's dedlurking?
we could save time a few turns by only showing the scouting unit
after the first 2-3 turns, only need to show the fake cap every once in awhile
Lewwyn
yep
scouting should be easy to do
oh man
scooter
one thing
well
Lewwyn
we can use the real game and swap techs
over and over
scooter
progress bar on techs
Lewwyn
because we won't use hunting for 20 turns
so we can "troll" by tech swapping
and no one will know for sure what we're doing
scooter
oh haha
Lewwyn
we don't have to finsih hunting until t20!
scooter
it wont slow down our real game start
yeah nice
haha i like it
we can even say in thread "swapping techs around to screw with people doing c&d trollolol"
btw, whenever we do the reveal, we ARE posting this chat
Lewwyn
yeah we go 3 or 4 turns then we posta pic from the real game with us starting the wheel
but in fact we'll start minign that turn instead
scooter
hahah
we're going to get too clever at one point and really screw up, but I dont care
oh
w'ell pick a terrible second city
Lewwyn
and we can take a screen of the scouting away from the cap
scooter
soon after that it'll be reveal time
Lewwyn
whe we do it
and say " observant lurker will notice we started the wheel"
Cyneheard
I'm out
it's 12:30 here
scooter
it is here too, but now i'm distracted by allthe ways we can fool lurkers
Cyneheard
so am I. That's why I'm leaving.
scooter
i'm betting a scouting unit from a neighbor will ruin it somehow
Lewwyn
new post in thread

say you're thinking about it and going to bed
lol
is it possible to get a timer by hosting our fake game?
lol
too much work
scooter
well as long as the timer is in the fog, we can copy/paste it in paint
takes a few seconds
Lewwyn
right

Date of chat: Thursday August 29th

[SevenSpirits]

The chat was too depressing, I couldn't read it. Too bad the warrior rush failed.

[Hesmyrr]

Nice effort, but animals are aligned with us lurkers, you know!
I'll appreciate it if you reveal the blog with legit turn report if you have one.

[Lewwyn]

So my micro plan that we've been following has run out this turn. And Hesmyrr we'll post the old turn reports later I think. We were emailing them to each other. However, the current turn is more pressing.



So the settler is completed. We have to choose city 2. We have to grab our copper first ring. I think one of the 4 dots will work.

Red - Shares pig with capital but needs a border pop to get another legit food source.
Green - Nice 3H city plant and immediate copper. Needs border pop for a food source though and can't build it own workboat for the clams
Blue - On wines but no need to build a winery then and the tiles not that ggreat improved anyway. Shares grasspig with future gold city (site 3?)
Yellow - Uses forest takes an extra turn to settle but gets wheat in second ring and copper and wines in first ring.

I'm favoring blue.

Anyway I'm going to play the turn. In any case we need to move the settler south. We also need to swap to slavery this turn, start a worker. Move the scout away from the bear.

[scooter]

Alright, let's catch up a bit. I really do wish I had more time to put into playing up this joke. We had hoped to do more - showing a fake settler stupidly wandering into the fog only to get sniped by a wolf (as a subtle nod towards Commodore's infamous PB5 mistake). Unfortunately this last week has been a combination of blazing fast turn pace and 0 time whatsoever. There's nothing quite like checking Civstats and seeing "well… I'm last to play BUT there's still 18 hours left on the clock."

I seriously spent like 3 hours one night creating a sandbox that duplicated every tile for the purpose of reporting the warrior rush. This image for instance:


pictured: a unit that never has existed

Has several edits on it and was not taken from in the game at all. This was taken from a sandbox I made where I WB'd in animals until I got the damage I wanted. If you look closely, there's a visible outline around parts of the scoreboard that should not be there because I got that scoreboard from a spot in-game that wasn't completely dark. Basically, I logged into the game and copied/pasted those parts onto here (turn timer too). The other problem was the mini-map. I was going to just screenshot the in-game mini-map and paste it over, but there was one major flaw with that. In the real game, we didn't have a warrior between us and pin, so we needed it to be "lit up" over the middle. What I ended up doing was leaving the sandbox mini-map as the base, and then going in game and cropping the top half of that mini-map over the sandbox, because it was just too much work to also edit in all the tiles north of pindicator that I had scouted. Unfortunately I took the shots at slightly different angles (didn't have the time to re-do it to line up correctly), so I had to play with it to get it so it wasn't obviously off. However, if you look closely at that picture, you can see the white dot for pindicator's capital on there twice and a little corner from a second "view box" which should give away that it was edited. I'm also betting that close examination will show a tile or two doesn't match the in-game perfectly. I tried to match it, but I was rushing a bit, so I'm sure I made mistakes. Fog-gazing would probably be the easiest way to spot differences.

Most of the scout screenshots were completely real, and I turned off detailed city view in the early turns so as to hide the fact that all our early screenshots came from the real game, and I just stuck warrior as top build and took the screenshot in a way as to not show that we weren't making any progress on a warrior build.

Side-note for Noble: I was having trouble setting the health exactly how I wanted, so I message'd Noble asking if it was possible. He said it's not easy, etc, then asked me what I was testing. Uhhh… Didn't want to spoil the surprise, so I made up some dumb excuse that he seemed to believe. Sorry about that. :P

Anyway, I got pretty behind for a stretch on real reporting, but I do have some early game screenshots and reports. We kept an email thread rather than a blog, so I'll paste those in so you can get up-to-date on what we've been doing. Then we'll snap back to the present and hopefully get some consistent AND real reports in here . The funny thing is my prophecy about our fake game shenanigans eventually forcing a mistake turned out to be true. We finished Hunting 1T too late for the worker because of a rushed turn combined with trying to be too clever. Whatever, totally worth it.

[scooter]

By the way, did anyone figure it out? I really wondered if pindicator's scouting unit that headed towards us would give things away.

[scooter]

Huge turn dump coming up. Just a warning that these reports aren't the greatest, but you at least get a feel for what we've been actually doing. I may have to split it into a few posts.

Turn 0

Just one picture everyone:



Yep. This happened. Real turn reports coming right up!

Turn 1

Essentially the same as the fake version, but the hammers went into the WB as planned.



Lewwyn tested it, and he felt working the fish was slightly better than working a 1/2/0 tile. In terms of foodhammers they come out about even, but the additional commerce is a real benefit. 

Turn 2



WB, growth and hunting continue, scouting continues.

Turn 3-4

Basically the same as the fake report except the WB continues:



Scout moved:



Lewwyn, do we need to switch techs to mining now? You wanna make the case for that in the forum?

Turn 5-6

Serdoa double-moved his scout into our land, not a problem as long as he doesn't stick around:



Rolled the turn, here's the capital:



I really did declare and move in on pindicator as indicated in our thread, and I did swap to Mining in the actual game too. 

[scooter]

Turn 7-16

Big picture dump before I use the TrollBox to create a fake report. Very little commentary here - just a log of pictures of the real game.





I offered this. He would accept next time he was in.

[scooter]

And that's it. Reporting basically tailed off at that point as things got crazy and we churned out 16 turns in a week. Basically just scouting and playing our opening. Any big questions? I'll try to get a full set of clear screenshots next time I log in so you can see our current state.

[darrelljs]

By the way, did anyone figure it out?

The least we can do is make you wait until the game is over to find out .

Darrell