[SPOILERS - PBEM17] novice and spaceman - Suryavarman of India

[spacemanmf]

So, novice, are you ok with me playing the second save?

[novice]

So, novice, are you ok with me playing the second save?

Sure, go ahead.

[spacemanmf]

Ok, I've done some scouting. He's left 3 transports in World Series, and just 3 infantry. Plus 3 bombers. He's left just 1 infantry in Leningrad. We should be able to take both - we get 75% odds on the infantry in World Series (once defences are cleared).

He did shuffle 3 infantry and 2 paras right next to Archangel in order to reconnect the transport lines. But we can easily put 4 mech infs in either for defence, plus one or two marines, and anything airlifted.

Pindicator II has two infantry, a paratrooper, 3 bombers and an airship.

[spacemanmf]

Right then, pretty good turn. Worth the wait...

Opening the save, we had the chance to buy Russia. Not cheap but what the hell. It's got promise.



Firstly, we were asked if we want to build a bank in Liquid Assets. Er, no. Oh and what's this? Diplomatic victory vote? Fancy that. I didn't expect it at all. I abstained, naturally.



We also see that Dave has put some units next to Archangel in order to defend two workers setting up a rail-link.



So, in order to cover two workers he presumably has left World Series very well defended, right? It turns out not...



But there are three transports in there. Could he have made a mistake (one that I nearly made but for a catch by novice)?

In order to keep a track of this, I took a picture of the opening power.



And here are the units we have killed before any attack is made.



I went in with 4 marines, getting 75% or so odds. I lost the first marine, but won the rest of the battles. World Series is ours!



Ok, let's check out the units we have killed after the attack.



So that's 7 infantry, although we only killed 3, plus 2 tanks and 6 marines. So 12 units, aboard 3 transports, plus 2 bombers and the 3 infantry killed through direct combat. Not a bad haul.

[novice]

Not bad - and I bet there's more? Fun fun fun.

[spacemanmf]

I swung our other transport over to Leningrad, which was defended by 1 infantry.



I didn't get great odds...



...and naturally lost the first battle, but the damage done was sufficient for a mop-up. I thought the levee was odd but then remembered about dikes.



Those are two Jewish cities so I checked out the latest votes.



Hmm, so what more damage could I do? I had 9 units aboard ships with movement points left, and they all got 85%+ odds. And they won them all.



This is what I left for Darrell to mop up next turn.



I blocked the route to Russia with some ships, and sent the rest to Pindicator II, with one loaded transport.



It was all I needed. I razed it since it would get swamped by Shoot's culture.



Builds.

[spacemanmf]

I subsequently worked out that I had knocked Dave's power down by 782k in that turn. That works for me.

[spacemanmf]

Right, turn sent on. I didn't revolt as our cities are growing back nicely. They will soon be ripe for drafting/slaving, however. We now have unhappiness in Capital and Trading Post due to Emancipation anger. But oh well.

This is the eastern arena. There are two main stacks of our boats. The moused over stack is the one SE of Corner City, while the bigger highlighted stack is NE of World Series (there in order to make it harder to attack the city).

He can attack the smaller stack with 4 destroyers and 4 battleships, after the odd aerial raid, but we took out a few bombers so I think we can take any losses if it reduces further his navy.



Something like 4NE of this 4 destroyer + transport stack we have 6 boats blocking the path to Russia (which I set to a 1-turn temple since there was not much else to do).

Further north, and just out of reach of the destroyers, we have 3 more transports mostly full. They can all reach VE Day next turn.

Just on the other side of World Series, we have a marine aboard a transport that might be able to raze one of a number of cities.

Story of the turn




Total units killed.



Demos.

[spacemanmf]

Ok, well, I suppose I had better post something. This game may not last much longer.

Dave has edited out a post he put in the technical thread - given the reason it presumably wasn't constructive. Novice - are you subscribed to that thread? Can you see what he said?

He has also emailed us: "We need to talk regarding PBEM17."

Right then, my thoughts. I would stress that these are my thoughts, not those of novice.

When I heard that Dave had voted in a religious victory, I was angry. To me, it is an absolutely ridiculous way to try to end a game. Dave declared on us and Darrell to stop us winning by space. With our combined force and the advantage of first strike, we are systematically wiping Dave out.

To his immense credit, Dave has been playing the game enthusiastically and has been enjoying it, and some of his recent strategic moves have been excellent. It has felt like a high level chess game and consequently has been very enjoyable. I had dialled out of the space race, but this is much more my thing.

Anyway, religious victory (although the same applies to the diplomatic victory - no-one's build the UN, which tells you a lot). It is an utterly meaningless concept in a multi-player game such as this. It is purely a single player game mechanic designed to assess whether you can butter up a sufficicent proportion of the AI civs.

The only way that Dave could win the religious vote is by Shoot voting for him. That goes against the every man for himself nature of this game. Sure, various parties have teamed up during this game for various reasons, normally to take down the leader. But once Darrell and I complete our plans of wiping out Dave and then, probably, Shoot, we would have to decide a way to win it that makes sense. The space race is always open.

In brief, Shoot voting for Dave to give Dave the victory makes a mockery of the game. It is using a game mechanic to win by the letter but not by the spirit. If they do not want to continue playing then just say so, outside the game, in the tech thread. As I say, Dave mentioned that he was enjoying the cut and thrust of it. Shoot, I figure less so.

To be fair to Dave, he later told me that he was really unsure and asked for lurker input. But the overall consensus was that he should go for it. In particular, Seven was 100% behind it despite it being a “silly mechanic”, which is somewhat of an irony given recent PBEM23 developments, which Darrell point out (sorry, yes, that was a bug not a mechanic).

It is perhaps naive of us to think that we didn't need to ban such wins. It was so obvious to me that it is a path that shouldn't be followed that it didn't even cross my mind that someone might choose it. Rego built the AP probably about 4-6 months ago. Only by a quirk of us capturing a Jewish city has it become enabled. There was no skill involved. Again, it probably comes down to our naivety to let it be enabled, but that does not mean it should be exploited.

Now there are some that say it is already a shadow game. Indeed, Darrell shared his post where he suggested that this game had already been won twice, once by us and now once by Dave. I disagree.

Whilst the fundamental nature of diplomacy was severely undermined by some of the actions of the players in this game, I did not regard it as a victory for us (unless you can count a moral victory). Had they not done what they did, we would have had a sizeable tech lead, but it was not a guaranteed win. Equally, I don't regard it as a victory for Dave - it is utterly meaningless for the reasons I have explained above.

So, we got the save through and novice confirmed that the religious victory option had been selected by Dave since we had to vote. Novice did nothing else with the turn. I was so disgusted that I didn’t open the save at all. At that stage, I was sufficiently annoyed that I was perfectly happy not to send the save at all. The game would end there in a stalemate. I would not give Dave the satisfaction of claiming a contrived, exploitative “victory”.

I spoke to Dave in chat (a chat which I posted). He said two things which we could do if Shoot had voted for Dave (and Shoot refused to elaborate other than to simply test us by saying he hadn’t to see what we would do). Firstly, play on (“just a few more turns”). This way, we could both get our desire, I guess – Dave would “win” but we could play on to find the “true winner”. Darrell had absolutely no interest in this.

He also said that we could reload to before he asked for the vote if we felt that strongly about it.

I have to say that even without these comments I may well have done what I did. It’s hard to tell. Or I would not have sent the save on. There was no way I was passing the save on without addressing it in some way, that’s for certain.

In chatting with Darrell (also a chat I posted), I learnt that he had a save from just before ending turn. That was crucial since he had done so much warring during the turn. Darrell posted his comments about the oversight that led him to send the save on the first time without gifting a city (which is as cheesy as an AP victory in a way, but there you go). He thought it was a joke. I hinted in a roundabout way (Darrell got it) that he might resend the EOT save but having gifted Russia. Which he did. He then left it to us to decide what to do.

This was not wholesale replaying to get what we wanted – it was a way of sidestepping a contrived issue which Dave had caused that was the simplest solution for all of us.

Novice was against playing the second save. He preferred to NAP-stab Shoot in order to capture Jewish cities. We did the maths and it would be very close if we took the cities we could take, but we probably could do it. But that would be completely changing the game-state. Shoot might be sufficiently riled by our actions to quit, although novice felt that voting for Dave would contravene the NAP. But we would be at war with Shoot, solely because Dave had chosen to go for a religious victory.

However, novice came round a bit and decided to go with my preference of playing the second save. So that’s what we did. We had not moved a single thing in the original save, nor did Darrell discover anything new from his replaying of the end of the save. In the context of the war, we did not gain any advantages from it.

I do not condone the replaying of saves unless there is a specific and universally agreed reason or doing so. I am always very careful not to do anything that might lead me to discover more information than I should when playing a save (for example, if I have reloaded a prior EOT save simply for inspection of demographics or city locations).

There’s been a lot of lurker activity which was probably mostly confusion, since we didn’t explicitly say anything in our thread. They may well be calling it cheating (and so might Dave). Well fine. Everyone can have their opinion.

We had four options: (i) Refuse to play the save, (ii) Play the original save without breaking the NAP with Shoot and lose the game to a religious victory, (iii) Play the original save, break the NAP with Shoot, leaving great uncertainty as to whether we could deny Dave the victory, (iv) Play a tweaked save from Darrell to sidestep the broken game mechanic.

I seriously considered (i); (ii) was not an option; (iii) we seriously contemplated but there was still a great risk of it not working (as it turned out, given Dave’s defence, I think we probably could have done it by capturing and holding three cities, but we didn’t know about Dave’s transport unloading error then); (iv) was very tempting to me – a sort of “screw you if you’re going to do it this way” type action.

So there it is. It’s just a game. Sure, I got annoyed, but it would have dissipated, like it did with the original Backstab Turn. Perhaps it’s telling me to go out and enjoy the sunshine, or spend more time with my family, or something.

It’s imperative in the context of a game that one plays fairly and within the rules, otherwise it undermines the game. I appreciate this. But I felt that this was a loosely justifiable exception to that rule, when done in such a controlled (and now explicit) way. You may feel differently.

[spacemanmf]

Shit, that was a long post.