[PB25-SPOILERS] The Lunacy of the Reign of HAK Continues

[HitAnyKey]

One last round of victory punches...

I took out his stack by Anxious. Only lost a Rifle that I drafted out of Burning Spears this turn.

[MindyMcCready]

And here is the official concession post. I had hoped to get mine out before Mindy,...

Sorry if I stepped on your toes there. I've been getting the impression for like 3-4 months that I've been the only thing stopping you from conceding. :LOL:

I know I've said that Ruff's inaction against Commodore has basically cost us the game, but in my view we pretty much never had much of a chance. Though his leaving the cities on the island empty (except for a single LB in each one) tipped the scale this turn to make it quite obvious. Pretty much the only way for anyone to beat Commodore would have been if at least 3 people attacked him at the same time. If I was in position when he started his conquest of retep, I might have been able to do something. But pretty much everything offensive I had was over trying to deal with Gavagai, which took WAAAY longer than it should have and longer than I expected. By the time Commodore started conquering retep, it would have taken too long to get enough troops back to the Commodore front. And doing so we'd let Gavagai rebuild and run over us from the other side. So my only real option there was to just keep pushing against Gavagai.

I think that this was a false hope or expectation for you HAK; despite the fact that you didn't hold any hope in it happening.

There's no reason, or shouldn't be a reason, for others to care about you/us winning over Master Commodore winning. The other players were always going to sit it out and not get involved in the HAK-MC struggle. We were always going it go it alone and MC was always going to be able to buy off a serious dogpile. Self interest pretty much guaranteed that. But even going it alone, I thought that we had a very good chance up until the Ruff move.

Self-interest should have kept us and Ruff in a strong alliance position. We both had self-interest in keeping MC off of Battle Island. Had the game followed a more reasonable path with a Donovan-Ruff alliance then Ruff would have/should have kicked or tried to kick MC off of his landmass (-4 cities for MC). Donovan could have/should have been able to eat more of Retep (-X cities for MC).

At that point Ruff would have probably tried to kick us off of Battle Island (-3 cities for us, but at least MC didn't own them) or maybe he'd like our continued presence. Who knows?

Overall, by Ruff's actions MC's probably gained 13 cities (7 from Battle Island, 4 keepers in Ruff Land + 2 that Donovan might have got from Retep) while debatably costing us our -3 from Battle Island. So MC got a realtive 13-16 cities that he shouldn't have gotten. And MC probably is just getting started with Ruff. And then there's the loss of Hungry and the 30-40T of naval starvation around our core cities. Ruff had the ability to be a deciding factor there but chose to let the biggest threat to his existance wander units onto his landmass.

We've had a city count advantage over MC for the entire game. And we might even still have one despite the 3 easy cities that MC just grabbed. But city count parity is not going to cut it when MC will get to Assembly Line some 30+ turns ahead of us.

As for the Gavagai struggle, it didn't work out too badly overall. We made some mistakes but so did Gavagai. The end part went very well since we forced Gavagai to make an attack that he didn't win (but looked close enough that he did try it). I was very pleased with our execution of that part since we did it with 'just enough' units and then got the continent out of it. I will say that it's become a little too fashionable to retreat from your core cities for my tastes.

This has been quite the game for me, as I've learned quite a lot and this is the first time in an RB pitboss that I've ranked this high and done this well overall. I do attribute a lot of that to Mindy, with doing/helping with so much of the stack/battle analysis. That's where I'm usually weakest in my games.

Thank you HAK. And the overall performance in this game should be measured against the difficulty of starting next to an MC-driving, DTay-empowered Knights start. It's no easy feat to start next to the game leader and still survive, let alone rise into contention. And this is doubly true after MC got basically gifted Grimace cities when he should have been facing 75% chance of losing every battle.

Some of your finest moments were landing Taj which you 100% initiated and strangely TGLH which you, obviously, 100% initiated. :LOL: I think that one of our best plays was keeping off the radar by whip-managing our score. Watching MC move to take GJ down a notch while we were argubly the real #2 is testament to our success there.

If some lurkers could confirm that the game's over I'd like to confirm that hypothesis.

I have a feeling Donovan won't be ready to concede, especially not before he finishes conquering Ruff. And I fully expect him to want to try to hit me to take 2nd place, so he won't want to concede until he has done that. But if he is, then I am ready to say good game to all. If not, then I'm perfectly find just continuing a bloodbath until that time does come.

Personally not sure about the peace thing with Commodore at all costs, since I'm betting his main cost would be me giving up Sore.

I'm not really suggesting that we give up a bunch of cities to MC. The only reason that MC has to fear us is because we have the *potential* to outtech him in the long-run. If you gift him 300gpt or whatever we remove that ability and double-power him to Assembly Line. So he should take that. If we're really playing for second place (which is pretty unusual in a basically 3 person game) then we use the 10T to send all of our units over to Donovan to get the game conceded.

At then end of 10T MC would probably be fine to keep the 300gpt arrangement going and let us and Donovan fight it out while he gets Tanks and bombers,...


IDK,...it's quiet here. Too quiet. No lurkers to confirm-deny that the game continues,...? Kill Dononan for second place confirmation? Try to wrestle Battle Island away from MC?

[HitAnyKey]

IDK,...it's quiet here. Too quiet. No lurkers to confirm-deny that the game continues,...? Kill Dononan for second place confirmation? Try to wrestle Battle Island away from MC?

No one has posted in Dononvan's thread (neither himself nor lurkers), so it's still too early for this. And like I said earlier, I doubt he's ready to concede until he's at least gotten his fun of conquering Ruff.

[The Black Sword]

I may be overstepping my bounds a bit here ... but from my perspective you guys still have a pretty good position and it's improved relative to Commodore in the last 20-30 turns.

You guys have more information than me of course, so I could be wrong and I certainly respect if the game is taking too much time then there's nothing wrong with bowing out. But I'm enjoying lurking this game and I'd like to see you play it out.

Donovan hasn't conceded in his thread btw, so if you guys do want to call it I guess we'll have to think about how to approach it.

[HitAnyKey]

Yeah, well I don't fully expect him to want to concede at this point. I know if I were him, I wouldn't. LOL
That's why I'm perfectly good with continuing to battle it out and keep on fighting. I suppose I just wouldn't spend as much time analyzing and stuff, especially since I know Mindy wouldn't want to put all that time in (as we've already discussed in chat). So I would basically fall back on my semi-random playing things as they come methodology. Which could also be fun for you lurkers. LOL

[GermanJoey]

Well, I asked him in his thread if he wanted to concede.

[MindyMcCready]

Yeah, well I don't fully expect him to want to concede at this point. I know if I were him, I wouldn't. LOL
That's why I'm perfectly good with continuing to battle it out and keep on fighting. I suppose I just wouldn't spend as much time analyzing and stuff, especially since I know Mindy wouldn't want to put all that time in (as we've already discussed in chat). So I would basically fall back on my semi-random playing things as they come methodology. Which could also be fun for you lurkers. LOL

If the game's still going I will continue to give my full support.

And I probably wouldn't do/recommend that self-destructive musings of attacking Donovan. Donovan's as likely to distract MC as he is to attack us - it really depends if he's playing for first or second place. If he's playing for first place he'd try to align with us.

[spacetyrantxenu]

DZ is not ready to concede yet.

[HitAnyKey]

DZ is not ready to concede yet.

Yeah, I kinda figured. And I probably jumped the gun a bit. I blame Mindy.
Our real short chat this afternoon just started off on that topic, and it probably kicked off various things I've felt about the game at various times. Most of the time I've felt we don't really have a chance, but I do still enjoy the battle. It's probably been the 2-3 hours we've been spending each morning in chat trying to figure things out that's sucked the energy out of me. Especially since it's caused me to lose out on quite a bit of actual work time that I could have been getting paid for. LOL
I so guess I kinda retract the full-on concession. Though when/if Donovan does decide he doesn't want to go on, then I guess I'll just leave it out there that I'm at the point that I'd also be willing to do so. I seem to recall quite awhile ago various people were talking about concession and I'm the one who wasn't ready.
I'll just continue on with less planning, and not allowing myself to spend so much time during the workday trying to figure out what to do. If Donovan decides to attack us when he's done with Ruff, then we'll just deal with it when that time comes. Though if Commodore does take Sore from us, I feel there won't be anything we can do at all. The wonders we have in that city are important ones. Plus in doing so, he'd basically wipe out our military since at this point the bulk of it is going to be there defending that city.
In either case....game on....again. LOL

But for now...back to watching tv with my wife.

[HitAnyKey]

I suppose a lot of this also stemmed from my simply having a rough week overall. I've had some time this evening to just veg out and relax, so I think I'm in a bit of a better mindset now. At least almost.
Probably shouldn't have had you guys post so quickly in Donovan's thread, but I suppose I/we did ask for it. So I think I'm back to being ready to fight the bloody good fight....even if it ends up being bad for me.