[PB60] Lazteuq and Civac

[Lazteuq]

Turn 150
The focus is back on the south again, as Amica/Van have launched another invasion. This time they don't have to worry about Superdeath attacking them if they overextend. The stack is quite impressive. They have whipped exceptionally hard to produce this many units to be dominating on both fronts. Knights are now a significant part of their attacking force, and more are streaming in.

I'm pretty sure we can avoid losing Uxmal if we play this right. Zama is likely dead though. I was roading south of Zama in expectation of an attack, but they arrived too soon, wouldn't matter anyway. Also Uxmal's borders just expanded, but they attacked on the turn immediately before. I think that was blind luck.

I put 3 defenders in Zama so they can't take it this turn. Then at least we get walls up. I'm guessing they don't actually care about Zama and really want to go for Uxmal (which is our Holy City). So I'd expect to hit that stack in 2 turns. I kind of want them to sit next to our deer forest, because that's a 50% defense bonus that they can't bombard away! If they do go toward Zama, I'm not so sure what to do. 10 cats can bring a walled city's defenses to zero in one turn if a few of them get Accuracy. At that point, there is little reason to stay in the city.
Regardless of what they do, I want to hit them on open ground outside a tile with defensive bonuses. I don't think we have enough hitters otherwise- If our attackers are left on open ground after our turn, they'll probably win despite our first-catapult advantage.

Other things:
I pulled back from the siege of Bream in the north once I realized we had no chance of even killing all the defenders in a single turn. That siege cost us a lot of money and now our defenses in the south are lacking.
They're pretty much dominating the inner sea, we stand no chance of contesting that without caravels of our own. If we invest enough hammers to win the boat war, we lose on land. I admit I've been tactically idiotic with the positions of these galleys/triremes. I'm not used to thinking about fighting 3-move units that can go in oceans. I started moving boats to the outer sea, where they can at least not die.
City visibility is really annoying because it means we can't hide our stacks defensively anywhere. I'm worried about them attacking in the north because they can see whether or not we have units nearby to respond. Sure, there are "hiding places" where their city vision doesn't cover, but we have to move through city vision to reach those, and I'm sure they're paying close attention. Engineering would help with this.

Amica/Van don't appear to have civil service so I think they're planning an Astro bulb.

Civac and I were talking about opportunistically hitting Jowy. Capture gold would be nice. I'm still skeptical if we'd want to actually hold anything we capture though.
It looks like Jowy has stalled out against GKC, but I think he'll win eventually. GKC's power does continue to fall.
I think Amica/Van are the favorite to win. Civac, why do you rate Mjmd's chances so highly? I must admit his city count is impressive.
Since he got 10t of peace with Amica/Van, Superdeath has retargeted his wrath onto Mjmd, who just lost his northernmost city.

We also talked about still trying to build Taj. We still have a prophet and scientist just sitting there in the capitol.

[Lazteuq]

I have done an extremely bad job of defending in this war and probably totally broken this game's balance of power in the process. I'm sure other players have already talked about it in their threads. I won't even bother going into details right now.
As you may already see from my lack of reporting and short login times, I haven't been putting in anywhere near enough effort to be competitive in this game. The problem is I lack time and dedication for pitboss games (59 also). Recently I've been really involved with grad school and the job I have associated with it, and that basically sucks away all my motivation for hobbies like this one. In the last two weeks I've been especially busy with travel, that's why you've seen no reporting here. Also I'm realizing that I'm probably just too much of a casual player to really rise beyond the green level, even if I did have more time on my hands.
My lack of interest may not be for the reasons you think: Getting surprise-attacked by Amica/Van and then abandoned(?) by superdeath was certainly discouraging but not the cause. I think I've already shown I can happily play on even when I have no chance to win like in PB56. Actually my inattentiveness goes back before the war: For example if I had been more dedicated I would have caught the surprise attack in the making by more careful scouting, demo/KTB watching, and watching whips.
Signing up for this game while also being in PB59 was definitely a mistake. It just wasn't so obvious here at first because of Civac's watchful eye and careful planning. Also IMP+some lucky wonder grabs making us look really good in the early game, concealing my lack of dedication.

To avoid causing another situation like this in the future, I won't be joining any more pitboss games for a long time. I'll certainly play this and 59 to their conclusions, but after that I'll just lurk.
To the opposing players in this game whenever you read this, Civac, and the lurkers, I'm sorry.

[El Grillo]

Please don't feel any need to apologize, I hear you and have been there before, as no doubt many of us have. The bottom line is that we're all here to have fun, so I hope you've enjoyed participating, and that's that. I've certainly enjoyed reading your reports

[Charriu]

What you experienced is totally normal here. Everybody had to find out at some point how many games they can handle.
I for one learned this the hard way just like you. My solution is to play only one game at the time (or two if I'm basically dead in one of them). I also make sure to make (bigger) breaks between games to get my head free of stuff. Remember, not everyone can or wants to be Superdeath.

[Lazteuq]

Thanks for your supportive words, guys. I realize I was being too dramatic about it.
Don't worry, I am still enjoying the games, and you're right, that's what we play games for in the end.

Within the next 2 days or so I plan to post a solid report about details of the game itself.

[Lazteuq]

OK, I would post some screenshots, but I'm pretty sure Amica's thread shows everything you'd want to see. I don't have any units left hiding outside of cities. I did set up a stack of 6 workers ready to reconnect the iron if they pillage it, but since I'm playing first I guess that doesn't actually help. Whatever.

The most recent big mistakes are:
Quite a few turns ago in the north, I burned a bunch of catapults and forced them to pull back from Izancanac temporarily, but I should have just given up on it entirely. I didn't actually kill many units, just caused a delay of the inevitable.
In the south, I split my stack outside of Lakhama, which gave them an opportunity to kill a ton of units easily. I honestly don't even remember why I thought splitting the stack was a good idea, I was definitely delusional. After basically destroying much of my main stack, they were left with a ton of wounded knights but I of course wasn't able to capitalize on it. Since I lost so many units, I had to retreat from Lakhama. At this point I got engineering and managed to consolidate almost all the units in the center. So I hit them in Lakhama with about 20 catapults. I've never been so disappointed by collateral damage. After all the collateral, my best units still weren't achieving anywhere close to even hammer trades, so I aborted the attack. Another 1000 hammers wasted. I should have definitely waited until they were on flat ground outside the capitol (like they are now). I don't know why I was so eager to attack right then and there. I was playing directly into their strength by attacking a hill city full of Protective crossbows.
Now I have basically no catapults because I wasted them all causing temporary injuries. So all I'm left to do is sit in cities.
There are so many ways I could have defended better, going way back to the beginning of the war. I definitely should have been able to stall them at several points, but now I think it's too late.

I'm not really sure if they'll need to bombard the capitol's defenses to 0 before attacking or not. If (when) the capitol falls, everything else will collapse very quickly. Unless someone joins in on this war and forces Amica to withdraw some units, I think I'll be banished from the mainland within 10 turns no matter what. I'm hoping to bait them breaking up their main stack and attacking Chichen Itza with knights separately, but I think they're too disciplined for that.

I wonder how many units Amica has in reserve on the borders with Jowy, Mjmd, or SD. Probably not much, because they're all involved in other wars.

[Amicalola]

Trip was fun, got absolutely sunburned but no regrets. It felt weird and sort of relaxing to not think about pitboss for several days, I think after this game and PB59 are over I will take a break from playing. I'm not hardcore dedicated enough to put in the necessary care for these two games at once.

-Amica/Van didn't attack. It looks like all my stress about their 6-8 units was unnecessary. That's a seriously well-armed settling party though. Maybe they're really that afraid of us attacking, but I don't see why.

Hah, I don't know how well you remember this but we totally were planning to attack and raze back then, with some extra whipped axes on galleys. I was super cocky about it too, thought it was basically guaranteed to work. Nice job getting such good defenses up so quickly!

I also wanted to say that I feel the first part of this too, you have my sympathy. Sorry to have attacked you when you were already burnt out.

Edit: I read through the rest of the thread and I really thought you defended fine. You were at a serious production and tech disadvantage, and still made us work really hard for the conquest. We also made plenty of mistakes ourselves. There's no way we could have killed you if anyone had intervened again, and you probably would have taken all of that territory back. Your northern stack came very close to breaking us at Bream as it was. I hope you aren't still down about it, I really don't think you were fair to yourself towards the end.

[civac2]

Hm, I think allowing you to hit with your knights and throwing away the catapults at Uxmal were serious mistakes. It's important to recognize the problems to improve on them. As for myself, I did not expect you to be able to push into another main area at all. Thus, I gave Lazteuq bad advice. We absolutely needed some number of higher tech military units. Construction and HBR would have been good, maybe Machinery as well.

[Amicalola]

I agree, those were mistakes, which are important to learn from. And I'm sure both of us made plenty of others in general, like our northern push, or skipping military techs. But I more meant the worry about dramatically unbalancing the game, which seemed like it was taking a bit of a toll. I've been there, and it sucks. I also don't think it's true here. For example, I think the general weakness of GKC was much more unbalancing towards Jowy, Mjmd, and to a lesser extent us, than any mistakes you made on the defense overall. But even if it is true, my comment was also 'I hope you aren't still beating yourself up about it.' Maybe I didn't phrase it very well.

I had the exact same thought early on about no one being able to push past the spokes without being backstabbed that you made in our thread. I think I made the claim/complaint around T100 that no one would be able to push seriously until Galleons, at least, due to the map shape. That didn't age well.

[Jowy]

I think I'd rather have a peaceful neighbor than agg Rome who praet galley rushes me! I think I could have gotten a big tech edge and used that to forcefully expand with way less effort.