RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

INCA



The Incan core, much fought-over in the wars against the Ottomans. Inca's research was producing about 260 beakers at break-even rate (which was ~35% on the sliders, and impossible to capture in a screenshot). Unfortunately those wars meant that Inca was far behind in technology.



The Incan Empire, second-largest in the world. Inca had 24 cities across the mainland and one eastern island wrestled away from the Ottomans. (Well, to be honest all those island cities were gifted, not captured... )



Incan Demographics. Great Food and Land Area, slowly improving in the other categories. I do think slaze would have produced a strong economy, if he hadn't had to take over the game halfway, and if he hadn't been attacked multiple times in succession.

ROMALI



The Romali core. Bas-Tyra, the former Kumbi Saleh, can be seen off to the northeast. Dantski's economy had been reduced to 150 beakers/turn as a result of heavy warring and pillaging.



The Romali Empire; there were another two cities cut off to the far south of this picture on islands. I believe that Dantski had 13 cities across the mainland and four islands.



Dantski was definitely the fifth-place team at the end of the game. This picture also does a good job of showing why the first six Demographics categories are the only ones that matter. Romali was apparently a nice tourist destination though, given the #1 Approval Rate and Life Expectancy.

[Sullla]

INDIA



I advanced one turn ahead, because we were just about to trip a Golden Age for our swap into State Property/Universal Suffrage. (You can see India's pre-swap Demographics in the other screenshots.) Here's the original core with its many river cottages. Research at break-even rate was 1400 beakers/turn; probably more like ~1100 beakers per turn outside of the Golden Age.



The Indian Empire. We had 31 cities, spaced across the mainland, center island, and several offshore islands.



Gettysburg, boosted by Golden Age along with the new State Property/Uni Suffrage civics. Every mature cottage gets 2 shields/turn... Silly as that sounds, every river city could build a levee and get that kind of production on riverside towns even outside of Golden Age mode. Cities like Fredericksburg were going to be pretty crazy.



India Demographics. Granted, this is boosted by a Golden Age, but still... We pushed for State Property to drive Production, which seemed to be working from the screenshot.

Anyway, Nakor was right and the game was pretty much over at this point. We didn't realize just how badly Holy Rome was hurting on the happiness front, since we were going off of their GNP which counted all that culture. Korea and Inca would have kept growing and improving their economy... however, it seems a little unlikely they could have caught up to India's significant lead.

Thanks for reading. Hope you had fun.

[dinamo]

Good game guy's.

[Speaker]

For the few of you who still actually like Sullla and I after this game, you may enjoy reading this old gem from (zomg) 7 years ago.

EG2 - Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead

Sadly, Sullla and I both burnt out from Civ3 during that game, and never finished it, but there is some enjoyable reading in that thread. Man does time fly. I can't believe it's been 7 years, Sullla...

[antisocialmunky]

Lol, I remember following that. Was disappoint by how it ended though. :D

[athlete4life10]

I didn't bother reading past this a while back as it just wasn't worth my time. I haven't read Sullla's report past the initial parts because I just don't care about it anymore. I went back and forth on posting this for a while but this post by you is just terrible. This post by you Speaker is the singlemost classless thing in this game. You talk about having some integrity here but how about the complete lack of it by yourself? This isn't representable of winning with sportsmanship, this is nothing more than one last attempt to give a solid kick in the nuts to somebody you just annihilated. Completely classless. Nothing I did was to spite you or spit in your face. I wasn't upset about being beaten or angry at losing a competition I had put so much time and effort into. I was actually kinda relieved to be done with this game.

One last FU from Kathlete on his way out. He signed peace with Slaze and gifted him the two island cities that were the cause of the reload controversy earlier, and we still had units around, and were about to send over enough to finish the job. Sorry, but you have acted like a total scumbag this entire game Kathlete:

*Constant turn timer manipulations during the 5v1
*Complete refusal to end your turn for the past six months
*Taking cities and units from Jowy during our war just so we couldn't have them, even though they were rightfully ours as the attacker
*Backstabbing Slaze with gifted units
*Refusal to even try and defend yourself and instead gifting enough gold to Nakor so he could upgrade his army and run 100% tech
*Signing peace with Slaze two turns before you die and gifting him cities that we were about to capture

Your conduct makes me so angry, I don't even know what else to say. Why couldn't you just play the game to the best of your abilities, and leave it at that? Why do you have go give the other teams advantages just to spite us? Just because we have played well? Despite having numerous opportunities to do so, we haven't smacked anyone publicly. We haven't sent any taunting emails, posted any insults in any of the public threads, have been respectful of the other teams in the game, and been a good ally to those who cared to work with us.

I will never play another game, Pitboss, or otherwise with you, nor will I play another Pitboss game where such blatantly cheesy gifting tactics are allowed. Who cares about sportsmanship, huh?

Regarding gifting cities/units, I considered it a viable tactic because of my newbness. Receiving them from Jowy at the end of his war was fine by me because I had already gifted him settlers for those cities. If you were so against it you should have just taken them by force then. That was already mentioned by somebody up thread! I couldn't hold those cities and probably couldn't have done much better than Jowy had you decided to fully come at me then! Your acknowledgement (by letting me keep them, then and there, made this tactic acceptable play). Making my allies stronger while I go down isn't cheesy or slimy. It's just another tactic. You guys got tons of spoils of war for the price of mostly nothing. So you didn't get everything...whoop de do.

I'm not touching the turntimer stuff...I've made myself clear on that already. I was hardly the only one "manipulating the clock" though. I made sure I understood the rules...it really wasn't that hard. Considering you put so much effort into the game, you would think you would have atleast tried to read them. Thought they were unfair? You had your chance to argue against them earlier. No sense complaining about them after the fact.

Backstabbing Slaze had nothing to do with you...what would you care apart from chalking it up to one more thing showing I shouldn't be trusted in pb2?

I did my best to defend myself and last as long as I could, while giving my allies my best shot to help them last longer. I do not see anything wrong with helping Nakor remain competitive and I do not feel guilty or remorse about that at all. Again, my gifting stuff away was not about spiting you or some stupid vendetta you thought I had against you!

With my whole 5 MP games now under my belt (playing in #6) and your (probable) 500+ games is there any reason why you and I WOULD be in another game together? Put aside your apparant dislike for me aside for a second and think about it. Why the hell would either of us want to play with the other? It would be a cake walk for you and me getting destroyed. Not fun for either of us and that's the whole point right? I'm not exactly upset you don't want to play with me. Feeling's mutual.

If you're so upset about my complete newbish play and tactics perhaps you shouldn't participate in games where newbs play. I thought the greatest aspect of RB is that I feel newbs were welcome and weren't berated. Sullla has made some amazing comments both in the thread and post-game discussion that have tackled my play with criticism(s) while allowing me to learn from it. This post by yourself (and possibly mine now) is nothing but destructive/counter productive.

This post by you is the exact reason why you guys got so much flak from lurkers and makes it look like Jowy had the right of your character way back when...even if he didn't have the right to attack it.

Athlete

[Speaker]

The unit and gold gifting was utter bullshit. Why didn't you just play the game to the best of your ability and then leave it at that? Do you not think it was a complete artificial advantage to give fully mature cities to other players, and gift hundreds of gold per turn to other players, allowing them to run 100% tech for 20+ turns? That's not diplomacy, that's crap, and totally unbalances the game. Would it have been fair if I played one civ, Sullla played another, and then at some point I gifted him all my cities, gold, and units? That would have been technically legal, right? Right? Helping my ally and all that jazz? What if at the start of the war you had gifted your border cities (which you abandoned) to Nakor, whom we did not have "Open Borders" with? We would have had to declare war on Nakor to continue our war with you? That would have been legal, right? What if every time we moved our units up to a city, you gifted it away? That wasn't illegal either! There are rules, and then there is doing what is sportsmanlike. You'll note that Sullla and I played this game with 100% honorable in-game actions. You did not, not in the slightest.

And really, give me a break with your ridiculous "defense" of your turn timer manipulation. You checked basically every turn multiple times, and refused to end turn unless it perfectly suited you, and took full advantage of the horrible ruleset to slave your cities outside of your playing time, as it suited you. Sullla and I did this just a few times, in response to you, but most of the time we coordinated by IM or text message, while one of us (usually me) was on the road for work, or made some other sacrifices to get together each evening and hammer out the turn.

Classless? I posted my critique of your playstyle, which I didn't agree with, especially considering one of the main tenets of Realms Beyond has always been to "play the hand you were dealt," and "play to the bitter end." You did neither of these things. I called you on it. Whatever. I didn't call you names, other than describing your play as being "scumbaggy." I didn't call you a noob, curse at you, or otherwise act derisively toward you in this post. I don't care in the slightest if you make noob mistakes in your city or worker management, unit movement, or whatever. I do care when you unbalance the game by creating an artificial advantage for another team. Perhaps you didn't even understand how unbalancing it is to give hundreds of gold per turn. Maybe it didn't seem like a huge deal. It was. It was a similarly huge deal when Whosit gifted several mature cities on the center island to Nakor. That would have been a HUGE deal actually, if we hadn't taken down Nakor like we did.

[Dantski]

*shrug*

I felt the mass gifting of cities was cheap. The gifting of anything to HRE seemed ridiculous given that HRE did nothing to help its allies all game (unless you count the phony war they had with Korea).

The slaze situation was a really bizarre one, gifting some units is understandable, but gifting a whole army? I would never do such a thing and it was a weedy move on slaze's part that I'm sure he regrets even considering.

As for the comments made by Speaker + Sullla in this thread....I'm not taking any of them personally so it doesn't bother me. I've never taken Civ seriously enough to be upset when people poke holes in my play, however I can see why some people didn't like your remarks about others.

Oh and India was just as guilty of turn timer manipulation as any other team, it wasn't much fun to have turns drag on for no good reason which was one reason I made no attempt to get the 2nd half of the timer in my war with HRE later.

Anyway it was a fun game while it lasted

[Nakor]

Sorry, Dantski, we (HRE) DID do things on the war with Korea. We send huge amounts of cash to Whosit so he could tech to better units and stay alive AND we kept a huge stack of Korean units occupied at their border. If you read out thread, we always considered a move against Korea during the war, but never felt we were in a position to make a decisive strike (and India has learned us how that should be done).


To all of you: If we had known that city-gifting and gold gifting were such an issue, we wouldn't have accepted them, but since it wasn't in the rules...
It was and is, as athlete pointed out, just a way to try and make your friends more competitive in the game. And yes, we of HRE benefited a great deal. Guess we did something right in our communication and diplomatic part of the game. Considering that Korea seriously thought about aiding us in the war against India again shows that our diplomacy was far better then our game play.

I don't take all comments Sullla made about my tactics before Cow personally either, though I do feel, and have posted, that the response to our role in that part of the game was made far bigger then it really was. During this game, everybody lied to each other and sometimes told a bit of truth. In my opinion (and I've played a lot of boardgame Diplomacy) it's part of the game and you have to keep giving people new chances and don't take things personal. It's just a game, after all.

I'd love to play another game against Sullla and others and see if we can get past these grudges that some still hold and show him that I can be an honest partner (or backstab him again if the opportunity arrises).

[Twinkletoes89]

Look everyone, the game is over and maybe its time to just forget about all the anger and move on?

Carrying on such a pointless debate will just serve to make you all angry and that's it.