[spoilers] Commodore's RNG Report

[Charriu]

Oh I didn't notice you were starting a game of reverse civ

[Miguelito]

The Celtic theory of victory: Remain steady while everybody else decays?

[Commodore]

The Celtic theory of victory: Remain steady while everybody else decays?

This is 64, there is no "victory", there is only loss.

[Hitru]

Someone always loses the least though

[Commodore]

Someone always loses the least though

It ain't Superdeath, then.

Poor Superdeath, but this is self-inflicted. He's never met an alliance he won't defect from; his diplomacy is always treacherous, he's prone to drop out of any team he's in the second he gets a chance. He plays clock games, he abuses the letter of the law and a peace treaty with him just means he'll be passive-aggressive. Noogerfrooger seems to be done with him, too. Literally the only use the Allies can get out of Superdeath at this point is as a nice distracting victim while we try to knock out Ginger before turning this into a weak 2 vs overlord 1. 

Carthago delenda est, Not because he's against us, but because him "for" us is worthless.

[Ginger()]

Well now that it’s all done I wanted to lament how we played the best development games with the weakest map positions and then smashed our blood, sweat, and tears into each other for 5 wars.

Could I have actually taken your capital on that first attack? I was only getting ~20% odds against your archers and didn’t feel comfortable just slamming and hoping for the best, especially because I didn’t know how much you could boat in as I marched in.

My plan originally was to pick up Oracle and chop out Colossus in Dune (ever greedy with the wonders) but Gav’s attack prevented me from following through on that.

I’m very annoyed by the limited directions this map gave me. Either a fuck ton of hills and no-man’s land to SD/Gav or that suspiciously iron-rich soil in the isthmus

[Commodore]

Well now that it’s all done I wanted to lament how we played the best development games with the weakest map positions and then smashed our blood, sweat, and tears into each other for 5 wars.

Could I have actually taken your capital on that first attack? I was only getting ~20% odds against your archers and didn’t feel comfortable just slamming and hoping for the best, especially because I didn’t know how much you could boat in as I marched in.

My plan originally was to pick up Oracle and chop out Colossus in Dune (ever greedy with the wonders) but Gav’s attack prevented me from following through on that.

I’m very annoyed by the limited directions this map gave me. Either a fuck ton of hills and no-man’s land to SD/Gav or that suspiciously iron-rich soil in the isthmus

Lot of tragedy there. I think you could have taken it, 20% is pretty decent odds but the saddest thing is that as narrow as that border was and as nice as your defensive line was, you could have had a demilitarized border with me all game. Less fun drama that way though.

[Commodore]

Pitboss 64: Coroner’s Report
And not with a bang, but with a whimper, thus Pitboss 64 comes to a close. Amicalola, crushed by life and no longer having any fun, conceded to Noegorefrogore, who in turn agreed to a draw. It’s a sad ending to an incredibly entertaining game, but that’s also completely fair…we play these things for fun, and it sounds like it’s been miserable for Amicalola for a long time. Hope life gets brighter for him soon, and in the meanwhile he can be proud of a very good game. It’s been crazy, but I’ve loved it. Let’s now judge harshly, because nobody played this perfect. Global demographics have fallen hilariously in the last fifty turns:


We’ll go by score, so let’s look at Amicalola first. Persia was a blessed land, green and with easy access to islands. The quixotic choice to completely neglect cottages was amusing, and might possibly have given all of us a chance, but the Protective/GLH economy was very impressive and a good old-fashioned Realms Beyond variant Grading on a curve, map start gives Amicalola a +0:

Amicalola’s game was dominant from the very beginning. His early Great Lighthouse play was inspired, giving him a solid economy particularly with his aggressive island reach. He was helped tremendously by Ginger in those islands, there were multiple times early when I was close to taking them but the Next Greek Invasion stopped me. Amicalola seemed to do a good job diplomatically, balancing the annoyed-but-allying-with-him Nowg and Gav in a way that kept his southern border secure, and he never really got targeted by SD and I until the Final Dogpile when it was that or lose. Courthouse, harbor, and bazar whipping waves impressed me, he was generally keeping pace with Ginger and Nugfruger at the top research position. Good game.

Next is our other game winner, Enaofraoger. Sumer was another pretty green land, loaded with coast. The main challenges were twofold: His green prime cottage land was thickly jungled, and the geometry of the inland sea there made expansion westward hard. Map start gives Nawfurgur a +5:

Noggerfrauger seemed to struggle with his start, probably in a large part due to his lack of expansion traits. Darius is the top leader on the map, but he definitely suffers in the landgrab, and Naograofru’s special player trait is a whopping -15 “You took a spot I wanted!” diplo malus, which led him to scramble heavily for the western trash land beyond his inner sea, while he might well have been better served trying to contest the north island chain from Amicalola. Although he ultimately did beat Gavagai in their long struggle, I’m not entirely sure it was a fight he needed. Nevertheless, given his territorial priors, Nowfrowgower managed his empire well enough despite the constant war, and his draw position was due to his masterful handling of the endgame diplomacy.

Superdeath is next in line, somehow. Carthage is a rather miserable land, dry and hilly. Superdeath’s initial move made it even worse, and he’s a resolute hill-miner, so absent Biology and Sid’s Sushi, this place is garunteed to be somewhat underworked. Now it is a big peninsula with a decent amount of coast, so Imp/Fin SD did have the chance to make a decent economy, but the man hates lighthouses. Map start gives Superdeath a +10:

The critiques I have of Superdeath’s game are primarily economic actually. Financial ignoring coasts, basically. He seemed to do a pretty decent job at the landgrab, and his long wars with Gavagai ended in a victory in the end, that all-in for the Pyramids was a good move. Stopping the terror that was a cannon offensive butt cold was an impressive military victory too. Diplomacy was as usual a complete cluster, some good strokes here and there (including paying for my Engineering lurch), but he’s completely unreliable in the end and that saw him being given up as a sacrifice. It’s the usual SD story, entertaining but ultimately a mixed bag.

Commodore, as ever this game, is hanging out here battling for third place. Default Celtia is a teeny tiny little isthmus, barely any territory at all. My capital is easily the worst of the lot, saved a little bit by the luck of moving to pick up copper. Green as the isthmus is, only a handful of tiles are here which disincentivized my cottaging even without the constant marauding Greeks. Map start gives Commodore a +20:

…but, there’s a beautiful counterpoint, in the gorgeous Green Island I had all to myself in the north. I’m genuinely proud of the development job I did here on this cottage-filled, lush subcontinent. Securing it was a big deal, the reason I worked so extremely hard at killing off all the Greek cities on the northern coast, but it’s been great all game. Map in the end brings down the grading bonus to just a +10:

I’m not the best suited to evaluate the entire game I played here, the intractable problem that the whole game felt like it turned on was Ginger. He was an existential threat from that beautiful Machinery bulb; with perfect game knowledge it’s entirely possible that an axe rush might have been the only way to win the game, which is whack. I really do think my Colossus beeline saved my bacon, but bad luck on the Phi rolls was very frustrating afterwards. My defensive campaigns did well but I never made much on the attack, Ginger’s chances of winning were crushed by the dogpile I carefully organized, not any brilliant military tactics. Maybe I should have taken crazier risks, it’s just hard to say.

Ginger’s little rump state is the same size as it ever was. Greece is a very interesting start, I think he might have the best capital + first ring of cites situation in this game, but then he’s in a wedge situation either pushing up the narrow Celtic Isthmus or diving into the Hill Country to the east. Still feel like it’s a good setup, but not as good as Persia, so map start gives Ginger a +5:

Ginger had a very interesting game. It’s a very novel type of game; he bucked the meta entirely and went for a narrow/tall game, combining intensive development, Serfdom, and the classic Great Person roulette into an empire that had several shots at winning. I think the only thing that stopped him from victory was not flexing into Slavery; he came within about 4-5 crossbows, then half a dozen knights, then a dozen pikes from winning his very near-run military conquest campaigns, but the unwillingness to whip suddenly gave his victims just enough time to build up a ton of lower-tech trash. The dogpile that took him out of contention wasn’t his fault, and he did a good job defending when it came. I would have been willing to have a peaceful border with him before his first invasion, but once that diplomatic choice had been made, it was made. Ultimately didn’t work out, but very very interesting game for Ginger here.

Finally, Gavagai the dead and gone. Ethiopia’s start was very much the Diplomacy Austria start…he was always going to end this game either on top or completely gone. Land quality was above average for the map, maybe a little better, and the position was both precarious and yet full of opportunities. Map start gives Gavagai a +5:

I wasn’t intimately familiar with Gavagai during the game but it appears that ultimately his fate was sealed not through development (although his economy crash hurt), but from ending up without any secure borders. His choice to punish Ginger early was tremendously helpful to me but it made Greece mad, he grabbed just enough territory to his north to force Superdeath to focus just on him, and the delicate diplomatic balance with Nowg and Amica eventually fell against him. That was a tremendously tricky situation though, completely understandable outcome in the end.

[Magic Science]

Pitboss 64: Coroner’s Report

Good coroner's report.

Ginger
...
I would have been willing to have a peaceful border with him before his first invasion, but once that diplomatic choice had been made, it was made.

But you had already established a peaceful border with naufragar many turns before Ginger attacked. (Or did you not see that diplomacy the same way naufragar did?). Were you really planning to establish peaceful borders with both your land neighbors? How would that have worked?

What is the final count for "Number of Wars vs. Ginger"? It must be some kind of record.

[Zed-F]

Commodore had the weakest start position and it wouldn’t have been in his interest to attack either of his land neighbors, at least until they’d worn themselves out attacking someone else.