RB Pitboss #2 - Postgame Discussion Thread

[Kristian95]

Just wanted to chime in, letting you know Jowy, that your Youtube video was absolutely brilliant! Great job on that one, and great choice of atmosphere music!!

[Dantski]

oh boy

I'm kind of amused that Dantski wrote in his very first post: "I plan on signing very few NAP's this game to try and leave myself open to opportunistic attacks on others," only to tie his hands with NAPs multiple times later on

Unfortunately NAP's seem to be the human equivalent of Pleased/Friendly relations for the most part.

Despite the comments, I still don't really understand the Julius Caesar and Mali picks. If you wanted rapid expansion with skirmishers for early defense, wouldn't Joao or Catherine of Mali have been a better pick

I hated my pick soon enough too. I was trying out various combinations in test games and I noticed Julius expanded super fast. I also didn't fully understand how the organized + imperialistic bonuses worked.

Although some of the lurkers were critical, I don't think it was necessarily a bad play to sign NAPs with India and Holy Rome in the early game. Dantski could have used those NAP to expand like a mad fiend, plopping down aggressive cities everywhere with skirmishers and then daring his neighbors to do anything about it. (This could have worked really well with a Cre/Imp Cathy pick!) The problem wasn't with signing the NAPs, it came when Dantski didn't use that window of opportunity to leverage his Imperialistic trait. It's a bad sign with Fin/Phi India is out-expanding your Imperialistic civ!

Poor expansion is the result of lack of Civ playing. I think I completed around 10 Vanilla games and maybe 3 BtS games. Add in a couple of SG's and I really don't have my early growth anywhere near optimized. Not sure city spam would've worked considering the maintenance costs were a LOT higher than I expected.

While Dantski's land was still very fertile, there's no question that it wasn't as good as the land that we had to the north. I guess in retrospect another river or two (or fewer rivers in our land) would have been better. But I know full well that you can't get everything perfect when designing the map! The one we had was great.

The main problem for me was, after settling Djenne, where were my settling options? Krondor basically took the food resources in that area, the place I settled Gao had very little production (ironically built ToA though). Kumbi seemed to be virtually my only option and its maintenance distance hurt considerably.

I'm still not sure why Dantski didn't take it to Holy Rome immediately as punishment for the aggressive Krondor spot. Signing those NAPs really ties your hands...

My 3rd city was the one grabbing copper, whereas Krondor was their 2nd. They produced a few axes early on which went to Crydee the barb city and that put me off.

I'm.... surprised.... at how Dantski chose to play the diplomacy. With Nakor settling aggressively on his doorstep, and an agreement in place with India not to settle additional encroaching cities with one another, Dantski immediately decided to ask Jowy about attacking our team on first contact. I don't understand that one! We establish a friendly rapport with Dantski, and he tries to poison other teams against us on first contact? Huh?

Basic character flaw, I really like to fight against the strongest people!

I believe the thinking was "I have my UU and Greece has their UU", lets smack the person between us. In hindsight, I think that went well

Giving away another contested barb city location to Holy Rome "for their help against Sulla" was another dumb play. Dantski gave away all the disputed land to the southeast just for the purposes of attacking my team. Hope it was worth it...

It was closer to them and they had axes earlier than me. Commented on Krondor securing the other SE resources.

I'm not sure this needs commentary, aside from "that's not how to play an Imperialistic leader" and "we weren't lying when we said Ancient Age wars were counter-productive."

This is where I criticize your diplomacy. You did use the counter productive argument many times, once or twice I'd get an email not long after suggesting I fight HRE!

As for the rest.... well updating a thread isn't that much fun and its even less fun when responses are minimal while other threads get 1k views a day. A large army of axes was foolish? I'm not sure what else you'd expect me to build? I had a few spears and a couple of chariots, more of those really wouldn't have helped. HA's were still a distance away if I'd chosen to tech HBR and I only got Iron hooked up about the same time as the war started. Have to remember that we were trying to have some element of surprise.

Landwise, without conquering and my poor economic traits (Org isn't as good as Fin thats for sure), I was doomed to a low finish position. Agree that even with your capital + Antietam, I would've had a very difficult time digging myself out of a technological hole.

As for the decision to switch sides, it was great for my team but almost certainly the wrong move overall. Once you commit to a huge gamble attack like that, you have to go through with it to the finish. Building all those axes and then never getting anything out of them was a deathblow to Dantski's chances to become a major power

Disagree that it was the wrong move to switch. At that point it was a matter of long term survival and CoW hadn't excelled in wartime while India had. The later destruction of Greece and Ottomans I felt vindicated this decision. Also I felt with India just discovering catapults and Whosits mistake with galleys, I needed out of the war. I definately should've talked about it with CoW first though!

Even at the end of the game, we never really trusted Dantski much at all. It was an alliance of convenience on both sides. That's a shame, but I doubt anyone in the game would have much affection or trust for a team that switched sides in such dramatic fashion earlier. Oh well. Thanks for your help in the war against Holy Rome, Dantski!

I assure you the lack of trust was mutual! :neenernee

Was just waiting for you to stomp me after Jowy, didn't seem likely that I'd get any help from my old 'friends'.



Anyway my list of excuses

1. Poor leader pick (didn't like Mali that much either)
2. Drew the short straw on land. HRE's only copper required them to interfere with my settling massively.
3. My odd determination to fight strong players
4. Not very good at Civ!

[Sullla]

Right, Ancient Age wars are indeed counterproductive. You should have been building your cheap settlers, not axes. However, once you did have all those axes, you needed to get something out of them! After the India war ended, you had something like the #3 military in the world, with Holy Rome languishing in #8 place next door. That's why we encouraged you to attack, because it was the right move in that context. And because it would have helped us a lot too! But I guess I can understand why you would have felt bad about attacking a former ally.

I saw a lot of the other teams quoting my emails out of context and seeing them as evidence of lying. For example, taking an email from T50 and then another one from T80 that contradicted one another, without mentioning that the world situation had changed significantly during the interval. I think it goes back to what someone posted here earlier, if you're disposed to see someone in a positive/negative light, you start to see everything from that angle. We certainly felt that way about athlete and Nakor at times, probably unfairly!

[scooter]

Ah nevermind then, I thought there's some kind of a trick to get it working since mine always unloads when trying to enter a pitboss game.

You've got to drop it in CustomAssets in order to get it to work without loading/unloading it. Two different ways to use a mod:

1. Install it in the /mods folder, meaning the core game is untouched, and you have to load/unload it as a mod.
2. Drop it in CustomAssets - which means the core game will use that instead. You don't have to load/unload it, but your core game is essentially modified until you remove it.

#2 is no big deal for something like Blue Marble, because it's a graphical mod only - no gameplay changes.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

I saw a lot of the other teams quoting my emails out of context and seeing them as evidence of lying. For example, taking an email from T50 and then another one from T80 that contradicted one another, without mentioning that the world situation had changed significantly during the interval.

No. No no no no no. Not if you're trying to get better at diplomacy.

You're blocking yourself from seeing the problem.


Disclaimer: says the guy who only plays SP.

[m4gill4]

As for the rest.... well updating a thread isn't that much fun and its even less fun when responses are minimal while other threads get 1k views a day.

The threads with the most content were also the most popular. I for one was very curious to hear your thoughts and I'm sure I wasn't alone. However, early on you expressed disdain for the thread and the lurkers respected that and for the most part refrained from badgering you about it. Not that we didn't want to...

Slaze was somewhat lax on updating his thread but never specifically said he didn't want to, so we would bug him for an update every once in a while and he would oblige us.

[Sullla]

Well, this should be interesting. athlete and kalin's thread:

- Warrior heavy opening seemed to work out OK, although it was slow in terms of growth. Taking the capital to size 4 before building a worker is generally not the best move though. I'm not at all sure about the value of whipping two workers consecutively either (double-whip followed by single whip). That dropped the capital back to size 1, and further added a -2 happiness penalty which froze it at size 3! (size 4 with furs) Plus the capital had to spend turns regrowing before it could start on a settler for the second city. Anyway, certainly an interesting opening, but possibly not the best.

- Heh, athlete really wanted to be friends with Byzantium. Boy, that aggressive settling move looks even dumber in retrospect!

- I really don't understand why athlete and kalin were carrying on separate diplomatic correspondences. That had to have been extremely confusing. Why not pick one person and have them send all the messages (?)

- In all honesty: the chariot attack on Paris should have failed. If you're going to rush with chariots, you need to RUSH with them. You would have been better off not finishing that second settler (which didn't contribute to the initial attack) and swapping immediately to max chariots. With both workers chopping, you can cut 2 forests every 4 turns (or 1 every 2 turns) which is 80 shields in 8 turns. With your capital pulling 7 shields/turn and whipping factored in, I think you could have managed 6-7 chariots pretty easily instead of the 4 that you actually had. There was also no need to do the whole road-building charade on the border:



Put the chariots on the rice tile, which can't be seen by anyone else. Instead of building a road, Owen Lars should be chopping that forest tile. Then the chariots move NW-W-W and can still hit Paris easily on the second turn of the war, with full visibility into the city (and defensive bonus from the forest tile if you choose to bring along any other units). Truthfully, you should have failed on this attack if Byzantium had been smart enough to bring along even one archer. You guys deserve a ton of credit for playing such a bold move... but it was lucky, and you really should have needed to bring more chariots to the initial attack.

I hope this doesn't sound arrogant or anything. athlete specifically asked us at one point in the game for tactical advice, so here's some of it now that the game is over.

- I don't really approve of outright lying to other teams (worker "accidentally roading"), but I guess that's more of a personal thing. Some of the other lurkers are apparently OK with everything that goes on diplomatically. What's funny is that the roading action was completely unnecessary, and actually conterproductive, as said above. Byzantium made the mistake of not realizing what was going on, so you could say it was their own fault for believing such obvious half-truths.

- It wasn't a bad move to try and broker peace between Rome and Korea, in the hopes of getting Whosit to settle towards Inca. Of course, it didn't work out in the long run, not least because your own team encouraged Whosit to keep attacking other targets, but the thinking at the time was sound.

- You guys had only a single cottage in your entire territory on T80. Yes, I know about the war with Byzantium and all - but still. That was a bad sign for the long term.

- I think I already posted this when looking at Byzantium's thread, but I can't believe they only built 4 archers for their capital, while taking the time to build Oracle (!!!) plus galley plus settler. They could have had 10+ archers so easily, and then gone on to do galley/settler after that, ensuring their survival. At the very least, that would have helped out my team a whole lot, and kept you from sending those horse archers over! Even with just the four archers defending, your BARELY managed to take their capital. Again, no knock on athlete and kalin, but Byzantium really should not have been eliminated there. (You should have needed catapults to eliminate their capital, if they had played things properly.)

If you are short on workers, grow to size 4, and double slave one out. Provided you have gotten granaries in place before the foodbox is half full at size 2 it's a pretty quick way to get a worker out. Obviously you'll need 2 workers present to get the granary chopped out quickly in new cities an the food hooked.

Thanks for the tip Krill! I believe this is what we'll probably due with Istanbul. It will have the granary complete with 2 food sources hooked up soon so we'll definitely be considering it.

- I have no objections to this kind of stuff, and I like having lurkers involved in the games. But seeing how Krill relentlessly attacked lurkers in our own thread and posted multiple CODE OF CONDUCT messages... well, it's interesting to see posts like this in the other threads. Very interesting. :rolleyes:

- I did appreciate reading your post months after the fact where you thought we deserved the second half of the turn split, athlete. Thank you very much for that!



- I really like this picture, as it illustrates just how far away Rome and Ottomans were from India at the time of the attack. Make of that what you will.

- Not going to go into the details here, there are many long posts in our thread on the tactical mistakes made by your team (and all the other attackers!) in the war against India earlier. It was definitely a tough fight for us, and I can imagine how frustrating it must have been on the offensive.

- I made this point after reading Whosit's thread, which bears repeating here. A lot of the lurker commentators suggested that athlete's attack against us was a good move because it was easy - they had the horse archers left over from the last war, so it didn't "cost them anything." I disagreed with that in Whosit's thread, and I feel the same way here:

Coruscant 2-pop whipped an axe last turn from scratch

Why? Well a few reasons. I believe we'll need to focus on HA's to help eliminate the Cow yet we needed an axe immediately to help deal with the barb city. It's at size 2 with 2 fully fortified warriors and an axe (a 2nd appeared after our chariot killed the first). The axe will then join the spear, the chariot and a chariot currently in Greece territory to land via galley in India. The overflow will go nicely into the stable allowing us to get a couple HA's out.

Because the whole Ottoman army was off dying in India, athlete was forced to build more units for home defense, and continued to get harassed by barbarians which could have been cleaned up with ease by those horse archers. Remember, building lots of axes/chariots/spears/horse archers is not what you want to be doing in the early game. Minimize those unit builds as much as possible, so you can spam your granaries, libraries, markets, etc. So while you can make a case that the war was "necessary", I don't buy the argument that it was "easy" for any of the teams involved. They could have used that same production on other, more useful pursuits.

- In case there's still any confusion on this: no lurkers tipped us off about any attack coming. None. The paranoia towards lurkers in this game was completely unjustified (everyone behaved admirably). It was pretty obvious from shifts in diplomatic tone (and NAP refusals) what other teams were planning. athlete, the fact that you had multiple units scouting around our borders was highly suspicious, not to mention Jowy's determination to play a game of brinksmanship with us (which he would never have done without allies). Nakor and Whosit were the only ones that surprised me, and Speaker sniffed out Rome's involvement because of all the Praetorians missing in Roman territory.

Seriously, don't blame the lurkers.

- I didn't know that you had plans to build the Great Lighthouse. The game would have been... different... if you had gotten the Lighthouse instead of Korea! And then the same city lost out on Hanging Gardens due to our team taking Jowy's stone. I wish I could feel bad about that, but I don't, haha.

- Do you think gifting away so much gold to other teams for various favors was worth it? I tend to feel that gold is a precious resource in a No Trading game, and basically all of your commerce should go into as much tech as possible. Gifting away gold means you're not spending it on tech. What do you think in retrospect, athlete?

- About the Incan war (which clearly was a terrible mistake in retrospect)... I don't think it was wise to split up the stacks the way you did:



I haven't even read the details of what happened yet, and I can already see something bad is going to result. A galley attack like that from the sea needs the element of surprise, which you wouldn't have here because slaze was able to see the boats 2 turns before the units landed. Going around the outer island to the east quite possibly would have worked better (?) Also, why did you move every unit up to the border one turn before attacking? All that did was reveal exactly what you had to slaze, and removed any possible element of surprise. You could have had them two tiles back and hidden with no loss of movement.

8 Horse Archers
8 Catapults
6 Axemen
4 Praetorians
4 Spearmen
1 Chariot

- Despite what the lurkers may have thought, this was not an impressive stack. The only things that matter are the horse archers, cats, and praetorians. Not one of those units gets odds on longbows in cities, so even 20 units isn't really that many. You really needed large numbers of maces and/or knights to attack at this stage of the game!



- Since you asked for advice on what you did wrong, it's pretty simple: your units weren't technologically advanced enough to defeat slaze's forces. You both had equal tech, which means the defender is going to win unless the attacker had overwhelming advantage in numbers (which wasn't the case). For both you and Whosit, you moved in your stack, it was hit with a bunch of cats for collateral damage, and then double-promoted longbows slaughtered everything. Longbows are much better offensive units than a lot of people believe, since they aren't melee (no edge for axes/maces) and get that first strike. The mistake wasn't tactical, it was strategic. That attack was never going to succeed.

- Did India catch breaks, or did we make our own luck in this game?

- I noticed that you didn't post too much on your backstab of slaze in the thread. Look, I don't want to get all preachy, but I really feel that was the worst unethical play in the whole game. slaze put his trust in you, and then you brutally stabbed him in the back with his own army. Wow. That was some dark dealings there... It's definitely not enough to say "it's a game, get over it." I feel (and felt) the same way as slaze, and would have reacted exactly the same way (did react the same way in our thread to other incidents). It felt especially bad to me because you couldn't beat slaze "fairly" with your own army, so you lied and cheated him out of his own army and then came back again a second time. Not meaning anything personal, I'm sure you're a good person in real life athlete, but that was a *LOW* blow there. Your civ inherited a lifetime's worth of bad karma from that!

- You posted nothing on our final war. I can respect that, but would you mind mentioning why you made all those bizarre moves at the end of the game? What was your goal by abandoning so many cities without a fight (?)

The fallout of the CoW [Coalition of the Willing] attack is what left us in the 4 vs 4 so not a lot I could have changed there but if India were run by somebody other than Spullla CoW never would have been realised.

- I found this interesting as a final point.

Reading through the thread and trying to get the "feel" of the whole thing, I believe there was too much focus on the attack from your team. As soon as Byzantium planted their forward city, the whole discussion turned to "attack attack attack!" OK, fairly so, but then even before Byzantium was gone, the main subject of discussion turned to attacking India. Then while that war was going on, half the emails with Whosit had the subject of attacking Inca once the current war was done. Internal development of your own civ seemed to get lost in the shuffle somewhere along the way... I could be wrong, that's just the impression I got from reading. After the early game, there wasn't much talk about what your own cities were researching or building. All diplomacy and the current/next war taking place.

athlete, I did see your post at the end of the thread where you addressed some of our complaints. I'm going to address that in another post though. I'd also love to see some of the other players reading our thread and commenting on it (Nakor, DMOC, slaze, plako, Broker, Dantski, etc.) when they have a chance. I can't be the only one interested in reading all these spoiler threads, right?

[Sullla]

This is another, separate issue I want to raise before any more time passes. I haven't even touched the lurker thread yet, but I've seen comments from a number of people indicated that they hated the way that Speaker and I played. I saw a lot of sentences to the effect of "arrogant jerks" and "lost all respect for them" bouncing around in various places.

Ultimately, how you feel is up to you. I don't feel the need to apologize for posting what I legitimately felt at the time. Speaker and I simply posted our honest thoughts at all times in the thread. If we thought other teams were acting dumb, we said so. When we thought other teams made a nice play, we said the same. I don't see how we could have done things any other way there and been true to ourselves.

That meant that sometimes we ended up posting some nasty stuff about other players/teams. No worse than what I've seen in the other spoiler threads so far, but definitely not nice. I think a lot of lurkers seemed to want me to act differently, or had some kind of nice-guy mental image built up (?) Well, both Speaker and I are fiercely competitive people. It was our goal to win the game, not to make friends along the way. Maybe that shocks some people, but it probably shouldn't. I don't believe we broke any deals with any teams throughout the whole game - most of the nastiness game from out-of-game rules disputes, which hopefully we can solve with more polished rulesets in the future. Did we push for maximum gain in those areas? Of course. We're fiercely competitive, we wanted to win. Did every other team in the game do the same? Yes. How does that make us any different from the rest of the teams then (?)

In the end, we can argue justified or not until the cows come home, but the fact remains that 5 different teams charged around the world to try and eliminate our team from the game, a move unparalleled in any other competition we've had here. (Sure, we saw similar moves against Exploit and regoarrarr in Pitboss #1, but MUCH later in the game. Doing so in the early Classical Age is a different matter entirely.) Several of those teams openly lied to us in their diplomacy to try and backstab more effectively. Yes, we did take it personally; yes, we did make it our mission to eliminate those teams from the game; and yes, we didn't feel much desire to be polite to those teams afterwards. We weren't role-playing Jesus here: I don't see why we should have been expected to turn the other cheek towards teams who were doing their best to kill us. And I think most of you would have reacted the same way, when literally every hand in the game turned against you at once.

No, I have nothing against any of those individuals on a personal level. I'm sure they're all great people in real life. I do ask that anyone reading keep in mind that we had real feelings too, and expecting us to play some kind of completely dispassionate game isn't really fair. I recognize that rooting for the underdog is fun, but too many people seemed to adopt a stance of "team ___ is behind and India is ahead, so that justifies any action taken by them to catch up". And that was darned irritating to us!

I really doubt that we'll play another one of these games, since we got so much flak for this one.

[Whosit]

I can't be the only one interested in reading all these spoiler threads, right?

No, although I'm not sure how you're getting through all the threads so quickly. For some reason, I just wasn't terribly interested in reading the player threads while the game was still on, so I suppose I should start now. Wonder if I can find anything in your thread to actually criticize (for good or bad)?

[darrelljs]

Wonder if I can find anything in your thread to actually criticize (for good or bad)?

Only one way to find out .

I am kind of surprised Sulla is the only one commenting on opponents' threads. Just the thought of getting into those PBEM2 threads had me salivating until all the damn...err I mean all the wonderful lurkers asked us to continue the game. At least read the India thread, after all they did hand everyone their collective ass (except us, cause we were already dead) and with the excruciating detail in which they documented every single turn, you can see exactly how. Just make sure you wear flame retardant clothing .

Darrell