[No players] Big epic lurking - PB74

[Gavagai]

I only looked through the concession debate here so far but this is already hilarious. It looks like Evil Coalition could not even concede in a clear unambiguous way like normal people do.

[pindicator]

We had to be evil to even ourselves in the end

[Gavagai]

We had to be evil to even ourselves in the end

With you I have no grievances, from your POV this war was the only path to victory, I think. Mig and Comm, on the other hand, would have much better chances for winning the game if they chose to split you between themselves instead of dogpiling me  I think this dogpile, unless I perform especially poorly, could only lead to increasing your victory chances at the expense of everyone else's, this is why it was a stupid move on their part.

[Hitru]

Yeah, we needed this war and tbh it was going really well. We just finished our industrial core and had sushi to grow further while you had to have huge ww. If Comm and Mig would stay in war I believe we would have won as our combined mfg was a lot higher than yours ( although it seems both Comm and Mig lost huge stacks without doing a lot, not sure what happened as I have not red anything yet).

In any case from our end we said we concede if Comm and Mig concede as we could not win without them, at least not yet.

[Gavagai]

Yeah, we needed this war and tbh it was going really well. We just finished our industrial core and had sushi to grow further while you had to have huge ww. If Comm and Mig would stay in war I believe we would have won as our combined mfg was a lot higher than yours ( although it seems both Comm and Mig lost huge stacks without doing a lot, not sure what happened as I have not red anything yet).

In any case from our end we said we concede if Comm and Mig concede as we could not win without them, at least not yet.

War weariness specifically would not be a long-term issue. I had a golden age scheduled in about ten turns and planned to switch to Police State which would allow me to eliminate WW entirely. But agree otherwise.

[scooter]

We had to be evil to even ourselves in the end

With you I have no grievances, from your POV this war was the only path to victory, I think. Mig and Comm, on the other hand, would have much better chances for winning the game if they chose to split you between themselves instead of dogpiling me  I think this dogpile, unless I perform especially poorly, could only lead to increasing your victory chances at the expense of everyone else's, this is why it was a stupid move on their part.

I still don't really understand how you can conclude the dogpile was a "stupid move" when they did it anyway, and it still wasn't even close to enough to stop you from winning. Are you really suggesting someone else could have won if they let you snowball even more untouched?

[Commodore]

"Attempting to stop me while I'm snowballing is a stupid move" is a bold message, but there's a lot of benefit if you can convince anyone that it's true.

[Gavagai]

We had to be evil to even ourselves in the end

With you I have no grievances, from your POV this war was the only path to victory, I think. Mig and Comm, on the other hand, would have much better chances for winning the game if they chose to split you between themselves instead of dogpiling me  I think this dogpile, unless I perform especially poorly, could only lead to increasing your victory chances at the expense of everyone else's, this is why it was a stupid move on their part.

I still don't really understand how you can conclude the dogpile was a "stupid move" when they did it anyway, and it still wasn't even close to enough to stop you from winning. Are you really suggesting someone else could have won if they let you snowball even more untouched?

I don't get this argument at all. They did a stupid thing and lost the game because of it. How is their loss an argument that doing this stupid thing was justified? Should not it be, you know, the other way around? They did not lose because I was some sort of unstoppable juggernaut - they lost because the war hurt their economies more than it hurt mine, as the food graph I posted in Mig's thread, I think, nicely illustrates. In the alternative default scenario where they just do nothing the gap between us would be narrower than it was at the end of the war, not wider. Mig was on track to overtake me in food before he started whipping out his Destroyers. Commodore was never behind at all and he won our first war, pushing me back from his island. There was never an objective reason for him to be behind (as I argued extensively in my thread), it was his choice to put all his chips on building a giant army and trying to defeat me militarily.
They had, fundamentally, two ways to deal with my lead. They could try to challenge me directly (as they did) or they could try to improve their position and outsnowball me. When it comes to the latter they both had promising avenues. Attacking Pindicator, of course, is the most risky and ambitious road, I am not certain it is the best play. But Commodore, at the very least, always could eat Tarkeel and Plemo without much difficulty and I even offered him an opportunity to do so. With the resources Commodore assembled against me, it could have been done very quickly. Even if we assume I take out Piccadilly in the meantime, Commodore would still end up with way more land than I would have. Mig could just chill and invest in internal development. His main advantage was security - my mfg lead (the only indicator where I had a significant lead) did not mean much as I had to convert my extra production into units while Mig literally had no enemies. In some scenarios, he could just build factories and power plants and then run research everywhere going straight for space (I feared Pindicator would do exactly that).
I think these alternatives are so much more attractive that if I were in their position attacking Oceania would not even be on my radar. I don't understand why this idea seems so alien to everyone. It reminds me of PB66 where I never went to war with Plemo because I did not see an opportunity for quick and easy gains and figured such a war would only improve Tarkeel's relative position. So I instead went for growing at the expense of nearby weak civ (did not work out at the end but it's a different story). The scenario we had here was very similar in form - the war massively improved Pindicator's position while Com and especially Mig suffered massive harm to their economies.
One scenario where the war could be justified would be if they had some powerful alpha-strike planned which would quickly bring me to the knees (and this is the only way in which you should fight a late-game war). But they did not even try to do anything like that. Commodore's invasion was the most well-telegraphed attack I've ever seen (as documented in my thread). Mig, by his own admission, had "no army and no plan" and, by his own admission once again, counted on winning "the war of attrition". But the main winner of any kind of war of attrition would always be Pindicator who would suffer the least attrition because of this geography. So - what was the point for Mig in trading one hegemon for another?
So, yeah, a stupid dogpile - exactly the sort of dogpile for which I didn't go in PB66.

[Mjmd]

So what would you have done in PB66 if you didn't think I could hold / push back? What would you have done if you thought Plemo would win that war fairly easily? I don't' think you are wrong that there were other paths specifically regarding Pin invading Tarkeel, but it requires either A) that you do nothing, which while that is what you say you would have done they don't know that, or B) them hoping whomever you pick as a target can hold without them.

[Gavagai]

So what would you have done in PB66 if you didn't think I could hold / push back? What would you have done if you thought Plemo would win that war fairly easily? I don't' think you are wrong that there were other paths specifically regarding Pin invading Tarkeel, but it requires either A) that you do nothing, which while that is what you say you would have done they don't know that, or B) them hoping whomever you pick as a target can hold without them.

In PB66 one of my contingency plans was to invade you if you started to fall apart  Keep in mind, though, that in PB66 Plemo kept a lot of units on our border. That made any attack against him prohibitively costly for me but also probably contributed to your ability to hold him off. So, me not attacking him and you being able to fight him on equal terms are interconnected variables.
"they don't know that" - they do. I offered both of them fixed-term NAPs. I would agree for a longer term if they asked me for it. Also, in the case of Commodore - I could not really do much to harm him. At best, I could take his islands, compared to Pindicator's core their value is negligible. Even in our first war a possible option for him would be to ignore me, give me the island I demanded and proceed to take out Plemo. 
(To be sure, hardly a decision he could make - what I got from his thread, he greatly overestimated my level of commitment and the resources I had available in this theater. He expected me to take all his western possessions - something I did not even dream about - and responded accordingly. I was very lucky to get out of this just by giving up my gains but Commodore's overcommitment hurt him long-term and was the beginning of his fall.)