Gaspar and NobleHelium - More Arguments About Buildings & Food.

[NobleHelium]

Barracks builds were inserted in cities that didn't have them and where it would not delay the first Tank build. We should have built one in BK last turn, totally skipped my mind that Tank pumping would want a Barracks.

[Gaspar]

I'll try and get an appropriate turn report up later tonight, rather than Noble showing you F1 after we were attacked for the first time all game.

Bottom line, Dave's actions? Super Cheesy. Commodore? Super whiny and the biggest martyr complex in recorded human history. (P.S. Buddy, I love you, but you keep losing from winnable positions because you make really bad decisions in close games, not because everyone else is Darth Vader.) But there really is nothing these guys can do at this point to change the outcome of this game. They should have conceded 15 turns ago. Since they haven't, I'm looking quite forward to eviscerating both of them.

[Gaspar]

Thought I'd title it with a tribute to a song Dave likes, since Dave's fingerprints are all over this turn. I should say, I suppose my previous post was unnecessarily catty. Sorry. This game however is an example of why we concede when there's a clear winner rather than playing them out - the games end in massively slowed turnpace and bad feelings when they're played past conclusion, and we have both in spades here. When one gets to the point where one cannot win by conventional means, cheesy stuff starts happening.



So to start with here, you can see the beginning of the end, so to speak. We declared war on Commodore to sink 4 transports and a caravel, because he kept teasing us with their location, mostly. We then discover Industrialism, the crappy Aluminum locations, finish our giant middle-finger Versailles and have our Ivory for Spice deal with Dave cancelled by obsoleting Ivory. After that, Commodore spies I assume fail 2x trying to revolt the city and also cut a RR near the city. He then uses 5 cats to eliminate the 40% defense in our 5t old city and the blood starts...



Amusingly he completes the Confucian shrine with probably less than 15t left in the game with Dave's prophet in the middle of sac'ing Cannon on our size 2 city. Perhaps impartial observers can spy all the reasons he's losing in that sentence.



Here the blood is really flowing, with him cleaning up our injured MGs and Infantry. I didn't bother to check the combat log, because who cares really. Maybe he got good rolls, maybe he got terrible ones, I'll never know because I'm sure I'll never want to read his incredibly whiny ass thread. IN THOSE TIMES MY RNG SUCKED/WAS GOOD/HO-HUM LIFE SUCKS/I'LL NEVER WIN/SOMEONE HOLD ME. We did birth another GG - we now have 2 sitting around and could go to 4-promo units out of box in Caldeum but decided we might want them immediately on the field so right now they're just hanging out.



Five Musketeer wins later and he is the proud conqueror of our EFF YOU city planted on the border for the sole reason of trying to steal a few cottage tiles from Kusari. I suppose that serves us right for planting it. You can also see Ichabod completing Angkor Wat and us screwing around with Airships on our turn, a single Destroyer the only blood we drew on our turn.

Here's the situation around <insert random cities named after something only Commodore understands> :




(Huge Image)

I'm not explaining that, but the bottom line is that we're in no position to attack right now. As it turns out, being gifted 30+ units can definitely change the balance of power short term. Of course, those units can't get a kill on any of our real defenders without collateral and once this attack is repelled he's toast, since he can't reinforce near as quickly as we can. But we're definitely on the back foot at the moment, hence the bajillion tank builds Noble showed you. Still, we've got enough units in Caldeum that he would need the RNG luck of a lifetime to win and if he does try and attack I think we can slaughter him on flat ground in a turn or two. But its definitely a dicey situation around Caldeum at the moment.

Other than that we've taken our naval unit superiority and moved a few units in position to harass his coast while defending outs. I'm still expecting an end around attempt on the east coast but he simply can't have enough units to actually do that AND we're relatively well-defended over there with Destroyers.

Bottom line: Next 3-4 turns, dicey. After that, he's dead once we can bring enough tanks to bear. We also intend to raze at least one French city before this game is over.

Here's the demos. If anyone has any questions about the situation, yell.

[NobleHelium]

Commodore used his Artist to bomb Chaz. It still has no defense at the moment because it hasn't regenerated since he removed it all. Of course he still has another Artist to use. *cough*

[Merovech]

This game however is an example of why we concede when there's a clear winner rather than playing them out - the games end in massively slowed turnpace and bad feelings when they're played past conclusion, and we have both in spades here.

This is an excellent point.

[pindicator]

Awesome composite image, btw

[scooter]

Awesome composite image, btw

+1, I always appreciate those.

[NobleHelium]

Summary of our current situation: it's lonely at the top.

My treatise on Commodore is below.

My disdain for Commodore is due to what I consider to be poor character. Specifically, his refusal to admit to errors of judgment. There were several examples of this in PBEM38, it is true, but also plenty of other examples, such as in PB5.

PBEM38 had a banter thread, which I vehemently campaigned against to no avail. The PBEM38 banter thread turned out to be exactly the type of banter thread that you don't want to have, and to my comfort it appears to be the nail in the coffin for banter threads. Or at least they're being called public diplomacy threads now, which they are. Commodore attempted to use the banter thread to draw attention to everyone but himself the entire game, obviously to try to stir up wars that involve everyone else but him. Seven eventually pointed out how "unbantery" the banter thread was after other people such as oledavy started doing it. Instead of admitting the error and moving on, which I would have been fine with, Commodore played the "it doesn't matter anyway" card and said that he's sure nobody was ever persuaded by any of the posts. If you're sure the posts wouldn't be effective, and they're obviously not banter, then why post them at all?

And then of course the Great Musketeer Gift happened. Commodore promptly used them to pseudo-double move us which Gaspar pointed out. Then Commodore tried to claim that he had been building railroads (of which he really only built one tile that shortened the route) so that the musketeers would have enough movement to attack our city normally anyway. Not only was this not true, he moved the musketeers two tiles past the city! Admit you made a mistake and forgot that it would be basically a double move, that's fine. Or you could even say that you don't think it's a double move. But no, he tries to play it off as miscounting. I'd have to be blind or an idiot to believe that.

Side note: I was and still am okay with the general idea of oledavy gifting musketeers to Commodore. He shouldn't have gifted so many that he had to give up two cities to Ichabod right afterwards though, because that definitely hurt his already miniscule chances of winning - he might as well just have gifted all his cities to Commodore then. And apparently he did it because Gaspar (rightly, in my opinion) called him Commodore's vassal in the banter thread (which, by the way, is supposedly for trash talking and that definitely was trash talking). So apparently he hated us all game a lot more than Commodore who surprise attacked him, razed a city, and almost took another one. This is another reason why banter threads are a stupid idea. You dislike your opponents a lot more if you need to talk to them.

PB5 example, because it's not all about PBEM38: pindicator and regoarrarr plant a city across the strait from their capital early on. The city of Coneheads was four tiles from pingo's capital, and ten tiles from Commodore's. And yet even at the end of the game he still insisted that it was a pink dot, when he had seen the entire map and knew the relevant distances (he actually saw it long before that, after he declared on them and found their capital just across the water). He spends the entire game blaming the "pink dot" and his awful starting position, which was actually pretty average for the map. What he never mentions is that he lost his first settler to a wolf and engaged in an ill-advised war to attack a city far away from him and close to his opponent's capital. It's always everyone else's fault that he's doing poorly.

That's why I say Commodore is unlearning. He doesn't learn because he doesn't admit to his mistakes.

[Gaspar]

I'm too tired to report, but I'll get something up tomorrow. Noble's summary is fairly succinct though. We're in a bit more trouble than originally noted but I think the worst is probably over with this turn. The main thing:

People I'm never playing with again:

• Oledavy
  

[Gaspar]

...and to say we feel fine would be an overstatement.

So to expound on the comments Noble and I made during the turn, the major even of the turn was Dave making peace with Ichabod, like so:



Dave gifted Ichabod Palaven and Irune as part of the peace treaty, then moved the two cities remaining garrison's out and gifted them to Commodore. He also followed up by cancelling all remaining deals with us. So, for those of you scoring at home during this game we've... done absolutely nothing to Dave while Commodore backstabbed him and razed a city and Mistabod spent roughly a billion turns at war with him but because we're winning he's basically just whoring off his empire to... make the game more interesting for other people? He certainly can't see any benefit from it, he's absurdly technologically behind and he has the exact same victory chance as Yuri. Not only that, but he had to give up those two cities because he could no longer defend them because he gave the units defending them to Commodore. BUT I BET HE'S LOVING ALL THE ATTENTION IN HIS THREAD. The part that is intensely annoying is that he's moving to extend the game despite the fact that he no longer shows any interest whatsoever in playing his fucking turn in anything remotely resembling a timely fashion.

Anyway, this created two additional issues. Firstly, the Banana was pretty important because Noble basically was squeezing every last drop of health out of the cities so we're losing food in almost every relevant city at the moment. Secondly though, with Dave no longer tying up Ichabod's army, we saw this:



We're assuming he's going to finish rails and march that stack on Bastion's Keep and/or Arreat Crater. We think we can handle it though he definitely conceivably could get a raze with good RNG or slow response from us. The bigger issue with it is that it forces the 4 Tanks being completed this turn in that area from being part of the Commodore defense.

And we're going to need everything for Commodore defense.



He pillaged the 4 tiles highlighted in white there, a town, a sugar plantation, coal mine and a farm. That's not what we responded to this turn, other than picking off a Commodore MG with Caldeum's new tank. We had to respond to this:



We saw a settler in The Bun and pieced two and two together to tell he was going to hit us with that stack healing with a Medic III unit and then raze Halls of Agony and replant Kiki. While its possible we could have defended that all-in-all Halls of Agony was never anything more than a crumple zone so we pulled all the defenders out to Cathedral and Caldeum. Caldeum won't be the city it was ever again - I expect more Commodorian pillaging this turn, but so long as we can still squeeze out 1t tanks we should be okay. Losing it would be a huge drain on our military capacity. I don't think we'll lose it, though:



Other than that, we did a little dance with Destroyers on Commodore's coast primarily to keep him building ships over ground units and possibly bait him into leaving his navy exposed. We kept tech off because there's nothing we'd be building over Tanks at the moment so right now the cash on hand to upgrade some of those obsolete units in Caldeum is more valuable than any tech. Commodore has done an absurd amount of upgrading by the by, the majority of his Infantry were once Rifles. I don't have full visibility on Commodore's military - the airship dance made us lose a small corner of his territory, but the F5 showdown is probably the most interesting this I can show you:

Here's all our land units:



And here's Commodore's:



I would say that Commodore's military is about equivalent to ours at the moment, though we have a solid leverage in power rating. If we can get a shot at his stuff in the open field, we should be able to put a real hurt in a few turns and then our significantly greater capacity to replace said units with better production and more build queues should tell. But if we're fighting all 3 of these guys for the rest of the game we're going to have to defend for a while and then this is just going to take a lot longer to play out. At our current turn every 2.5 days pace, we might be done in December. Thanks, Dave!

This screen doesn't mean anything anymore, but here it is for completeness.