RB Pitboss #2 - Postgame Discussion Thread

[Sullla]

Yeah, I think you were too good of an ally, Whosit. In our thread, we never had any real beef with you, although of course you were pretty far away. We didn't LIKE what you did with your Praetorians, and I think we both said we thought it was a dumb move, but you were always honest about what you were doing.

Personally, I think your allies took complete advantage of you. You built all those units and helped them attack, then they all stood back and did basically nothing when you yourself came under attack. Unfortunate!

[m4gill4]

My thread may have been "Paranoia 101," but I think I tended to jump at shadows rather than the real threats. Well, maybe that's the definition of "paranoia."

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't all out to get you

[Sullla]

Hmmm. Don't want to dominate discussion in this thread, but I started reading the lurker thread finally, and the whole thing just kept going, and going, and going... Should probably make a couple of comments, right?

That whole thing was tremendously amusing, even if most of the times it went around in circles without really going anywhere. It seemed like 90% of the discussion revolved around what India was doing, haha. Some people liked us, many people disliked us, but I hope it was always interesting to follow. (And no grudges against anyone's opinion, though I wish a few more of you had liked our thread!)

I did learn a lot about conducting diplomacy from reading these games. I think India's diplomacy sucked pretty bad leading up to the 5 vs. 1 war, as so many lurkers pointed out. Afterwards, I thought we did OK for the most part. It was definitely a learning experience, and I think I'd do a lot better if there was another, future game.

Oftentimes the lurkers seemed to forget about the limited knowledge of the players actually in the game. I think my favorite was a comment that we should have deliberately sandbagged our GNP, so that it would have discouraged the formation of an alliance that we had absolutely no idea existed, involving teams we hadn't even met yet. Umm, OK.

The innumerable (and possibly deserved?) arrogant/infufferable comments we got about our thread also had a lot to do with perspective, I think. Remember, I was the Turnplayer for most of the Apolyton Demogame, and I wrote in exactly the same style about how stupid the Templar/Imperio teams were. None of the two dozen people on the RB team ever complained, and everyone as a group reacted in the same angry/emotional way towards the other teams. But in this game, removed from the context of actually playing the game and sitting instead on the sidelines, many of the same individuals thought my posts were unacceptable. I don't think that excuses everything that was posted, but I hope it puts it in context at least. (And of course, the other teams reacted equally poorly/emotionally to the game, such as regoarrarr's "Drop Dead!" message, Jowy's suicide ending, slaze's reaction to the second attack, and athlete's endgame cheesefest.)

Hey, what can I say, we all got a little too invested. Including you lurkers! :neenernee

I'm mostly regretful about the game's ending. I handled it poorly, Speaker handled it poorly, Krill handled it poorly - we all did. The biggest problem is that I was away during most of that period on vacation with very limited Internet access. There was an accusation that we deliberately ignored a rules violation lurker post and played on, but that's not really true: I didn't have Internet access for 2 days and had no clue what was going on until much later. (Check the thread, where I didn't post from June 28 to July 1, EXTREMELY unlike me!) That meant that Speaker was the one dealing with controversy, and, ummm, that didn't exactly calm things down. Speaker and Krill are a bit like oil and water.

I don't want to go into whether the ruling was fair or not again (I still think it wasn't), but I'm still baffled over how it was handled. Krill had very reasonable and intelligent posts in the lurker thread - in a thread we couldn't read! - while he was opening antagonizing us in the public thread. I just don't understand that... Trying to "deflect backlash" onto Krill was a terrible way to deal with the problem. That was not at all conducive to resolving the conflict! What really bugged us was the lack of any explanation for why the ruling was chosen. Now of course there *WAS* a reason for picking 7 cavalry, which had to do with shield cost of units, but no one ever bothered to tell us that. Everything was just presented as a fait accompli, with no explanation or compromise.

Speaker didn't agree, but I was willing to accept the deal until reading this post from Krill:

If Nakor gets bullied now to accept something different, then all it shows is that at RB, all you have to be is an awkward bastard and break your word, and you don't have to follow the rules.

And that was it, as far as compromising goes. Krill, I appreciate what you did for this game, but please, if you're an administrator again, you can't post stuff like this. The admin is supposed to be impartial and above the situation, not defaming the public reputation of the teams involved. (I also think handling the whole situation quietly in private with PMs would have worked a lot better than turning the entire lurker thread into a debate forum would have been wise, but I guess that's water under the bridge.)

Anyway, it was memorable, and it seems we played the role of the villain for a lot of you, so I hope you got your kicks from cheering against the Yankees/Lakers/Chelsea of the Pitboss game.

[Shoot the Moon]

Oftentimes the lurkers seemed to forget about the limited knowledge of the players actually in the game. I think my favorite was a comment that we should have deliberately sandbagged our GNP, so that it would have discouraged the formation of an alliance that we had absolutely no idea existed, involving teams we hadn't even met yet. Umm, OK.

The innumerable (and possibly deserved?) arrogant/infufferable comments we got about our thread also had a lot to do with perspective, I think. Remember, I was the Turnplayer for most of the Apolyton Demogame, and I wrote in exactly the same style about how stupid the Templar/Imperio teams were. None of the two dozen people on the RB team ever complained, and everyone as a group reacted in the same angry/emotional way towards the other teams. But in this game, removed from the context of actually playing the game and sitting instead on the sidelines, many of the same individuals thought my posts were unacceptable. I don't think that excuses everything that was posted, but I hope it puts it in context at least. (And of course, the other teams reacted equally poorly/emotionally to the game, such as regoarrarr's "Drop Dead!" message, Jowy's suicide ending, slaze's reaction to the second attack, and athlete's endgame cheesefest.)

I think the perspective thing also goes both ways. I think a lot of people were put off by you criticisms of other teams in your thread for the precise reason that they knew you didn't have a all the info but sometimes seemed to be criticizing the other teams as if you did. I think part of that may be your style of reporting, where you come across as having all of the info and are in control of the situation (and don't get me wrong, it's an extremely engaging style of reporting), but when you do have a limited perspective it can rub the wrong way I think. (Although I did not particularly object to your thread, so I hope to not be putting words in others' mouths here.)

I did learn a lot about conducting diplomacy from reading these games. I think India's diplomacy sucked pretty bad leading up to the 5 vs. 1 war, as so many lurkers pointed out. Afterwards, I thought we did OK for the most part. It was definitely a learning experience, and I think I'd do a lot better if there was another, future game.

If I may ask, did you guys do many chats in the game, or was it mostly just emails? (I seem to remember early on you posting something about disliking chats, but I may be wrong on that). From lurking and from playing in PB3, it seems to me that the medium of the message can make a difference. From what I've noticed, it seems that a lot of the closest allies in these games are not the ones who exchange the most emails or even necessarily have the biggest in-game incentives to be allies, but are usually the ones who chat the most (I'm sure there are exceptions to that of course).

[slaze]

I walked into the game around the the time the Coalition was occurring, or even some time after. Turn 112, or a little earlier. After a turn I received 5 messages from various teams; of greater attention were the ones of my neighbors: an NAP/terms with athlete an note with whosit. I got another from sulla, nakor, and I believe plako.

And somewhere was mention from athlete not to trade or help out Sulla in any way. It was very clear from the beginning that there was a group of civs allied together. I had two exploring chariots, each converging towards the opposite end of the globe. The one in the north came to Jowy's land, I asked to pass through. I said I was looking for Sulla's land and he directed me to the south of him. Soon after and due to Jowy's border, the chariot was force to pass by a barb city (one of many rendezvous for those 8 pratorians) where it was killed by a barb axe.

The chariot in the south was allowed OB all the way to sulla and when I got there, I wanted to have a peek. By the the war was pretty much over. Sulla had ended up ahead, and in my journey to gather information to gain a more global feel of what was going on. Most of athlete was mapped out, none of whosit, and one turn I was offered, in a diplo message from sulla, to open borders. i agree and maybe 1-2 turns later I get a message from Athlete: the 25 turn countdown is kicking in. IIRC, this was turn 130, with whosit later atticking at turn 150, and athlete at turn 155. It was at this point, turn 130, that I knew things changed and I would probably be attacked.

Up until then my focus was on the economy. I made the choice that I thought put the Inca in the best position to win, and thought that was to focus on the economy. First turn I played had 90 gold in the bank, -45 gold@100% science and breaking even at 10% science. A few turns later finally noticed I didn't have sailing for foreign trade routes and that got to to 30% science for breaking even.

First turn I had 6 cities and a settler which dsplaisted marked to put 1 tile north of a barb city he razed. I went against dsplaisted's plan and put it where Tiwanaku eventually went, whosit's supposed globe city (what I had deemed the best city available). Looking back now, this was probably unwise of me to do, at that point my standing army, subtracting garrison units, was around 4 axemen 1 chariot, whereby then I had seen whosit's 8 prats and soon a new prat to sniff out the new Tiwanaku border labeled like, Trooper 17 or something.

Turn 130 came I began to play on pins and needles, but no attack came until turn 150. By then I had managed to eek it to longbows, switch to vassalage and whip 10 out. Towards the end I would expect an attack every turn and one day I was able to play two turns in a row, the end of one turn and the beginning of another. It wasn't until that point that I felt ready, and then the retrospective ruling came and we all had to rewind. If I was able to make that play, I think I would have made a stand at Tiwanaku. But as is i gave it up, and the rest is buried in the thread.

And then the athlete invasion occurred and thanks to splitting stacks and leaving units unpromoted, I was able to exploit these mistakes. I made the mistake of having workers too far away and unable to road - I could have done far better damage than I did.

But things pretty much worked into a stalemate up north. Sulla had joined in by then against Jowy and when Jowy was finally exstinguished, I was surprised to see Sulla stop. I was under the impression that sulla would fight athlete (he never directly agreed to this and it shows my faults at diplomacy to make those assumptions. Looking back he maybe only said something like joining in the fight, which i took to mean what i did.

So when I asked sulla to join in against athlete and he refused, i nkew then that India would only act in their self interest. They would not go out of their way to help out anybody else. And so at that point I judged them to be a runaway civ. I looked at the athlete stalemate that was ocurring and I thought, Why are we doing this? Sulla needs to be stopped, and us strangled together in some useless war wouldn't improve our situation any, it would only improve sulla's. So I sent a feeler message out to athlete, he responded favorably and then we chatted (just the once) and put together a loose plan to make it happen. What happened did and once the backstab came the incan game changed from trying to put oneself in the best position to win to devoting one's entire civ to fighting another. And that put me out of it for sure.

I don't blame athlete for doing what he did, after his blunder things changed some, we had lost the element of surprise. I still held the veiw that the most important goal in the game at that point was still the curbing/attempted destruction of sulla so I maintained the deals vaguely put in place, naively gifting units and such. At that point I knew I was behind so I took a risk. I was much better off with a status quo athlete and a crippled sulla than the other way around. Live and learn I guess, and try not to think what if.

...

[pocketbeetle]

I think few people will deny that you played very well with the hand you were dealt Slaze.

Your choices for the big decisions (Farmer's gambit to catch up, siding with the Ottomans to team up vs India) were spot on imo.

[Nakor]

Finally finished the whole Killer Angels thread.

Sullla/Speaker:
I'm impressed by your MM and planning. My aim was to learn in this game and I did learn a lot.

I'm a bit annoyed by the fact that you keep blaming me for dishonest diplomacy. You judge us for talking to other civ's regarding your lead while we were trying to get a NAP and good relations with you. Calling me/us weasels and bad sportsmen, while you actually do the same thing by keep talking to us about a NAP while never having the intention to make one and trying to get others to attack us. Sounds very one-sided to me.

Also, I think the only part of this game in which we outplayed you guys was the diplomatic department. We have kept friendly relations with all civ's (except you of course) throughout the game due to our diplomacy. And yes, we did reap rewards of this with the money gifting and city gifting (this should be banned, though, next game).

And I was really surprised we were able to build MoM and TM right under your nose. But then, there were other issues for you at that time.

I learned a lot by reading your thread about MM and warfare (sentry HA's!). I hope to be able to use that in my next games.

Also, I do hope that you, Sullla, aren't serious about NEVER being able to trust me in ANY other online game. That really strikes me as odd. One game's enemy can be your closest friend in another game, in my opinion. It all depends on the circumstances. But maybe that's due to my background of online diplomacy with the same group of players. You know you can be back-stabbed and backstab yourself as well once the opportunity arrives. And then in the next game, you play with a clean slate. I hope you're up to that, should we meet again.

One question remains: Would you have managed to survive if Whosit declared war before landing his preats...?

[DaveV]

(And no grudges against anyone's opinion, though I wish a few more of you had liked our thread!)

I think there was a "silent majority" that enjoyed your thread and had no complaints to post in the lurker thread. I certainly looked forward to your posts and followed the game with much interest because of the clear narrative in your thread. Many thanks to you and Speaker for all the time that went into constructing this civ tutorial.

[SleepingMoogle]

Echoing DaveV's post. Reading up on India's progress has been a daily staple for the last year or so, and has taught me a lot. Thanks a lot to both Sullla and Speaker for keeping up the reporting, and also to every other team whose threads I frequented a little less often.

[Twinkletoes89]

@Sullla

I think the one reason why there was a bit more 'disappointment' in some of the comments made in the spoiler threads was that the game was within the community.

With the Apolyton game where you guys were against other communities and would likely not talk to the others much again, you have a lot more leeway to post critical remarks and weed smileys, and I can see why most people found that acceptable.

This game was all about players in the same community who like to play together and will read the threads and be more likely to cause trouble and tension on this forum. We want to welcome in as many people as possible and sometimes people can take offense and leave if the comments are harsh enough and noone wants that!

I think we all understand that everyone puts in a lot of effort into this game and as such, become highly emotionally involved in it. I think the one thing we would all like is for everyone to just take a deep breath and count to 10 before posting some of the more critical/personal statements and try and use a bit more moderation in language.

Aside from that, thank you everyone for a great game to lurk and some amazing threads to enjoy!