Nothing like the Prodigal Sons: The Odd Couple actually play as themselves.

[Gavagai]

Hello!
I skimmed through your thread but still can't understand why exactly did you decide to invest into a hopeless war with me while having a Mikehendy monster beelining Cuirs right at your other door.
Also, after this worker incident I never seriously planned to attack you (I considered it but decided against it as I had a lot of land for peaceful expansion and also Bantams as a much easier target). I expected Mikehendy to start eating you with Cuirs fast and soon and pile in at the very end to take a couple of border cities. But that was all my aggressive planning.

PS Lewwyn told me that you hate early war - is this true? Because this game makes it difficult to believe this.

[Gaspar]

Hello!
I skimmed through your thread but still can't understand why exactly did you decide to invest into a hopeless war with me while having a Mikehendy monster beelining Cuirs right at your other door.
Also, after this worker incident I never seriously planned to attack you (I considered it but decided against it as I had a lot of land for peaceful expansion and also Bantams as a much easier target). I expected Mikehendy to start eating you with Cuirs fast and soon and pile in at the very end to take a couple of border cities. But that was all my aggressive planning.

PS Lewwyn told me that you hate early war - is this true? Because this game makes it difficult to believe this.

Hi Gavagai!

Let me work backwards. I don't hate early war - but like anyone rational, I prefer to avoid it. We never considered anything against you as anything other than defensive action for the first 20 or so turns.

I think you underestimate psychological factors. The units you had planted on that forested hill were basically like a giant red flag being waved in front us of every turn. When you combine that with Seven's conquering of retep and the 2 workers basically ending any chance we had of winning, well, you start to change your focus.

The turning point though was your tech rate. We didn't meet Mike until like t80 - we had no idea he was our neighbor nor that he was doing especially well - score is pretty meaningless that early. But we were watching you blow through techs and we decided that we needed to bring some pain early, while the units were equal or we were going to watch all of our cities turn green. That's why we made the feint attack at Nitrogen and the real one at Beryllium. Once we razed Beryllium, we were relatively satisfied that we'd brought you back to the pack a bit and were happy to just keep detente. We'd have kept offering you 10t treaties as long as you'd have accepted them.

We obviously also saw the French threat eventually - I don't think you can say we ignored it - we took 4 cities off him and pushed our border back in a very favorable fashion! Even now, with Muskets on the field, we're destroying France in hammer exchange. Should we have attacked him sooner? Sure, in retrospect. But there was no way to know you weren't going to attack us as soon as you saw our stacks elsewhere. You seemed pretty aggressive to us, I honestly don't think you realize the aggressiveness of your actions.

I don't think with the way the game was going France was ever going to conquer us without you joining in as well. We were always going to be able to keep close enough in tech that our... dedication to survival would have always been enough. We might have lost a city or two, but that's all.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Hello!
I skimmed through your thread but still can't understand why exactly did you decide to invest into a hopeless war with me while having a Mikehendy monster paper tiger beelining Cuirs right at your other door.
Also, after this worker incident I never seriously planned to attack you (I considered it but decided against it as I had a lot of land for peaceful expansion and also Bantams as a much easier target). I expected Mikehendy to start eating you with Cuirs fast and soon and pile in at the very end to take a couple of border cities. But that was all my aggressive planning.

PS Lewwyn told me that you hate early war - is this true? Because this game makes it difficult to believe this.

FTFY. I'll let Gaspar/Noble explain their war aims.

[NobleHelium]

Here's a Noblefied version of Gaspar's post.

After we lost the workers, we had lost the game. There was no way we could have recovered from losing 2/3 workers shortly after T50 and having to do several emergency whips to save Plame Affair right afterwards. We could have sat back and tried to recover, but we clearly weren't going to be able to keep up with you when we saw how fast you were teching. It doesn't matter that you were planning to attack Bantams first rather than us - 1) we didn't even know who your other neighbor was, and 2) we still expected you to conquer us eventually, and sooner rather than later. Perhaps that's because I think all games should be won by domination or conquest (and only by space as a stalemate breaker), but that's my view of how Civ4 should be played. Anyway, it was conclusive that we were losing the peace. And so I quote The Sisko from Deep Space Nine (the only Trek series worth watching) - if we're losing the peace, then that means a war may be our only hope. And so we went to war. And I think we definitely ended up in a better position because of said war, our eventuality of being conquered notwithstanding. We definitely survived longer than we otherwise would have. Same for our war with France - attack while we have the upper hand or at least some semblance of competitiveness, rather than wait to be invaded when we are in a worse position.

Edit: I just read your post in the lurker thread. You really have to realize that other people don't know what you intend or don't intend to do. War may have been hopeless, but so would have been the peace, and that was even more certain than war. Oh, and if you kill our chances of winning, we're probably going to do something in response.

[Gavagai]

Assorted notes:

1) I think your GNP was so bad due to some mistakes you have made, not just due to inferior leader/land. For example, I imagine this gold city which you rushed to capture so early and which didn't have immediately workable food resources in the first ring was too hard for you economy to stomach on toroid.
2) Your "duel" mentality is really deficient with Mikehendy around. By putting more pressure on me you just put some pressure off him, allowing him to grow into a monster.
3) I think you had a very good chance to recover by peaceful means. You had Pyramids, Colossus and only something like one less city than me. Pyramids/Colossus economy can be very strong short-term, you could catch up in techs. At the very least you would be able to meet Mikes Cuirs with a sizable stack of knights/cats which would most probably save you.
4) The fact that you didn't know about Bantams or Mikehendy until so late was probably one of your biggest mistakes.

Overall, I think you actually have played a really good game, considering your starting situation and the scoreboard reflects that; but I still think that decision to attack me was pretty bizzare.

[NobleHelium]

We rushed to capture it because we expected you to go after it. We could not afford to let you have that position because it was too close to the Teapot Dome location which we definitely needed. We don't have an omniscient view of the game and could not possibly know what you were exactly going to do.

If I see a clear and present danger, I'm going to do my best to thwart it, not worry about another danger that may or may not be there. When we became aware of the other danger later, we did our best to thwart that as well.

[Gavagai]

We rushed to capture it because we expected you to go after it.

Really, that would be an idiot move on my part. I would get a slow growing city, costing me a lot of maintenance and requiring a lot of units to defend it which could be easily cut off from my core. I would get all the problems which you had with this city, only in a much more extreme variant.

[NobleHelium]

Consider why you alone think our actions as bizarre. Consider why you don't think our attack on France as bizarre. It's because you alone know what you were planning to do, and nobody else does. Likewise, you don't know what Sulla was planning to do. Maybe he wasn't planning to attack us at all, and thus our attack on him would be equally bizarre, would it not?

[SevenSpirits]

Very entertaining thread, thank you.

Nonetheless, I expect him to land MoM and Taj, do a deep beeline to something, and collect a concession around t175.

...

I don't know how, but you successfully predicted my building MoM and Taj. I REALLY did not expect to get either of those in a field with many IND and FIN civs.

Your concession date guess was off though. I think it was pessimistic given the MoM + Taj expectation, though otherwise reasonable.

So yeah, we should have built that spear instead of the axe after all. Blar.

I still don't understand the axe build there. Spears, man! I mean it's not like Gavagai's going to attack you with a single axe, right? But a single chariot could happen.

Then, given that you had the axe, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to put it on the workers. I guess that's better against a woodsman warrior, but it's worse against a chariot. I don't know, maybe you had reason to weigh the warrior possibility more highly there.

[NobleHelium]

Well, we were greedy because we considered ourselves behind due to the map. We didn't see Gavagai having any units other than some warriors, and figured he was planning to settle up on us soon, so maybe we could use the axe for aggressive action. So I suppose it's also true that we thought an axe attack was possible because we were considering one ourselves. And we definitely had to cover the workers because Gavagai's warrior was lurking around.