PBEM6 post-game thread

[SevenSpirits]

With Nakor a few turns from elimination, Lewwyn and I discussed what we wanted to do after and decided to just call it in my favor. I'm too far ahead in tech and demographics, and that's with half my cities still growing incredibly rapidly. The most likely end would simply be a UN victory (only two techs, a building, and some food away) before our NAP even runs out.

With Nakor's permission, we didn't wait for his last city to fall a few turns from now. So, good game! Final positions -

1. SevenSpirits
2. Lewwyn (previously athlete4life)
3. Nakor
4. Ruff (previously Jowy)
5. The Reverend Doctor

Though what really matters is that we had fun, right? Thanks everyone for playing, and to Bob for the map! (I thought it was pretty cool.) And now I'm going to go read all your threads!

[novice]

Congratulations to Seven on a dominant game, and to Lewwyn for an impressive slaughter against TRD.

[Lewwyn]

I posted my in my thread a little thanks to everyone. It was a lot of fun. And I'm happy everyone was in it.

I've read through most of the threads now already. I think others reading mine will probably have the most to read.

I really loved the map concept and thought it was really interesting, I'm just a bit sad I didn't get to play it from the very beginning. I ended up being in war from the moment I started to the end with about a 10 turn interlude of peace. I would have enjoyed a little empire building on this map. Thought I did get to found at least one city myself

Thanks a lot to Athlete for letting me take over and putting me in a position to warmonger on a clean slate with no diplomatic repercussions. And having read TRD's thread I can tell you, yes, yes I whipped the hell out of my cities. I even quadruple whipped one. All the battle planning was great fun. I do think there were a couple things you could have done differently TRD. For one, yeah more whipping. I don't know as much else about what was going on due to not so much updates, but I pretty much knew how many units you had and where they were the entire time. Did my first naval bluff get to you at all?

Seven and I did have a nice beneficial alliance going right from the start. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that when I took over, I already owed Seven money since Athlete had borrowed from him. Then later I lent money back and we did some nice unit exchanges. Also I had no units in my cities beyond my front line cities. Have Seven as an ally was imperative to keep pressing forward. I don't think I really had a chance to overcome Seven in this. We had a NAP until 200 that I believe Athlete signed. (It wasn't me right? I don't remember if I did sign it. I would have signed it anyway even if it were my call.) And the game was basically over by T200. In fact, I'd say looking at these threads that Seven was the leader throughout and even by the time I took over there wasn't much of a chance I could overcome him if I had wanted to.

Nakor, I was basically banking on you not attacking me. XD If you had come after me I probably would have been unable to really put you down completely and I wouldn't have been able to finish of TRD. Those pikes came out of no where though, right? I really had nothing else backing them up. Everything went after TRD. I was peeved by the Temperance thing, as you may have noticed from me demanding it later. I don't think you really had a choice at that point. Also with TRD and Ruff going down you were about to be surrounded. I wish I'd had a bit more time before Seven attacked you, thus allowing me to get more economically stable and build enough of an army that I could take more of your land, but as you'll see, I was way behind on infrastructure. War does that to you.

I think one of the key point of the game was that while my war was long grinding overland and dragging. Seven was able to go in hot, have a small area of confrontation and continue to build infrastructure and tech in the back. Shorter war, similar profits, drastically different costs. Thus he was able to take his already superior tech and race even further ahead.

Great fun guys.

[Lewwyn]

Congratulations to Seven on a dominant game, and to Lewwyn for an impressive slaughter against TRD.

Thanks novice!

[SevenSpirits]

I should really go to bed, but really quick, some responses to lurker thread debates:

Talking to myself...

Regarding the 'phants, surely the right thing to do is to post in the tech thread. Every game around here has banned them, I can't imagine this is the one where they intentionally didn't. The proof that this is borderline exploit play is that both of them 1. Assumed they were banned and 2. Are acting like Kids at Christmas about realizing they're not. Surely not in the spirit of the stated goals of RB of "Playing legitimately" and "Variant play." And surely unnecessary from Seven, who was recently complaining in his thread that everyone else sucked and he wished they would give him a better game.

People already talked about this but yeah, you're way overestimating how good that was. In actuality it was like - "heh that's cute, our game didn't ban war elephants and the mapmaker managed to put them in, in a very non-powerful, even joking way, and yet they might actually be slightly relevant haha!"

And also, treating the revelation that I was wrong about the rules we agreed on as simply a revelation that I was wrong, rather than a potential rules question, after I combed through the tech thread and realized that was the case, is certainly not arrogant. It's pretty much the opposite. Do note that this game did not do a lot of the things that other RB games did; e.g. there were huts, and raging barbs, and random events, and normal speed. It wasn't an accident that we didn't ban WEs! That was the spirit under which the rules for our game were made. We only banned the things that we cared about, and apparently we didn't care about elephants.

It's a cheese play and it shouldn't be allowed in a game like this. No offense intended to Ruff, but cheese is cheese. Selling away cities to third parties should never be allowed in wartime.

[In response to Ruff potentially selling Nakor some cities for money and iron.]

I actually mostly disagree. That wouldn't be breaking the rules, rather it would just be stupid. It's stupid for the same reason it's not cheese, namely that I had no intention of fighting Ruff any more. I was only at war with him to be a bastard (blockade his island capital, for one). As the game bore out, Nakor was in fact the next player to capture cities from Ruff! Hence: stupid.

But you can't ban stupidity, even if it's going to throw the game. I mean, TRD didn't whip enough. What are you going to do, pop into his thread and say "you have to whip more, or you're effectively giving Lewwyn free cities"?

I mean, I wouldn't have been happy about it, but, we have a rule about no bail-out gifting of cities during war, not a rule about no trading of cities for strategic resources to the player in the best position to capture them anyway.

Wait, if I'm understanding Lewwyn properly, TRD moved units out of Temperance (onto that plains hill that is N-NE I believe) to make it easier for Nakor. If that's true, then I'm definitely calling cheese. I have to be honest, it irks me how frequently Nakor seems to benefit from freebie cities in PB/PBEM games.

Yeah, they broke the rules there no question. (Though the rest of us had no way of knowing this until after the game was over.) Luckily it doesn't seem to have changed the result of the game significantly.

[Sullla]

One thing we may want to consider in the future is simply banning the Great Lighthouse on water-heavy maps. It's the one early game wonder which can simply destroy Civ4's balance under the right circumstances. You probably could have wagered in the map creation thread that the player who landed Great Lighthouse on this map was odds on favorite to win... which is exactly what happened. I don't think that's necessarily the gameplay we want, and these water-filled maps are really cool otherwise. Food for thought.

[SevenSpirits]

Some other replies to lurker thread opinions:

Judging from Athlete's updates, it looks like every barb on the continent is being magnetically drawn to his poor city

Yeah, it seems the randomness of the giant stacks of barb warriors did affect the game somewhat. I think Athlete ran into that because he was extraordinarily close to a (mainland) barb city. Also possibly because he founded earlier than me and Rev? I don't remember what happened. I think in retrospect this game would have been a bit better without the initial mainland barb cities. The island cities were a good twist though.

On the micro level, I loved the opening moves and thought that SevenSpirits played them about as well as possible.

Thank you.

One other note: I'm still not sure if the Oracle was quite worth it. SevenSpirits pointed out the extreme cheapness due to marble + Organized Religion, and accurately compared it to the cost of two axes. Slinging Feudalism for total earlygame safety and denying the Oracle to everyone else probably means that this was the right move. But... those same two axes would have captured the disputed barb city instead of letting athlete take it. I still think the Oracle comes out slightly ahead, but only slightly in this case. It does ensure that Rome can't really attack him with any success, which is a big deal.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I think the oracle move was way better. The most likely outcome in my opinion if I capture the barb city and don't get longbows is that both athlete and jowy attack me. That's not necessarily a game loss, but in the best case TRD and Nakor still gain on me a lot. I think it was worth it for the deterrence alone, considering I was stuck between two players who had cooperated in their last game and had both picked an aggressive leader. And in addition to that I denied Oracle to anyone else, got a very useful tech for spiritual (I used vassalage a lot, and serfdom too) and got another 2gpp/turn in my capital.

It's true though that I should have built more axes. (And ideally, I could do both.) Though also keep in mind that I did have some axes for the barb city, they just got distracted at exactly the wrong moment due to 20 barb warriors showing up out of the fog.

The map itself was really good work, unique and highly interesting! My only real issue would be the variability introduced by all those barb cities; there's a lot of luck factors involved in what units spawn and who captures them. I probably wouldn't have done it that way, but I don't really want to complain because it was a great idea overall. A final little nitpick item to consider: those islands "behind" the starting ones aren't very evenly placed. Rome's is completely secure until galleons, but India's can be easily accessed from the mainland. That seems a little bit off... Oh well. Might not even be a factor.

Yes, the map was good. There were a few other uneven things that really shouldn't have been that uneven though.

- Jowy has a simply worse home island. It's the only one whose non-resource tiles can't be irrigated.

- The continent had a mostly smooth edge with the notable exception of an incredibly long inlet through "my" territory. This inlet had the effect that the land on the far side of it would not have been connected to my other mainland cities, and was thus fairly indefensible. So Jowy got more land, and I got less. I don't think I was mistaken to stay out of there.

- The orientation of the home islands had a big effect on how easily players could access the mainland. Nakor and I had our capitals facing away from the continent, such that a galley would take 3 (in my case 4) moves to even reach the mainland at all. And Nakor and TRD both had their second cities far away from the continent, while the rest of us could easily travel between them.

I also think it was a bit unfair to penalize agriculture as a starting tech so much, with no grains on the home island and almost none in general. And I already said this too, but I think there should have been both copper and horses available at the start, because the time to take that barb city is so critical.

That fake war was indeed silly on any number of levels. It looks to me like it just gave athlete enough time to research up to Berserkers... certainly didn't fool anyone for very long. One of those things where you talk yourself into an overly complicated plan that isn't worth it.

It was a really, really terrible move. Not only was it bad for the actual war, it convinced athlete and myself that the other three were all working together, which drove us to work together heavily in response.

If I were SevenSpirits, I definitely wouldn't be gifting away galleons to anyone else. That's a massive military advantage on this map, if you have galleons and no one else does. I think he could befriend athlete without having to give up such an important edge. But it could work out well too, so who knows.

It is a big military advantage, but you're looking at it the wrong way. I have a lead, and I need to not lose by facing too many opponents at once. If I secure one player as a total ally, and that player cripples another player because they have a couple galleons, that is two more players I don't have to worry about while I do my own conquering! Meanwhile, the galleons will be completely ineffective against me, since I actually have water techs, so it's not like there is a big risk of it backfiring. And furthermore, if he tries to use them to settle the faraway islands, he a) will not be able to get work boats over there and b) will not have trade routes, so it's pretty pointless.

[SevenSpirits]

One thing we may want to consider in the future is simply banning the Great Lighthouse on water-heavy maps. It's the one early game wonder which can simply destroy Civ4's balance under the right circumstances. You probably could have wagered in the map creation thread that the player who landed Great Lighthouse on this map was odds on favorite to win... which is exactly what happened. I don't think that's necessarily the gameplay we want, and these water-filled maps are really cool otherwise. Food for thought.

It also seems I was the only player who even thought of building the great lighthouse. That might be a good indicator that I would do well even if we had then banned it, heh. Just imagine how much better I could have done by not building it until I had four cities! Actually, all the wonders lasted pretty late this game except that one, so all the good ones were quite strong. An Ind civ could have cleaned up.

I agree though. It really should only give 1 trade route per city, and the fact that it gives too means banning it may be in order.

[Ruff_Hi]

Not a fan of Ruff's idea to pass Nakor cities just to spite SevenSpirits. I hate it when people make petty moves like that.

He then called that "No Bail-out city gifting" which might be able to be interpreted in a way Ruff tries to do it now but if you read the actual discussion in the tech-thread, I feel it is clear that they intended to ban exactly what Ruff has in mind.

It's a cheese play and it shouldn't be allowed in a game like this. No offense intended to Ruff, but cheese is cheese. Selling away cities to third parties should never be allowed in wartime.

As you know, I joined this game late, didn't participate (or read) the rules discussion and certainly didn't know about the 'no city under threat gifting'. That said, (again, without reading the context), I didn't consider the city that I was planning on gifting away under threat. I was looking for a way of taking the attack to Seven and the only way I could see of doing that was advancing with a mixed stack of cats, maces and Crossbows (thus my need for machinery and iron). I wasn't just going to sit around waiting for the axe to fall.

I had a plan, I was trying to execute it. I didn't view the city giving as robbing Seven of a city he was remotely close to taking and I don't view it as petty or cheese. That said, whipping a city down from size 10 to 1 was pretty petty (sorry Seven).

In the end, Nakor and Seven totally cleaned me up - surprise at the beginning and superior units at the end.

[Jowy]

I have no idea what happened after I had to leave the game, but I hope you all had a good time playing. Congrats Seven on the win. Impressive comeback by Athlete too after the rough start.