[SPOILERS] Lurkerloos and map discussion

[Hesmyrr]

To the players it must look like Team Scooter has lost interest: Rapidly losing score, increasingly slow to finish their turns, probably willing a fast exit so they can get on with other games. But to us, the delay is rather more strategic: The turn roll-over before 90% of the Zulu civilization moors up within landing range of India's only source of metals... The turn when CFCJesterFool et al are forced into a sudden, and totally unexpected, re-working of their ultimate micro plan.
...

Of course I have the advantage of foresight, but I do think savvy players should have realized something was up when civstat showed Commothoth score increase to 311. Scooter's score decreasing at the same time, combined with the fact that this score change occured after Commothoth played his turn, is clear sign of scooter giving up city to live on longer, which reveals his intent not to die.

Back to the attack plan, yeah, it was not going to work out at all. I think scooter is fully aware it has been bad plan at the start though, just that he chose to follow through a plan that maximized his enjoyment for remainder of the game. What they're doing is much more innocent than what some of other losing civs did in the past, and well, I have fond spots for Hail Marys.

@Krill
You'd spontaneously burst out singing?

[fluffyflyingpig]

Regarding Scoop's plan, why didnt they leapfrog the 2nd wave at least to the pl-hill island? That's an extra 2t of transit that wasn't necessary for the 2nd wave. just to save unit support?

Natch.

They are going broke as it is. Supply costs for that army are killer when you only have one city.

[Gavagai]

They have a defensive strategy built for grey barbs... not the yellow ones. Find another game where 2 teams FIRST met because of 7 loaded galleys.

If you were playing India, would you be ready? I sure wouldn't.

They didn't need to fight land barbs, they had a fully fogbusted island for ages. They started a military build up specifically to fend off a possible invasion from a human team - Xenu or Serdoa. And here is my question - if you expect a human to invade you, why don't you want to build spears? And if you don't expect an invasion - why build military at all?
Actually, even now they BOTH are talking about whipping axes but not spears. And Nakor expects Scoopin to come with a mix of spears and axes, completly forgetting about a possibility of chariots. As I understand, CFCJester doesn't have a lot of MP experience but Nakor should know better.
An interesting question - do they even have hunting researched? I bet they don't. May be that's why emergency-whipping spears isn't even an option for them. And it looks like that now they will stack in IW as many axes as possible and they will just get slaughtered by Scooter's chariots.
Even one spear in IW would be enough to decimate Scooter's stack. He would take a city, he will take it anyway, but he would have no chance to move further.

[timski]

India can produce Spears... while it retains metals, which probably means dry whipping. But Nakor is asking whether they need "Axes or Triremes?", so.

If you were playing India, would you be ready? I sure wouldn't.

It's not so much that India aren't ready, as that they have no redundancy to deal with the unforeseen. We saw this earlier when they struggled with Barbarian Galleys turning up at random. They had no expectation that their island nation might have such problems, and hence no backup plan for dealing with it should it occur, other than losing most of their seafood while they slowly teched Metal Casting.

Now, I don't expect India to have units stuffed into every city, on the off-chance of an invasion. But they should have had Archery teched so they could whip Archers in such an emergency: And from what I can see, they don't. They should have a comprehensive road network in place to allow their armies to move around their island: Yet even now India has no road connection between their northern and southern cities. Even IW was isolated until a turn ago, in spite it being an obvious (only source of metals) target.

I suspect this is just single player mentality kicking in: The AI almost never attacks overseas in the early game, so just ignore the sort of tech and improvements that are only needed in war.

Question: Why is CFCJesterFool expecting to "lose GA and two workers"? If Scooter was coming for GA, surely they would have offloaded the troops onto the Corn-farming Worker 1SW of GA at the end of last turn. The only thing Scooter couldn't have done in that way was the map trick. [Edit:] Or, I see the second Worker: Oh my! Its the Worker 1N of IW, which was presumably auto-mining, and used up its turn before CFCJesterFool noticed the impending invasion. That (lack of) move will give Team Scooter some hope.

[Sullla]

You guys are being way too harsh on the India team. While they certainly could have played things better, expecting them to be ready to handle this insane overseas invasion - from a team they hadn't even met - is nothing short of ridiculous. Why would they have teched Archery when they were alone on an island with no one to attack them? It's also completely counter-intuitive that they would need to be rushing spears instead of axes to deal with this threat. Step back and put yourselves in their shoes: do you honestly think you would be dealing with this situation any better? Because I tend to doubt it.

The one thing that can be obnoxious about these games is when omniscient lurkers sit in this thread and tell everyone else what they should have done. There's no realistic way that the India team should have been expecting this attack; it's in the top five of most bizarre plays I've ever seen in these RB games, and it's not even a good decision to boot. (The Zulu attack is incredibly stupid and counter-productive, giving up their territory and throwing the game to Commodore.)

Lay off them. They've got a hard enough time on their hands right now.

[timski]

Oh, I'm quite sure I would have done far worse... That's why I find it so interesting to watch and learn from: I enjoy working out the optimum way to play a situation, understanding why X or Y happened, how a given situation could have been played. So although my words may be sometimes brutal, I, for one, am not intending to tell anyone what they should or should not have done. If I'm talking to anyone, it's to myself...

[Gavagai]

IThe point isn't that they were unprepared to Scooter's invasion - I think, we all agree that there is no way anyone could foresee it. The point is that they were unprepared not only for any kind of invasion but even for a small raid. For example, their new city has one chariot in it and can't be reinforced quickly enough. All you need to take it out is just one stray galley with a spear on board. With a little luck even an axe will do. And such raids are definitely a possibilty - they have two human teams nearby one of which has had a respectable power for a long time.
A different issue is that it would be completely understandable if they just didn't expect war and built no military. But the fact is that they understood clearly that an attack is possible. That's why they did build military after all. But if they expected some kind of invasion (not from Scooter, of course), it was reasonable to expect that a human will come with a combined arms force. What's the purpose of a pure axe army then? And I don't even speak about such things as spreading out all their units along the continent instead of keeping the main bulk of them in one or two stacks somewhere in the north, bad road network, etc. The problem is not that they didn't expect an attack but that they did expect it and didn't put any serious thinking in military preparations.

[MindyMcCready]

You guys are being way too harsh on the India team. While they certainly could have played things better, expecting them to be ready to handle this insane overseas invasion - from a team they hadn't even met - is nothing short of ridiculous. Why would they have teched Archery when they were alone on an island with no one to attack them? It's also completely counter-intuitive that they would need to be rushing spears instead of axes to deal with this threat. Step back and put yourselves in their shoes: do you honestly think you would be dealing with this situation any better? Because I tend to doubt it.

The one thing that can be obnoxious about these games is when omniscient lurkers sit in this thread and tell everyone else what they should have done. There's no realistic way that the India team should have been expecting this attack; it's in the top five of most bizarre plays I've ever seen in these RB games, and it's not even a good decision to boot. (The Zulu attack is incredibly stupid and counter-productive, giving up their territory and throwing the game to Commodore.)

Lay off them. They've got a hard enough time on their hands right now.

I think a lot of these omnicient lurkers are in alot of ways taking notes, for their own benefit, on how to not have this happen to them should they play their next multiplayer game (or first). Personally, that's the point-of-view that I write many of my posts. I get it that your point of view is very different given the amount of multiplayer you've done and the lurker traffic that you generated in the past.

This is your second 'obnoxious lurkers' comment that you've made,...its kind of,...discussion killing. I mean, its not like you're refraining from throwing stones at the Three Desperados.

PS: Thanks for (unknowingly) introducing me to Realms Beyond. Still a Sullla and Speaker fan.

[Bacchus]

Hello, all

I have been lurking along after Gavagai pointed out the community to me, and I did have this question on India. I will immediately say that it doesn't concern the Pindicooter attack, being the target of a suicidal funraid by a team on its way out of the game sucks, no two ways about, the concern is general attitude to defence. Here's CC:



Now, India don't really post borderland overviews, which makes this slightly difficult to explain, but here's the north frontier, leading to none other than Xenu:



The tile to the right of the island peak is fog-covered, and for all they know has a Galley with a raid squad. Go 2SW from that tile and you can occupy the seafood + unload onto the plains forest adjacent to CC and within a 2-move of IW. IIRC, CC has no hammers invested into a second unit. Doesn't this just offer two cities up for grabs?

P.S. The tile to the left of the island horse offers the same alluring possibility.

P.P.S. And, actually, the tile to the right of the peak is a chokepoint for the coastal access to Xenu's core, so he should aim to control it anyway. So many things one sees after writing the post.

[novice]

Generally speaking, remember that military buildup is a balancing act. Overbuilding defenses against attacks that have low chances of happening can be a mistake as well.

I think Sullla's earlier question about why India's farmer's gambit empire isn't larger is more pertinent than the question of where their army is. Build a strong empire so you can react to attacks efficiently and quickly if they happen.

Anyway I haven't studied India's land nor micro in detail, maybe their land didn't support faster expansion.