Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[pindicator]

Totally agree with mh's assessment

[Ellimist]

We did not agree to a "land split" with WPC.

We didn't, but we allowed WPC to believe that we had. The result was the same.

[T-hawk]

Liberalism turned out to be a mistake. We never used Education or Liberalism at all - never built a single university and never used the civics. So we accomplished nothing but making Nationalism cost an extra 2500 beakers. Sullla whipped up the team into a big frenzy about our beaker lead, and nobody really considered that those beakers didn't actually accomplish anything.

[Zargon]

I wasn't allowed in at the time, but I would have argued against Pacal as our leader choice. I think Mansa would have been a better choice, for three reasons. It's a diplo game, and 90% of diplo is about convincing people you're losing, and spiritual hides your advantage in a way expansive doesn't. Espionage then redoubles it's power, because you're now effectively immune to the biggest weapons espionage provides. Finally, spiritual is clearly the highest skill-cap trait in the game, and here you have a dozen of the best civ players around pouring thousands of hours of brain cycles thinking about every tiny micro decision - nearly every possible advantage would get squeezed out of it.

Hubris got us in the end. I warned against the game-theory aspects of playing win-more moves from a winning position instead of playing tight, defensive moves, though I fell victim to it myself when I was in favor of finishing the Germans instead of stopping halfway, partially due to my lack of game knowledge misleading me about how far behind in tech we'd fall.

Plus things other people said.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Not to disappoint anyone but I just checked our diplo inbox for the hell of it. No messages. Though after MH posted over in the ISDG tech thread that we were dead we got a few GGs at least.

[NobleHelium]

Liberalism turned out to be a mistake. We never used Education or Liberalism at all - never built a single university and never used the civics. So we accomplished nothing but making Nationalism cost an extra 2500 beakers. Sullla whipped up the team into a big frenzy about our beaker lead, and nobody really considered that those beakers didn't actually accomplish anything.

Good points. I've had several games where I grabbed Education but didn't really do anything with it, but never quite thought of it in this manner. Although I wouldn't say we made Nationalism cost an extra 2500 beakers, because we could bulb Education while we couldn't bulb Nationalism.

Spiritual does not render you immune to spy civic switches. The opponent can switch you back out of the civic immediately after you switch into it.

[antisocialmunky]

In no particular order:
1) Bad luck, how many key things did we miss? This is more the icing on the cake rather than a major contributing factor but we lost 2 wonders fairly closely that would have catapulted us ahead. Though, losing Taj is as much our fault for treating CFC like an AI who couldn't infer what we were trying to do.
2) In hindsight, we went into the game with the wrong game plan
a) I don't think we would have been able to take the Germans out without their WPC Vendetta. The whole WPC/Germany thing dragged us down with both of the teams. If the Germans had played seriously, they would have stopped us cold and forced us into peace and made us reevaluate the strategy. In fact, the quick Germany defeat reinforced our false sense of superiority that fell down in the face of real numbers (which you'll notice that we stopped using around the time of the world war).
b) We never actually flipped the German lands around to be contributing members of our empire.
c) We basically threw away our lead we had in the early game for the war where we didn't get anything but sunk costs building the German cities up. They didn't contribute anything in the subsequent war.
d) I would say we didn't adequately plan or run the numbers on how we were going to make the German lands pay off. We assumed more land was better but this does not a gameplan make.
e) The alternative thing for us to do would have been to build ourselves up or fight a phony war with the Germans where we took their border cities instead of eating a whole civ and being slowed down. However, I don't think we seriously considered this due to the gameplan and mindset we adopted before the game started.
f) In general, we weren't adaptive and opportunistic. We could have sat back and farmed ourselves to a stronger position before fighting a world war or even jumped in on someone else's war.
3) Ignoring Spying - nuff said. Not having to bombard made the CP Cuir blitzkrieg unstoppable.
4) Generally unhelpful diplo attitude which highlighted our arrogance of the other teams which was unwarranted. They were never that far behind. Kudos to Scooter for holding down the fort.
5) We shouldn't have been streaming and doing reports, that put too much pressure on Sullla and the turn players.

That being said, I think the thing that really lost us the game was the unhealthy atmosphere in the private forum. I think we should not have a private forum in the future so we can be a little more honest with ourselves and open ourselves up to outside critique. The one sided vetoes and the shutting down of serious discussions of the alternative plans really hurt us: Krill was right for the wrong reason.

[NobleHelium]

The one sided vetoes and the shutting down of serious discussions of the alternative plans really hurt us: Krill was right for the wrong reason.

I don't see what this has to do with whether the forum was private or not.

[antisocialmunky]

The one sided vetoes and the shutting down of serious discussions of the alternative plans really hurt us: Krill was right for the wrong reason.

I don't see what this has to do with whether the forum was private or not.

I don't think I've seen a demogame or SG that had such a - for a lack of a better term - draconian bent sometimes when it came down to dealing with discussion. People seemed to have gotten overly defensive sometimes, maybe an open forum would have made the game feel a little less serious than what it ended up being. Maybe its because the teams are generally not as large as the 20+ people we had but I think we would have done some things for the better if we allowed just anyone to come in to offer suggestions.

Atleast the diplo thread wouldn't be as embarrassing to reread.

[Ellimist]

Did any of the other teams have a public forum?

If so, where?