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

[Ceiliazul]

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.

Ahem:

when in doubt, always go spear. The things that are countered by an axe usually give you more time to whip one.

[Ceiliazul]

[quote='Boldly Going Nowhere' pid='468951' dateline='1396017253']
Likewise thanks to Ceil, who came in probably hoping this thread would be to my usual standards and hung around to the end.

I did, and I was sad that morale went down so fast and stayed there (not unreasonable after the worker losses, but still got hard to motivate myself to keep reading.)

However, I nominate you for the "Gaspar Award - Most prescient thread title", for the original title, naturally. [999]

[Gaspar]

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.

Two things:

1. I think you underestimate just how much we ended up recovering and the scoreboard does reflect that.
2. I think there's no chance that if the situation was reversed you wouldn't feel the same way towards us that we felt towards you.

[NobleHelium]

And because this was forgotten...

Gaspar
k
that just leaves the workers
NobleHelium
ok
Gaspar
gonna name the french workers
NobleHelium
all four of them are on the city? tile, yeah?
Gaspar
jefferson and jackson
since jefferson did the la purchase
and jackson fought at the battle of new orleans
NobleHelium
are there any other J presidents
Gaspar
all four are on that tile, yes
johnson, but we already have him
NobleHelium
anyone else
Gaspar
no, i dont think so
NobleHelium
well washington fought in the french and indian war
oh
we only have two workers
to name
Gaspar
yeah
NobleHelium
the other ones were existing
ok nm
Gaspar
jackson, obama, polk and jefferson
walk into a bar, ouch!
NobleHelium
i don't get it
obama isn't a military guy
Gaspar
they're the 4 guys on the tile
which i was going to say
NobleHelium
well i mean the ouch part
Gaspar
then i realized it sounded like the start of a joke
so i said they walked into a bar
NobleHelium
i mean i'm sure all those dudes would be offended at the prospect of a black president
Gaspar
and then i used the pun joke
where they walk into a literal bar
NobleHelium
oh
Gaspar
as opposed to a place that serves alcohol
NobleHelium
i've never heard that one actually
Gaspar
I'm definitely posting this exchange in the thread

[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.

Two things:

1. I think you underestimate just how much we ended up recovering and the scoreboard does reflect that.
2. I think there's no chance that if the situation was reversed you wouldn't feel the same way towards us that we felt towards you.

1. Well, you can't claim that you recovered because of your military activity as you were not making any gains. Only in the very end you did take from Yuri a size 3 city, I think (you also cleared a lot of land from his culture but at mo point you had an actual lack of land). All other cities you took you razed. Now, imagine that you didn't fool around with the hordes of HAs and Police State - how much better off you would be?
2. I can reject this claim. You have burned my Holy City and still my only concern was to establish peace with you. I even didn't burn a city back when I had a chance.

[Gaspar]

1. Well, you can't claim that you recovered because of your military activity as you were not making any gains. Only in the very end you did take from Yuri a size 3 city, I think (you also cleared a lot of land from his culture but at mo point you had an actual lack of land). All other cities you took you razed. Now, imagine that you didn't fool around with the hordes of HAs and Police State - how much better off you would be?
2. I can reject this claim. You have burned my Holy City and still my only concern was to establish peace with you. I even didn't burn a city back when I had a chance.

1. Well, we planted 2 other cities because of that attack, so net gain is 3 cities. I firmly believe if we didn't fool around with HAs in Police State you and he would have been farther ahead and we'd have been much closer to the "next to be eliminated" pile than the "recovered" one.
2. You can't reject the claim based on that situation because you were ahead. Time was always advantageous for you because more time = further ahead.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

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.

Gavagai, you are operating under the assumption that you would have attempted to keep the city. Our focus on capturing the city was also an attempt to prevent you from razing it to deny it to your enemy. Losing two workers is 120h. Capturing a barb city is worth 100h on a saved settler, ignoring all other concerns. Also, we would have wanted to establish something in that area to prevent you settling it anyway, so the barb city was a good opportunity to do that. I think what you are underestimating is that you had way more food than we did in the early game, had a much better teching leader (it doesn't get any better than Darius, ever), and you had Sacrificial Alters available to you to convert all of that food into hordes of units to overwhelm us once you had stunted our early growth by taking the workers. There is simply no other way to interpret your neighbor's actions when he takes your stuff than to assume that further aggression certainly is possible and probably is likely (how's that for some Rumsfeldian phrasing?) and, further, you would be able to out expand and out tech us until a future time when war would be a certain winning undertaking for you.

To put it another way, if you're in a race with someone faster than you, it doesn't do any good to take out his knees once he's fifty yards ahead of you. You have to kneecap him while you can still reach him. If you both have to go to the ground in the fight, at least he can't outrun you there. This ignores, of course, everything else in the game, but at that time, our focus was on the enemy that we knew, you (the known known), and not on the one we didn't know who we didn't scout nearly well enough but knew would be there, "Mike" (known unknown). Bantams would be the unknown unknown in this scenario. If we had known how much you stood to profit by not warring with us, perhaps we could have had more confidence in a lasting peace with you and eschewed further war with you and instead punched "Mike" in the face sooner for his ridiculous farmer's gambit. But we did not know about Bantams to the extent that we all came to know him later in the game, once his ineptitude had been more generally known. This leaves still, though, the issue of how to deal with Darius with More Food, More Land, and More Tech at a later date, but it at least would have been an option to explore. With our limited knowledge, at that time, with that intel, and mired in what felt for all the world like an existential conflict, I am not sure that we could at any point have disengaged the conflict with any assurance that you wouldn't resume it immediately when it became more advantageous to you.

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.

Two things:

1. I think you underestimate just how much we ended up recovering and the scoreboard does reflect that.
2. I think there's no chance that if the situation was reversed you wouldn't feel the same way towards us that we felt towards you.

1. Well, you can't claim that you recovered because of your military activity as you were not making any gains. Only in the very end you did take from Yuri a size 3 city, I think (you also cleared a lot of land from his culture but at mo point you had an actual lack of land). All other cities you took you razed. Now, imagine that you didn't fool around with the hordes of HAs and Police State - how much better off you would be?
2. I can reject this claim. You have burned my Holy City and still my only concern was to establish peace with you. I even didn't burn a city back when I had a chance.

Number two in your scenario, Gavagai, is again based on having better information than we had. Noble already covered that you knew your intentions but we could not possibly know them, we could only guess them based on information available to us, specifically your previous actions toward us. We had no reason to know that you had a much better target in Bantams and therefore had a very good reason not to war with us. If I'm off base on this, it's because our reporting flow of information was seriously diminished after a specific time in the game and as a lurker I didn't get a memo somewhere. But this is my interpretation of our viewpoint, and I think it's a pretty solid read on things.

I do want to commend you on a well-played game. I do not think that the map is solely responsible for what you have achieved here. You took what you had, polished it up, and did a whale of a job. Between this game, PB12, and your work with Zanth in PB17, I think you've played your way out of being qualified for anything remotely "green" in the future and I look forward to playing you again. You're not playing in PB18, are you? I better check.

Cheers!

Xpost with Gaspar. No wonder, look at the size of this post.

[Ituralde]

And because this was forgotten...

[SNIP]

I'm definitely posting this exchange in the thread

That was hilarious!

[Krill]

One of the things that amazes me is how many of the best players are front-runners. Krill is probably the 2nd worst front-runner on these boards (feel free to post this part verbatim in their thread btw, I'd love to hear a response.) Nicolae is the worst. (Other gigantic front-runners: Kyan, Noble, Lord Parkin.) I personally have a LOT more respect for the players who play it out with a spirit of true competition when the game doesn't go their way than the ones who frequently jump in guppy pools and/or frequently bail on games once they're not winning. Someone like novice or rego comes to mind here. Anyway, I find it absolutely fucking hilarious how Krill has pussed out of basically every opportunity to play against mackoti or Seven but here he is, all over a base BTS game because he gets to steal a little of Seven's glory. I say this liking Krill btw, but I just fucking hate front-runners.

Anyway, only Noble and I jumping in this game made this in any way reasonable for Seven to even be in here, and he's still proven in multiple instances that he's much better than us. Realistically, there are maybe 10 players on the whole board who can ever beat Seven in a game that doesn't have a ton of inherent randomness. And Seven would be favored against all of them but mackoti. This game doesn't have a ton of inherent randomness, but it does have enough that Seven can lose. All it takes is one of his neighbors giving him the Xenudore treatment from PB7 while we get a free pass, for example. That's unlikely, particularly as we have an aggressive neighbor, and its also entirely likely Seven could fight it off. (Especially as aggressive Zulu.) Regardless, I fully expect him to win and Krill to stick around as long as that's the case. And then maybe after this, the two of them will stop being scared little girls and play each other a neutral field (i.e. not a Krillmod game) preferably with mackoti and a few other heavyweights in the field. Give us the game we've been waiting for since PBEM17.

Hey Gaspar, what do you mean by front runner?

[NobleHelium]

You know that was posted on my birthday. Way to insult me on my birthday asshole.