I'll respond here instead of in Scooter's thread because this is probably too much for a player thread in an ongoing game.
(April 13th, 2014, 23:14)Gavagai Wrote: IIRC Xenu was doing spite-whipping in PB8 during his war with Brick, no protest was voiced.
This is the post you're referring to, I think.
To recap, that situation was markedly different from what Bacchus did and I think I used the term "spite whip" in a situation that definitely, in retrospect, was something different, not spite. That was the first turn of an invasion where I was guaranteed to lose my two front cities. My report shows that I first 2 pop whipped a size 7 city the finish a settler that was nearly complete, and at the time I was planning to offer the two cities for peace. If accepted, the peace deal without open borders would teleport the settler into my territory. Later on in the report I explain that I changed my mind, having decided that ten turns of peace wasn't worth leaving Brick's invading stack intact, and that I wanted him to have to burn the units. Thus dry whipping walls the same turn I had already whipped the settler. The end result was whipping the same city twice, turning a size 7 city into size 3 before Brick got to capture it. It wasn't deliberate spite, it was a change of strategy and I totally reserve the right to do that, as anyone should. In the end I lost both of those cities but Brick didn't get anything further from me, and bleeding his stack a bit did contribute.
Lessons to learn here:
1. Just because I've done something doesn't make it good or right, but going back and reading up on the situation makes my conscience feel so clean.
2. Spending your population when it makes a difference to defend your empire is a Good Thing.
3. Spending your population just to spend them and deny them to your enemy is probably petty, but can be a defensible action in some situations where it can matter in an ongoing conflict.
4. Annihilating your population right before you're obviously going to die to deny benefits to a former enemy....You mad bro? Unless you're the grudge holding type (and I know the type
) this is probably a step too far, in my opinion.
In the hypothetical situation where it's the turn before you're going to be eliminated and you're in position to raze one of your enemy's core cities, or, as is appropriate for Scooter's thread, let's call it their capital. You're dead anyway, right? How is attacking their cities and wasting their population different from wasting your own? For one, there's always the hope that your enemy will release their grasp on your throat if you release the grasp upon theirs. That is, if you're going to sack one of their cities maybe they'll offer you peace instead of finishing you off....except that if they finish you off your stack disappears. So maybe turn order is a factor if it's that close a thing, but basically there can be value in the concept of attacking your enemy at the end if it's done right. In terms of Scooter's situation, he isn't positioned to kill Lewwyn and make his stack disappear right this second so that option is out. But in the hypothetical situation we're talking about with Bacchus, let's say Bacchus had a stack in Plako's territory threatening him. If Plako captures Bacchus's last city, that threat is gone, so it's no good. That's different from Lewwyn's threat, which is real and all too credible. That makes the attack both possible and potentially useful to Lewwyn. I don't see how a theoretical Bacchus attack versus Plako's cities could have benefited him at that late stage of the annihilation phase, it was simply too late. So from that position it was too late anyway, but if it had been earlier on, sure, go attack your attacker, it's a perfectly viable strategy
when used correctly.
For an incorrect use of the attack to gain peace strategy, go back to PB11 and see how Halvgud the Sisub treated his Russian empire against enemies on both sides. He invaded north and stopped our invasion temporarily while simultaneously invading south and getting his southern army annihilated in enemy land, if I'm remembering it right. And then losing more cities to the south because he lost that army and had no regional counterweight to Suttree's French forces. In that situation I don't know what his better options would have been, but marching around and deciding which attacker got the spoils may not have been the best way (but I'm biased and not to be trusted in this rendering of the tale). Anyway, the point is that it depends on the situation whether or not attacking as a defensive action is a good idea or not. But this is a wholly separate issue from destroying your own population to deny it to your enemy.
That, like invading as a defensive measure, depends on the situation. Circling back to the top, let's use my defense against Brick as an example. He didn't have enough units to wipe me off the map and decisively eliminate me, so war was liable to be a long term prospect. Yet I knew I had zero chance at holding those two front cities, given my horrid defensive positioning. I think I
could have been within my rights to spite whip those cities down to nothing to deny him the population to later use against me, but I didn't do that. It could have been a useful move because the war was apt to go on long enough that those cities (and their slave ready populations) could have been used against me. So under that line of thinking maybe spite whipping would have been the better tactical move and I blundered by not doing it. But it seemed like a bit of a dick move, and the operating spirit of the game was "don't be a dick", so I'm glad I didn't spite whip them. Looking back at it now, I'd have been pissed if I was the attacker and all I got for my trouble was a bunch of size one cities. That's probably how Plako feels now, it probably feels like a hollow victory in some ways, even if he can profitably exploit the new lands and cities eventually. But it sucks the fun out of it for sure. That sounds like a dick move to me, so maybe that's where the line is crossed. If you're making the game less fun for other people and not doing yourself any benefit in the bargain, that's probably not a good thing. You can talk about game balance and all that if you want to try to, but Plako already paid the price to take these cities, maybe you're effecting game balance more in the opposite direction if you delay the return on his investment. I don't know how to make that calculation so I won't even try to. It just seems like poor sportsmanship to me, so better to not do it.
If you're being conquered fight like hell for as long as you can to make the conquest cost your enemy as much as possible. Maybe in doing that they'll think twice about trying to kill you the next time you're neighbors, no one likes to eat gristle, right? But just smashing everything out of spite seems petty, unfun, and unnecessary.
Sorry for the overly long post to whoever made it all the way through it, but this is a grey area topic and we may as well explore it some.
