[NO PLAYERS] The Kibitzer Klub: PB13 Map & Lurkers

[pindicator]

Guys if we use your approach (game is less fun for other players & you have no benefit) than we should be deleting all our units at the point when elimination becomes inevitable.

But why stop there? Let's just delete our units on turn zero because elimination is, as you put it, inevitable. Or we can go one step further and just stop playing because, hell, we're going to lose anyway. It might not be this game, but in some game at some point we are going to lose, so why not just delete our units now!

You can't honestly believe any of what I said is true, and I don't think you believe what you said is an accurate illustration of what we're trying to argue here.

[Bacchus]

EDIT: Cross-posted with everything after Xenu's post.

I think it's largely down to preference at the end of the day, whether people think the attacker is within rights to claim that population as his based on military superiority even before he actually captured the city. I am mostly indifferent here, I don't think allowing or disallowing population destruction affects the game that much. I do slightly lean towards allowing it — late games attacks against laggers become a touch too profitable for my taste, but I'm willing to play whatever the consensus of the field for a particular game is. It's evident from the discussion here and in scooter's thread that people feel differently, and this causes no problem up until two people with opposing expectations end up in the same game.

Even though I don't see much point in trying to deliberate what is a matter of taste, I would point out that warfare fundamentally means being a dick to another player, the only difference here is that some actions, like attacking and razing cities, taking advantage of weakly defended spots, promoting tanks to amphibious commando, are seen as "a part of the game", and others aren't. The distinction, to me, is arbitrary. Moreover, in a nearby discussion, some of the same people who see self-pillaging and whipping in a face of certain death as petty very strongly defended their own commitment to vengeful warfare. To me, that's amusingly inconsistent — if you are prepared to actually damage your prospects to launch a massive retaliatory strike, you have absolutely no high-ground to look down upon what I did. I was being eliminated no matter what I did, I didn't make the situation worse for myself, I just made it not as pleasant for the attacker as it could have been. To me that's what defense against insurmountable odds is all about anyway.

Also, given how much pettiness, jerkiness and spite are being brought up in these discussions, I think it's worth pointing out, that none of my actions were emotion-driven. To me, there was no fundamental difference between allocating a musket to a city garrison where it could do some damage to the incoming stack and allocating an axe to pillage a town. In both cases I had a resource which I could employ to deal some damage to the attacker, either take off some unit health, or deny him some future incomes. I employed the resources at hand, the options the game gives me, to maximize the expected damage to the attacker. Now, I'm completely fine with declaring some of these options as out-of-bounds by honour rules, that is as options which shouldn't even be considered for their efficiency, but frankly I don't see either self-pillaging or "spite"-whipping as destructive to fun.

And honestly, whilst I have some sympathy to the suspicion of whipping down to one, I really don't see how anyone can even take issue with self-pillaging. Self-pillaging takes units and logistics, it can be easily prevented by the attacker with a small cavalry screening force, and self-pillaging too far in advance of an attack risks actually damaging your defensive capabilities by hindering research and production. Finally, late-game workshops are not so much worse than towns to make the tactic somehow game-breaking. It all seems to me so much a case of normal cost-benefit interplay between the warring parties that I am genuinely puzzled by the apparently strong feelings elicited.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Guys if we use your approach (game is less fun for other players & you have no benefit) than we should be deleting all our units at the point when elimination becomes inevitable.

My elimination is never (has never been?) inevitable. My chance of winning of course dies in every game pretty soon after I start playing, though, so I'll take that as the starting point here. If you're saying I should start deleting my units as soon as I realize I've lost the chance to win, you completely misunderstand why I play games here in the first place. I'm not as good as other players and generally don't think I have a shot at winning. But that doesn't keep me from having fun. Which makes me wonder why you play, if this is the kind of approach you discern from my ideas about not spoiling the fun for other people when that's all that is left to you. You do play for fun, right? And don't say "winning is fun", of course it is, but winning isn't the only thing. Play for fun! And win if you can, but don't piss on someone else's fun just because you can. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

preview edit: x-post with Bacchus.

[Bacchus]

@Pindicator and BGN:

If Gavagai's arguments are really straw men, can you stand back for a second and earnestly explain the difference between having a garrison that is guaranteed to be wiped out in your last city, and having deleted that garrison? Seems to me, the only difference is how much damage the attacker will take. That is, the only reason to keep that garrison there, rather than delete it, is to damage the attacker with no benefit to yourself, as you are equally dead whether some attacking units were damaged in the attack or not. People keep reading Gavagai's posts and having the reaction of "well, obviously that's different!", yet Gavagai's whole point is that this difference appears to be rooted in habit and emotion, not logic. Keeping your city garrisoned, even if the garrison can't hope to stand, only to make the attack more costly is not seen as spite, but why not? What is so different, I really am asking in earnest, because for all Gavagai's efforts to raise the question, it was never once even considered to be a genuine one.

[MindyMcCready]

Guys if we use your approach (game is less fun for other players & you have no benefit) than we should be deleting all our units at the point when elimination becomes inevitable.

Seconded.

There isn't much that separates consideration for your attacker and rolling over. Since the game doesn't have a surrender button; defend to the max every time.

EDIT: I took it as a given that Gavagai wasn't so much being literal as asking where do you stop in your consideration for your attacker. Personally, I'd stop before whipping the city down to size 1 but everything else is fair game.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Bacchus, would you play a game where it was expected of you to give up the moment that winning or surviving became obviously impossible? Of course not, what would be the point? No, you play on, you do your best, and you set your own goals for your own entertainment, and do your best to not make things unfair or unfun for other people. You defend like a madman because you probably don't want your cities to be taken from you, not because you feel like your defense is going to change the outcome in the end (this is referring to your "inevitable" conquest by Plako, which, in this case, really was inevitable given the power, tech, and production disparity between your civs). You defend because in the game we're playing in that situation, defending is the appropriate action to be taking. Define "appropriate" however you want to. When you're being attacked, you defend. So what do you choose to defend, your cities, or your tiles, or something else? In Civ you choose to defend your cities because when you lose the last one, you lose everything anyway, it's what defines your survival in the game, holding that last city. So what if it's hopeless? Keep fighting until the end, that's what your enemy expects you to do.

Your enemy doesn't expect you to pillage all your tiles in a hopeless, inevitable situation like you were in. In PB8 I discussed pillaging my own resources too, but I wasn't in an existential conflict for my survival. I didn't believe my invader was capable of completely killing me, so denying him resources (i.e., cotages) to use against me was a defensible action in terms of my continued participation in the game. But you were obviously dying to Plako -- what does it matter to you if he benefits from your cottages or not? You're dead no matter what you do. But your destruction of your entire empire I'm sure did serve to sap Plako's enthusiasm for the game, how could it not? If you doubt me go ask him, I'm sure he'd be having more fun if he wasn't facing the prospect of building everything from nearly zero in your former territory. And how did that benefit you? He couldn't use those holdings against you in any case, your death warrant was signed already. I don't think we should have to set guidelines of when you can or can't destroy your resources in the face of an invader, but if we need a litmus test maybe it needs to be something like "if it can't help you and only hurts the enemy, it isn't a sporting behavior" or something. But I still think that's covered by "don't be a jerk", because it felt like a jerk move to simply deny Plako the spoils of war when it served you zero benefit to pillage everything and spite whip the remaining city.

Preview Edit: Mindy, I think you're wrong. Refraining from pillaging yourself when in a doomed position isn't rolling over at all. Defend as hard as you can, then die as best you can. Never surrender. But don't be a jerk while you die.

[MindyMcCready]

Preview Edit: Mindy, I think you're wrong. Refraining from pillaging yourself when in a doomed position isn't rolling over at all. Defend as hard as you can, then die as best you can. Never surrender. But don't be a jerk while you die.

Fair enough. I consider scorched earth a valid tactic but I agree that it should have some tangible benefit to the defender in ETA to death or in ability to survive a future conflict.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Preview Edit: Mindy, I think you're wrong. Refraining from pillaging yourself when in a doomed position isn't rolling over at all. Defend as hard as you can, then die as best you can. Never surrender. But don't be a jerk while you die.

Fair enough. I consider scorched earth a valid tactic but I agree that it should have some tangible benefit to the defender in ETA to death or in ability to survive a future conflict.

I'm 100% of scorched earth as long as I'm not suffering from a terminal case of invasion. Deny the enemy anything he can use against me. But if I'm dead anyway, that's where it becomes a petty and spiteful action, IMO.

Unrelated, when are you going to sign up for one of these games? I'm sure that several people would jump at the chance to dedlurk you. (WilliamLP and AT come to mind! )

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

EDIT: Cross-posted with everything after Xenu's post.

I think it's largely down to preference at the end of the day, whether people think the attacker is within rights to claim that population as his based on military superiority even before he actually captured the city. I am mostly indifferent here, I don't think allowing or disallowing population destruction affects the game that much. I do slightly lean towards allowing it — late games attacks against laggers become a touch too profitable for my taste, but I'm willing to play whatever the consensus of the field for a particular game is. It's evident from the discussion here and in scooter's thread that people feel differently, and this causes no problem up until two people with opposing expectations end up in the same game.

Even though I don't see much point in trying to deliberate what is a matter of taste, I would point out that warfare fundamentally means being a dick to another player, the only difference here is that some actions, like attacking and razing cities, taking advantage of weakly defended spots, promoting tanks to amphibious commando, are seen as "a part of the game", and others aren't. The distinction, to me, is arbitrary. Moreover, in a nearby discussion, some of the same people who see self-pillaging and whipping in a face of certain death as petty very strongly defended their own commitment to vengeful warfare. To me, that's amusingly inconsistent — if you are prepared to actually damage your prospects to launch a massive retaliatory strike, you have absolutely no high-ground to look down upon what I did. I was being eliminated no matter what I did, I didn't make the situation worse for myself, I just made it not as pleasant for the attacker as it could have been. To me that's what defense against insurmountable odds is all about anyway.

Also, given how much pettiness, jerkiness and spite are being brought up in these discussions, I think it's worth pointing out, that none of my actions were emotion-driven. To me, there was no fundamental difference between allocating a musket to a city garrison where it could do some damage to the incoming stack and allocating an axe to pillage a town. In both cases I had a resource which I could employ to deal some damage to the attacker, either take off some unit health, or deny him some future incomes. I employed the resources at hand, the options the game gives me, to maximize the expected damage to the attacker. Now, I'm completely fine with declaring some of these options as out-of-bounds by honour rules, that is as options which shouldn't even be considered for their efficiency, but frankly I don't see either self-pillaging or "spite"-whipping as destructive to fun.

And honestly, whilst I have some sympathy to the suspicion of whipping down to one, I really don't see how anyone can even take issue with self-pillaging. Self-pillaging takes units and logistics, it can be easily prevented by the attacker with a small cavalry screening force, and self-pillaging too far in advance of an attack risks actually damaging your defensive capabilities by hindering research and production. Finally, late-game workshops are not so much worse than towns to make the tactic somehow game-breaking. It all seems to me so much a case of normal cost-benefit interplay between the warring parties that I am genuinely puzzled by the apparently strong feelings elicited.

I'm in a hurry here, so without refinement:

Bacchus: "I would point out that warfare fundamentally means being a dick to another player". This is not true at all. This is competition. Competition requires some extent of "us vs. them". However, we are not competing for life or death resources like water. We are competing for recreation. Part of recreation requires that you keep it civil to keep it fun.

Bacchus: promoting tanks to commando, razing weakly held cities, etc are arbitrary equivalents to spite whipping your units with no benefit to yourself, only harm to your opponent. This is absurd. Games have rules. In basketball, is it arbitrary that players are expected to bounce the ball to run around with it? Perhaps, but it is an accepted rule of the game that all players must adhere to. Commando units are available to anyone who can make it happen, unless we set up rules in advance saying otherwise.

Also, I think you missed the point about the counter-invasion. It shouldn't be simply about inflicting damage to inflict damage: That would be spite. It is about inflicting damage in order to force your opponent to stop inflicting damage on you, or be willing to accept the consequence of not stopping your invasion.

My question to you whipping the city on the way out is whether or not if you were playing a sport in a one-off scenario (playoffs, for example) would it be ok to injure a player on the opposing team? It doesn't hurt your chances, you're being eliminated anyway. Spite whipping your Moai city is the equivalent to doing this.

[Gavagai]

Guys if we use your approach (game is less fun for other players & you have no benefit) than we should be deleting all our units at the point when elimination becomes inevitable.

Can you stop with the goddamned strawman arguments all the time? Or are you just a troll?

It's pretty obvious that this isn't a straw man but a perfectly valid argument. If you are going to be eliminated anyway, it would make no difference for you whether you have units defending or not. But the necessety to cut through your defenses would make the game less fun to play for your rival. Therefore, keeping units inside your last city is a paradigm example of poor sportsmanship as you are spoiling the fun for another player for no gain for yourself.
This example perfectly satisfies criteria you have proposed. If you don't like the conclusion, then, please, refute my inference or reject your premises. Or, please, keep civil at least; being called a troll for just being logical hurts.

EDIT. And yes, it's pretty obvious that in desperate situation your only logical options are deleting all your units or causing maximum possible damage to your rival. Because if damage to a person who attacked you has no intrinsic value, there can be no point in fighting when you are about to die.