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

[spacetyrantxenu]

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.

No, actually, I couldn't care less for my cities for their own sake. I do play for the outcome, because I view making the conquest as difficult and the prize as sour as possible to the attacker firstly as a matter of fairness to other players, secondly as a matter of metagame as I don't want to be attacked in the future and thirdly as this being the only intelligible and measurable goal on which I can focus what scarce mental faculties I have. I really don't see any other goal I could get behind as a defender in such an asymmetric conflict, but it would be quite fun to hear out alternatives. The only semi-viable I thought of was maximizing the turns of survival, but because the way to do so is to plant a bunch of cities around the polar circles and generally marginal land, it felt compeltely arbitrary and gamey to me, as well as unfair to the other contenders (if I was pursuing this goal, I would only build as many units as required to safeguard the cities from a Cavalry attack, knowing that they would fall to Cannons).

Your enemy doesn't expect you to pillage all your tiles in a hopeless, inevitable situation like you were in.

Surely, after this whole discussion he does

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.

I really don't see why this should even enter into my decision-making. Maybe I should have just gifted the whole thing to him, that way he gets to have fun, and I don't have to play out the fairly boring defense turns. Everybody wins! Sorry for being facetious here, but the very suggestions that you should base your troop movements, build orders and research on what other players might find more enjoyable is too strange to comment on. Besides, the whole point of playing at RB is to be challenged, no?

"if it can't help you and only hurts the enemy, it isn't a sporting behavior"

This is going back to Gavagai's point — building units in your last city, even though they cannot prevent your destruction, but can only deal a bit more damage to the attacker qualifies as "unsporting behaviour". In fact, a whole bunch of actions qualify as such, the fact that you separate self-pillaging specifically is only down to personal preference, the logic behind it is exactly the same as pressing the "fortify" button, to ensure that, once I'm dead, the attacker at least has to heal or is more vulnerable to counter-attack. Actually, as you can see from this very game — it's a relevant game-wide consideration. I might be eliminated, but my effect on the game persists, and I am quite alive enough to see it and care about it.

On the jerkishness, I can only say again that I'm happy to play in games with clear honour rules placing this, or indeed any other action out of bounds. Enough people have said they see nothing objectionable in self-pillaging and whipping that you should take a step back and consider whether insisting that someone behaved like a jerk is reasonable.

A lot of this feels like you and Gavagai either missing the point completely on purpose, or that we come from completely different and incompatible points of view. I know now that, after reading your thoughts and his on this topic, I'm not interested in playing a game with either of you in the future. Nothing personal, just a clash in the types of play I would expect from an adversary. I'm in the group of people who don't want to have to have rules for everything, playing with you it seems like we'd have to hire a lawyer and go over a long hypothetical list of possibilities so we could agree on what would and wouldn't be fair behavior before we started a game. Ain't nobody got time for that.

you should actually delete your units if you want to cause as much damage as possible, because you are limiting your opponents opportunity to gain XP and produce a GG.

I actually thought about that, and I'm still not sure whether the one action or the other was the correct one. This was also the reason I used ancient-era units to pillage, rather than to defend and largely deleted them afterwards.

EDIT: But again, BGN, Xenu and co would say that I shouldn't even be weighing the damage to the attacker's units against his XP gain, I should rather.... I'm not actually even sure what is the alternative being suggested here. Which is partly why this whole discussion is quite tiring.

Yeah that's completely what I was saying. No, wait, it isn't. Let your units die in your last city or delete them, I don't care about that and it's a valid choice either way. But pillaging your tiles makes no sense when you're about to be dead, it's only a spiteful act. What does it gain you, a few XP in your RB metagame reputation? "Don't fight Bacchus, he pillages everything, not worth attacking!" FALSE. Now I know to just kill you all at once if we ever fight a war. Or attack you in sufficient force to initiate your self-destruct sequence, then withdraw and watch you pillage all of your own tiles. Or whatever. I thought you fought your defense in a reasonable fashion in how you tried to survive Plako's inevitable conquest, the strategy with the forts was fine, you were trying hard to persevere in an impossible situation. Kudos for that. But the pillaging served no useful purpose and that is where you crossed the line in my opinion. My opinion isn't law around here, to the benefit of everyone, but I know I'm not interested in playing in games with people who hold positions this contrary to what I view as fair play. If it were me in Plako's shoes I'd be pissed off beyond belief at how you played your endgame. Yeah, there's nothing he can do about it now, but I'll bet he won't be too keen to play with you again either. I could be wrong, I don't speak for anyone else.

Gavagai, I've already stated that pillaging your own resources in some situations is a valid tactical play, scorched earth to deny the resources to your enemy. But it comes with a caveat that once you're doomed (aka, Mindy's ETA to death) it serves no further benefit to you and is only a spiteful action toward your opponent. That's what Bacchus did, that's the case I'm arguing against.

[Krill]

Sure, I agree that pillaging cottages can make sense. In fact that's the main reason I don't actually like making general rules, it's that a lot of edge cases that aren't damaging are removed from the game. That said, sometimes the loss of edge cases is necessary so that rules are easy to understand.

I don't care either way about any of this in isolation. Pillage cottages, spite whipping, whatever. But there are effects on the metagame that might not be so beneficial.

[Bacchus]

Side-note: Bacchus, why wasn't that pop you whipped all on the last turn not, like, whipped into actual units during all those turns Plako was invading you? The fact that you had that much pop a dozen turns into a war you knew you were going to lose is actually half of what's puzzling to me. If all you cared about was hurting Plako, surely whipping units like a crazy person would be the better approach rather than not whipping until it's too late for the whips to matter for any reason other than spite. Also, I realize there's a strong chance that cannot be answered in this thread without spoilers, so maybe that answer should go in the lurker thread.

Even though I'm pretty sure Scooter knows the answer to this question already, Canticle had enough base prod to be producing a unit a turn with only occasional whipping.

[pindicator]

How about the rest of your cities? I think that's what he's asking about

[Gavagai]

Let your units die in your last city or delete them, I don't care about that and it's a valid choice either way. But pillaging your tiles makes no sense when you're about to be dead, it's only a spiteful act.

It looks like you never cared to try to actually understand my argument. My point is whatever you do in desperate situation may be considered as "a spiteful act" according to your logic. If harming your opponent has no intrinsic value, any kind of defending when you have no chances to survive even a turn longer is pointless. If it has intrinsic value, then pillaging improvements is perfectly OK.

[pindicator]

Gavagai, I think the point of Xenu and BNG is if you can do something that causes your Civ to live longer then kudos, regardless of how much it hurts your opponent or is "self destructive". But in the last turn of your existence, whipping down cities served no purpose other than to spite the attacker and is seen as poor sportsmanship.

Re: pillaging. I agree with Krill that there are plenty of valid applications of it. And seven is right that units doing so aren't defending. So it's a gray area and one I hope people will take some time to think about the motivations for doing it before employing in their games

[Bacchus]

Xenu, I explained the logic behind the pillaging, it's a straight-forward one. Pillaging is not some sort of freak act that gets thrown in when a switch is flipped, the decision to pillage or not to pillage a specific tile or a set of them comes about as a result of exactly the same considerations as the decision to delete units or not, how many units to build and which ones, where to position these units. It's not some sort of self-destruct sequence, it's a part of a continuous consideration of how to make the attacker's life difficult, whilst preserving the best possible chances for myself and it guided every single action that I took — to you there was a difference between me coming up with a strategy to minimize the effect of cannons and pillaging, to me there wasn't, each was the subjectively appraised best I could do towards one and same goal.

It's to you that pillaging is this unspeakable hideous thing, and as I said from the start, I appreciate that it can be and I am perfectly fine for playing a game without it, there are plenty of other tasks to allocate units to. If you want, rule pillaging out. But then you don't want to be a lawyer and saying that I, and indeed everyone, should impose some sort of self-censorship on the decision-making process without explicit rules. Fine, I can try and do this, but surely you understand that I can only police my actions to fit with your expectations if you tell me what these expectations are. I also agree that it might be too much work to formalize these expectations, express them in words and get them across, not worth it for recreational gaming, which is why indeed some players avoid some other players. It's pretty clear you see defense with a very different optic than I do, in your optic, pillaging has no purpose, no value, it achieves no meaningful goal — and that's fine, but please understand that there are also other point of view, and in the one I described pillaging is no different from other ways of harassing the attacker.

You might also say that the very goal I put myself is wrong, that after my own chances, the second priority should go not to damaging the attacker, but something else — and as I said above, I'm very open to alternative suggestions. Myself, I couldn't come up with anything better for the second-ranking priority and you have so far only offered something to the tune of "defend cities". Which cities? To what end? Survival for as many turns as possible? I explained how that would lead to bizzare and disbalancing play. To some other end, what is it? As it is, I just don't understand what drives your decision-making on defense, what are you optimizing on, how is it that building units in the face of an undefeatable stack to you HAS value, but pillaging in the face of the same stack has NO value?

[Gaspar]

To me, there's a perfectly obvious difference between actions taken to hurt the opponent and actions taken to hurt yourself which will "poison the well" against your opponent. That's the difference between razing a random city of an opponent that won't actually help you and spite-whipping your last city, for example.

The ethics of any move can be debated endlessly, but ultimately, in a thing I do for fun, I don't want to play a game that has a list of a thousand rules and I don't want to play with people will take advantage of those rules not existing. I want to play games with people who can see the difference themselves. That probably greatly shrinks my pool of possible opponents. So it goes.

[Gavagai]

But in the last turn of your existence, whipping down cities served no purpose other than to spite the attacker and is seen as poor sportsmanship.

OK, but, according to this logic, what exactly you should do on the last turn of your existence? It's impossible to gain anything for yourself, harming the attacker is prohibited. Given that basically anything you do would affect the attacker one way or another - should you help the attacker? This is the only option left and that is why I started to talk about "deleting units" in the first place.

And, please, don't answer "you can do anything but spite-whipping and pillaging", this is getting ridiculous enough already.

[Gaspar]

OK, but, according to this logic, what exactly you should do on the last turn of your existence?

Fortify your goddamn units and go read the lurker thread. Why is this so hard?