[SPOILERS] Small Wunders and Izzy of Inca: The fat lady sings

[WilliamLP]

Hmm I guess this may be at least part of the story:




For my goals, I don't know, it needs some thought. Obviously what I'm doing now isn't going to work, trying to war Greece with 75% of my power and nothing to do but focus every bit of war effort he has, and at the same time facing an inevitable continental domination attempt by Plako a couple of eras up and far more powerful on every metric. That's just going to get me out of the game pretty quickly.

For irrational selfish reasons I'd prefer that Plako not win the game, though as a third party I'd probably be cheering him on.

[WilliamLP]

2metra offered:




I should have just taken this, but I wanted to see if it was one of those desperation deals because he faced a crushing counter attack. It wasn't, so I just re-offered with 10 gold instead of 1. If he doesn't take it, he has a stack including 25 knights and a bunch of rifles vs Lucia (city to on the NE border) vs like 7 rifles on a hill in 40% culture. He could take it with the knights but he'd grind a bunch of knights since the rifles aren't in range yet, and Cavs could counterattack and wipe that stack out.




So as expected, I got smashed in Hannya Plain, worse than I expected. Why did I even leave units in there at all? Basically because I'm a fucking moron who should know better.

I kill:
7 Suicide Cats
1 Rifle
2 Knights

He kills:
14 Rifles
1 Musket
3 Longbows

So, basically after a rough day in jail I'm going to have trouble pooping right for a while.

I have a ton of Cavs that could counter-wipe most of what he's got at very high odds, but the culture closing off makes attacking impossible. A smarter version of me would have reasoned about this and place counter-attacking units appropriately.

Is there anything positive I can take from this? I don't know. I learn don't be an idiot, but also cats still work really well in rifle vs rifle stack battles. So don't take cat hits on unit stacks, like ever. And leaving units in cities with no culture protection or hills is pretty stupid. And culture is a big deal.

Like Ichabod much earlier in this game, I started drooling and got way too greedy. I should have settled for a decisive small gain immediately, and then been done for a while. (E.g. keep Withered Fields, raze Hannya Plain no matter how good the infra was, plant a conservative city 2N of it, just raze the eastern stuff and get out immediately.) I'm usually very loud on the side of saying gains from war are usually harder than you think, so I just have to revise that position further along, I guess, and learn from what happened here. At the very least, trying to fight someone 1-handed will just get you screwed hard.

Trying to do this attack when I could have fully committed to it could have been different, who knows.

I'm not going to quit this game, no matter how ready I am to just move on (very).

[WilliamLP]

And Mackoti (now with Destroyers and Transports) is taking cities off of Commodore? I don't know what is going on with this game. Please dude, just start biting into Plako and conquer your continent so I can be free of this game!

[WilliamLP]

And.... for good measure why not take a city off Scooter after ending turn?

I do have to feel for the guy. He was once in an extremely plausible position to win the game with a couple inherent, unique and powerful long term advantages - Darius and circumnavigated Vikings. (Not just one naval advantage that Krill and co. thought necessary to nerf immediately after, but two at once.) Even I'm pretty attached to my core cities, coming from a position where I think I was out of it the moment I had to build axes instead of a second settler, and where expectations of everyone have probably been long since exceeded.

[WilliamLP]

"A gracious act of generosity" accurately describes the situation. It's definitely not just giving that shit back in order to end a humiliating ass-beatdown.

There are so many fake wars going on, I can't keep up with what's real anymore. Also presumably some drama I'm oblivious to.

I'm pretty done with worrying about things like worker micro and whether a city should be working a mine or a windmill. I go toward Railroad next I guess, as a defensive tech and for lack of a better idea. Maybe I can fool someone with pig iron.




Plako is going to capture culture next to Gotterdammerung any turn now. There's no way I can keep up with a size 14 city's output. I probably shouldn't have units in there since they're just donations after a cannon first-strike. And cannons can of course be anywhere in a 10-tile radius and still hit.

What I don't understand about the culture mechanic is why sometimes one side will have more cultural control over a tile than another, but the tile won't transfer ownership yet. Is there a 1-turn lag on this or something? It would be good to know since the situation I don't want is where the tile 1SE of Gotterdammerung transfers to Plako in between turns and then he hits me with cannons at the beginning of the next turn. The game still says I have more culture in that tile, but it will change soon.

[WilliamLP]

Hi 2metra:




Maybe he's just going to plot out the optimal weak points to make my life worse in 9 turns, oh well for those 9 turns we can be good friends, right? I quite respect the guy for stepping into his very unique and specialized short term role in this game.

Plako is reading as winning the culture war 1S of Gotterdammerung. This is the mechanic I don't understand, why he shows as having more culture on those tiles but they haven't switched to him yet. I guess I go with the 1-turn lag theory. At any rate it means I need to get units out of there to avoid being struck first with siege.

This is starting to look like one of those geological scale climate graphs:




Hockey, anyone? My own part in this graph would look better if I hadn't just donated 14 rifles by freezing up and rage-playing a turn without much thought. (And if I beat myself up enough, maybe I won't do the same stupid stuff twice.)

Usualy i kill them, sooner or latter when is easiear , cheaper or more fun to do so.

I hope he's in the mood for fun soon.

[Ceiliazul]

yes its a one turn delay, with possibly another turn depending on turn order. dont beat yourself up over the 14 rifles, its how you learn... you got bait-and-switched on your attack so you dont deserve any self immolation. you declared war on a publicly stated "burned out" emperor and he was replaced by a young uncoming general.

cheer up! and apply these lessons in pb18.

[WilliamLP]

Thanks. It's indeed good to learn some of these things in a game that doesn't affect the outcome or (probably) even the relative standings of 7th vs 6th vs 8th or whatever. So I have only non-ironic thanks for 2metraninja here.

And yeah, the lowly catapult's collateral in aggregate affects reasonable stacks of rifles more than my intuition had said. And also the next time I'm raging and compound it by misclicking a couple of times I need to slow down and probably step away from the game for a few hours or overnight and reason it out.

[WilliamLP]

Not much is going on now that the dust is clearing after 2metra's clinic in pre-industrial defense tactics. Remarkably, he has freed his frigates and now seems to have wrested control back of his coastline! Nice job. I, for one, think the conspiracy to exclude him from RBCulture should be put to an end. (Do I need a tag to indicate sarcasm?)

Lewwyn is about to be mercifully free from this game. Someone else is about to discover a new meaning to the phrase "hits like a Mack truck". What would it be like being attacked by someone so ferocious that he can defy the entire metagame of English spelling and grammar, and invent a system better than what is used by native speakers?

I should be less clueless about espionage than I am. I have a spy in 2metra's land only to attempt get an idea of what I'm missing, for future games.




I've gotten the feeling that some people don't see espionage as being a perfectly balanced inclusion in BTS. Sullla vaguely hinted once that it might not be one of his favorite aspects of the game.

What I wonder is how useful it is in RBMod, and if so, when. Plako has been running spies on me which I only know because I'm catching them sometimes. (Do you passively catch them in your lands, or is that message only for failed missions?) If he's running it there is probably a value to be gained because he's a pretty smart guy. (Krill puts him at equal number one of all players because he's too diplomatic to irresponsibly assign a precise skill ordering. )

Is that "spread culture" mission good for anything? Is the culture only to the city tile itself, or does it have area of effect?

"Forment Unhappiness" seems like just a troll move. The kind I wanted to do on Dtay before we implicitly agreed that I'd only give him open borders if he stopped pestering me with pirates.

EP for tech in this incarnation of the mod feels very inefficient. I don't know if there are circumstances where that changes.

[WilliamLP]

Another turn, and I'm really at loss for what to play for right now.




I hadn't even considered, like, actually building up these cities. With terraces and stuff. I'm just spamming culture trying to get to +40%. The attack that I thought would come is not coming, and I sure don't see any signs that it will be soon.

Most of what I've got is dedicated to this front line now:




He'd need a lot of stuff to feel good about invading and opening himself up to a first charge from 16 cannons, 23 cats, and then 64 cavs into a bunch of rifles.

I've been headed to railroad as the most annoying defensive tech to deal with. Damned if I really want to think hard about whether railed mines or windmills are better in which cities once I get there.

If I felt comfortable that I have a secure stalemate now anyway, I could also go Constitution -> Corporation for the large commerce bonus.

So I guess I just play like Oxy's North Korea civ in PB11 now? If I had made progress against 2metra, I could imagine trying to overtake Harry and Fintourist in econ eventually with more land. Or that might happen anyway since they have a neighbor whose power graph has been brought to you by Ray Kurzweil:




In my wildest dreams, Mack is setting up for a major strike on Plako that forces concession. I'm sure this is on Plako's mind as well. Despite the eventual static advantage he could have with land and food, Plako, should he imagine winning the game, has a truly massive hole to dig out of with tech and infrastructure, even still lacking Assembly Line.

I am quite interested how Mack chooses to try and finish this. I could see the Flight path or the Electricity -> Industrialism path next for him.