Gaspar, Lewwyn, et al go full Sartre

[Gaspar]

Sure, I'll unpause so you can take peace with Oxy and attack me, TBS.

[Lewwyn]

Sure, I'll unpause so you can take peace with Oxy and attack me, TBS.

Or whoops, ...take 3 more oxy cities and whip/draft a shit ton more units.

[Krill]

I'll bet 4 Krill points on the GSpy.

[Gaspar]

It's a GSpy for sure. I'll take Krill points. Where are they good to redeem?

I'll put 3 bottles of Xenu on a Merchant because its the GP we're most likely to duplicate elsewhere.

I'll also put 2 Commodore tenderloins on this game being called before we use it to fire part of the next Golden Age.

I'll bet 4 Krill points on the GSpy.

The next one is probably a merchant, so no need to play a guessing game, though I guess the pool is dirty enough to be interesting.

TBS took two more cities off Oxy this turn, neither of which had any units in it. He still has the overwhelming majority of his army in Gurton Buster, so TBS is rolling over him with Knights and only needing to use a few Cavalry. He's still teching Banking at breakeven rather than saving gold for upgrades (or even upgrading, for that matter) as opposed to his mass Holkan > Pike upgrade that he did against us. There's actually no more unit power in the current TBS invasion force than there was in ours. Clearly Oxy isn't interested in defending against TBS - which I could accept if he hadn't defended tenaciously against us - and whatever minor interest this game had is in the past. I don't mind losing but watching what Oxy is doing is infuriating. When I hear people complain that X player defended well against them while Y player didn't bother defending against their opponent, I get it. But ultimately that's the random variance in these games. But when you watch the EXACT SAME PLAYER defend competently and firmly against you and then FIVE TURNS LATER watch him basically roll over and show another player his belly - well, I get human nature and in-game factors affecting diplomacy and clearly TBS has been a better friend to Oxy this game than we have. But you don't get to decide you want another guy to just take over your empire because you like him better. Or maybe you do but I surely don't want to play games against you.

I will end every turn report from here out thusly:

Code:

set conc

And would appreciate it if someone could test the waters to see how the rest of the field feels. If I don't hear something from the group within the the next day or two, I'll do the same in the tech thread.

[mackoti]

It's a GSpy for sure. I'll take Krill points. Where are they good to redeem?

I'll put 3 bottles of Xenu on a Merchant because its the GP we're most likely to duplicate elsewhere.

I'll also put 2 Commodore tenderloins on this game being called before we use it to fire part of the next Golden Age.

I'll bet 4 Krill points on the GSpy.

The next one is probably a merchant, so no need to play a guessing game, though I guess the pool is dirty enough to be interesting.

TBS took two more cities off Oxy this turn, neither of which had any units in it. He still has the overwhelming majority of his army in Gurton Buster, so TBS is rolling over him with Knights and only needing to use a few Cavalry. He's still teching Banking at breakeven rather than saving gold for upgrades (or even upgrading, for that matter) as opposed to his mass Holkan > Pike upgrade that he did against us. There's actually no more unit power in the current TBS invasion force than there was in ours. Clearly Oxy isn't interested in defending against TBS - which I could accept if he hadn't defended tenaciously against us - and whatever minor interest this game had is in the past. I don't mind losing but watching what Oxy is doing is infuriating. When I hear people complain that X player defended well against them while Y player didn't bother defending against their opponent, I get it. But ultimately that's the random variance in these games. But when you watch the EXACT SAME PLAYER defend competently and firmly against you and then FIVE TURNS LATER watch him basically roll over and show another player his belly - well, I get human nature and in-game factors affecting diplomacy and clearly TBS has been a better friend to Oxy this game than we have. But you don't get to decide you want another guy to just take over your empire because you like him better. Or maybe you do but I surely don't want to play games against you.

I will end every turn report from here out thusly:

Code:

set conc

And would appreciate it if someone could test the waters to see how the rest of the field feels. If I don't hear something from the group within the the next day or two, I'll do the same in the tech thread.

are you sure he didnt retreated army to fight beter?If what you say is truth man this is serious lack of sportmanship,this is realy bad play.Is like he punishig you atacked him?or what the heck is thinkining?I think is beter to whip to the ground everithing(even i dont agree) then to do what tbs oponent is doing.To bad this was avery interisting game to lurk.

[Gaspar]

are you sure he didnt retreated army to fight beter?If what you say is truth man this is serious lack of sportmanship,this is realy bad play.Is like he punishig you atacked him?or what the heck is thinkining?I think is beter to whip to the ground everithing(even i dont agree) then to do what tbs oponent is doing.To bad this was avery interisting game to lurk.

I'm not saying he's moved nothing towards TBS - he's moved 6 muskets to a city near his border. But he still has I believe at last count 19 Maces/Pikes sitting in a city on my border. If TBS was swarming him with Cavs, I could see why he might feel this was hopeless and he may as well defend against Commodore/Myself poaching him. But 90% of TBS's invading army is Knights/Keshiks, which those Maces and Pikes would put up a strong fight against.

More galling to me than even that - when I invaded he upgraded like 10 holkans > pikes and Axes > maces. Meanwhile he's sitting on a stockpile of gold - still teching at breakeven and hasn't upgraded a single unit in the visible area and I've seen at least 4 warriors. I mean, I can't be sure that he's being totally malicious I think its almost as likely he still had some hope when we attacked and now he knows he's toast and he just wants to be eliminated because he doesn't have time to play any longer. Unfortunately, both ruin the game as a competitive enterprise.

And I will say that Commodore and I had a brief chat yesterday unrelated to this game and Comm made the offhand comment before we stopped talking that the garrison in Gurton Buster (the city on our shared border with Oxy) sure seemed personal. I just can't see any situation where you'd fear a potential threat from a guy you have a treaty with more than an active threat from a guy who is running you over with less than his best units.

Anyway, mostly I just find it disappointing because I was enjoying the game and even if the endgame was TBS rofl-stomping with a military unit an era ahead, there's no fun in watching the last throes of hope be decimated because a guy doesn't want to defend as hard against all the opponents, just the ones he apparently doesn't like.

Not to mention the fact that he's completely ignored every post by Commodore or I in the tech thread in reference to his refusal to implement the bouncing fix which ends up slowing the game down. I don't even care if he doesn't want to do it - the fact that he just outright ignores perfectly reasonable questions from the people you're playing with means I definitely would never play another game with him.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

The next one is probably a merchant, so no need to play a guessing game, though I guess the pool is dirty enough to be interesting.

Too bad I didn't check in to place my bet. I'm willing to hazard a guess about your next one from the dirty pool: Like TBS, it's brown and eventually will cover every corner of the map.

(Just to be safe, don't open this anywhere you can't discreetly view and then walk around for some fresh air. Grossness...you've been warned. )

I'm sorry to see the game go down this road just when you're firing your GA and ready to make some interesting moves.

[NobleHelium]

Random mechanics interlude from a couple days ago (last turn).

NobleHelium
so
do we have any GPP in olympus
Gaspar
6
3 engy 3 spy
NobleHelium
yeah
that's what i thought
#fuckpitboss
that's happened twice now
with the culture adjustment
it can change the borders before you get to work your tiles
it happened with commodore with the hamlet on the border as well
good thing we didn't pop the GA last turn
because we might have actually starved a pop
if we had gone with the minimum food configuration during GA
never happens in pbem

[NobleHelium]

Five cities popped borders in one turn. Pretty sure that's a record for us.

And Oxy lost that coastal city as I expected. I bet if he had gotten the whip off it would have held, I can't see TBS having that many galleys.

[Gaspar]

At some point I'll likely be not annoyed with the game enough to actually report the Golden Age but today is not that day.

We got eyes on TBS's main stack and its Rifles and Cats. He will roll over Oxy in no time whatsoever. There was nothing Oxy could have done once TBS war-dec'd. That said, I give you a study in contasts:







As an exercise for the lurkers, how many different ways can you come up with to play those two screenshots better? Pay particular attention to the situation SE of Nick-Nack, I raged about this for at least 20 minutes. Prizes awarded in Plako Wool.

Demos:

Code:

set conc Mongolia