So, I thought I was making a cute play here. Settle this new city, surprise-pop borders in 2 turns via caste+missionary (a trick that TBS repeatedly clowned on me with in PB18) to reclaim my culture 1NE of hitshowers, use my GG on 20 lvl-2 upgrades, then hit 45 unit stack with my 62 unit stack. Even if I don't wipe him, this should give Grimace (who's at war with him in the west) some encouragement to keep fighting. Sounds great, right?
Well, he surprised me by building walls. So, I had to blow 7 cats knocking that down. That left only 14 to hit his stack. Turns out it was not enough; I lost around 40 units killing at most 10. I don't even remember, it was a complete disaster. I lost 9 ~50% battles in a row at one point. He's just gonna romp through and wipe me out now. Blugh, and I'm not even in slavery anymore to whip up a new army... alas. GG Haram.
Hmmm, so once again I am at a stalemate with Haram, but now I do not understand why. Backtracking a bit - by now, Haram has probably told you that he has razed my entire core. I lost my big hammer city, my capital, my Moai, my big coastal wharf, and a couple of smaller settlements. Haram razed EVERYTHING for reasons that are beyond my understanding. When he razed the first city, I thought, ah, it is too close to Grimace, he'd rather just have my capital. But he razed that too! Razing my Moai was completely baffling because it was a solid 8 or 9 tiles from Grimace's border and a really fantastic site with tons of infrastructure. (all of my cities in my core had tons of infrastructure, although who knows how much survived)
So, so far, for all his losses, he has kept the chokepoint city that i spite-whipped and the other border city now culture-crushed by SevenSpirits and seperated from his empire, that I had also spite-whipped. Note that I have not been further spite-whipping my cities after my big stack got wiped, partly because Haram is no longer really a contender, but mostly out of respect for being beaten fair and square. He's earned my land and it, as far as I can tell, is his last chance to make a comeback. Grimace had jumped into the war some turns ago and took a couple of Haram's western settlements, but that seems to have stalemated and they now have a peace treaty. That brings me back to my original question - why is Haram not continuing to take my essentially undefended cities in my now fully developed and fertile but underpopulated eastern sphere? And why is he not keeping them when he can, now that he no longer has to fear Grimace for at least 10 turns? The longer he waits, the longer I have to make another serious stack and the more likely it is that Seven will just jump in and take everything I have.
Alright, I guess I should do a post-mortem here. I'm probably not going to do any further reporting as I wait for death unless something really absurd happens, and my reporting has already dropped off heavily for the last 30 turns. If I wait any further, I probably couldn't be arsed to do this at all.
So, I didn't have too much fun this game, and didn't do too well, either. I'm not sure which one is the cause of the other. I reacted badly to a situation that was very different than what I expected and then couldn't keep my enthusiasm up in order to continue playing mechanically at my best. Happens sometimes in DotA too, but in DotA there's always new games another night. That's not so in a pitboss game that you could be playing for a year!! My friends got a good laugh at my constant misfortunes here. So, as long as they had a good time, it was worth it. (and I got my revenge when I later crushed them in our own pitboss game - its not so easy as it seemed when you're watching, is it you fuckers? )
My Mistakes
Before I discuss anything else, I want to rehash what I think my big mistakes were in this match, as that's the most important thing to get out of doing something like this, I think. I think I made six big ones:
1.) I should have been more open to different combos for my opening. My AH-only start was shitty, especially with first pick in the snake draft, but I think I should place some blame on myself for not figuring out a better solution to it. Mackoti's assumed worker-worker-settler at size 1 BW-first productive opening seemed to work out really great for him, whereas I didn't even consider Productive as an option because I thought my earlier worker would be useless due to AH taking 12 turns to research. As it was, I felt like I HAD to have a hunting/mining civ, and freaked out about not having any available by the time the snake wrapped back around. Ironically, the size-1 Productive opening would have probably accelerated my rush enough to make it work, had I still gone down that path. Big egg on my face, eh?
2.) I got too obsessed with Haram early, and scouted poorly to the north and east. I might have been able to strategically "see" a path that didn't involve a duel to the death with Haram if I realized that, because I essentially had the same situation with Parkin, I'd thus be forced to settle in the opposite direction from both no matter how my duel turned out. This was foolish tunnel-vision no matter how you slice it. Its especially irritating considering how important I stressed that hunting was for the incresased scout movement, and then I went had him putz around doing nothing!!
3.) I got too invested in a duel scenerio and threw all my chips in on a rush, without understanding how draining it would be to play the aftermath of one for months. IIRC, I was having a very, very hard time IRL at the time of the decision, with huge stresses relating to work, my family, illness, and my then-upcoming wedding preparations, probably influencing my decision-making here. I don't know. In hindsight, it was pretty stupid, even though it almost did work. If it had, it woulda been awesome. Like, imagine if HAK and Haram's positions were switched, and he finished stonehenge right as I was moving in to hit? I woulda been an unstoppable beast! But, the rush most certainly did not work, and both our games were wrecked. If I found myself in this situation now, I would try to avoid rushing in any way possible unless I was 99%+ certain I could win, something I can't possibly see being the case.
4.) I went TOO all-in on the rush with no back-up plan, and as a result my second city sucked ass. What you want out of your second city in Civ4, whether single player, ladder games, or pitboss, is MUSCLE, and a single grassland horses tile is NOT muscle. Sure, it got my rush out stronger and faster than the spot 1S. But what then? Settling that spot faster might have discouraged Haram from the choke all together, had he spotted it, without needing to rush at all. Stupid, stupid tunnel vision again. :headslap:
5.) I should have whipped my capital more early, because even though working lots of Imp mines on settlers was pretty great, it over-specialized my most important city for too long.
6.) I grew discouraged and let my game lax. I stopped planning, stopped playing attention, and stopped trying. Had I remained interested, I might have recovered even more strongly than I had. I might have had fun with the game again, as I was just starting to when Haram invaded with his big Keshik stack. I probably wouldn't have lost a city to the barbs, kept a better eye on Haram, built up more forces to discourage him. Would it have been enough to catch up to the leaders - would I too be switching, along with Mackoti, into State Property in 1190 AD? Probably not. However, I might be up near Gawdzak or wetbandit, and still having fun.
Picks Re-evaluation
Well, what do I think of my picks? Well, I'm not sure. On one hand, I think ToW Imp is a really fantastic trait; to any extent that I was able to recover after my disasterous early game, I owe it mostly to Imp letting me spew out settlers at a ridiculous pace and getting markets up everywhere.
Cha, on the other hand? God, I don't know what the hell to think about Cha anymore. It's really such a weird trait; it's sort of a passive "jack of all trades" opportunity type of deal in a game where getting ahead of your competition usually means directly leveraging your advantages as soon as you can. For example, no matter what else your modus operandi might be, its good for an Exp leader to focuses on getting early granaries in his new cities. These early granaries accelerate all their growth - that's their advantage. With Cha, what do you focus on that helps accelerate? Let's see. First, the extra happy cap lets you leave cities ungarrisoned, if you want, for a super long time. Ok, so that's useful, as you can either save on upkeep and hammers on garrisons, or push more troops up to your front lines. The extra happy cap lets you grow cities early, if you want, letting you get a nice big capital for example, or you can whip in lots of extra infrastructure or units. Or, you can try diving deep into the tech tree for something special, as the extra three happy cap lets you potentially skip or delay the monarchy line AND the calendar line. All this sounds great, and I think that if you have an unpressured, sandboxy situation, where you can leverage all this stuff at the same time, then Cha can be among the best traits.
However, in all these cases you don't get anything out of Cha immediately. It's sort of like a finite trust fund that you gain access to as you come of age, one that you're REQUIRED to spend. Whether you invest it wisely, are forced to bail yourself out of unforseen trouble, or spend it stupidly, you get what you get and then its gone. For example, (going through the positive opportunies again that I mentioned earlier), the potential for lighter garrisons doesn't help much if you have to build a military anyways, because of barbs or neighbor aggression or whatever. Taller cities are cool, as long as you have strong, improved tiles to grow on - and you're growing onto the right tiles. Parkin got a lot out of Cha/Pro this way, I bet. In addition, you can only ever grow one size at a time, so you're getting NO value out of your trait until you hit the "normal" happy cap, then only getting 1/3 of your trait bonus at first, then only 2/3. It could take a long ass time to get the full value here, so you better hope you have good food! The same logic applies to whips - each extra 1-pop whip, for whatever extra hammers, commerce, and food you get outta this compared to doing 2-pop whips - only gets you a partial benefit until you hit the happy cap. You're also at risk of running yourself into debt... you better get something valuable out of these whips that compounds into good value quickly, because Cha doesn't truly give you MORE whips, it just gives you the whips SOONER. If these whips were panic whips due to enemy pressure, well that's just too bad. Furthermore, even infrastructure whips can be sub-standard, as Cha does not give any building-multiplier by itself. And does your extra happy cap really get you much more compared to ther traits, when its time to get forges and courthouses up, and Ind and Org are essentially getting two extra whips for free? (Imp/Cha is actually a good pairing here, I think) And all this assumes that you're actually whipping out useful stuff; if you screw up and whip out useless garbage, then Cha doesn't get you anything at all. Finally, the potential to skip two big chunks of the early tech tree, Monarchy and Calendar, could be swell, but what if you end up having five calendar resources in your borders? You'll probably still want it, so that part of the trait's potential is wasted. What if everyone has lots of early happy available? Cha doesn't give any benefit until you start hitting the happy cap, and so the farther that is away, the later it is that you get any benefit. What if you have no happy at all and still need Monarchy? Sucks to be you.
Before this game, I ran a bunch of single-player tests that let me do some amesome shit with Cha, but after two crummy games with it at RB, I don't think I'd pick it again. If I did, I think Cha/Pro, Cha/Imp, and Cha/Exp are the only three combos that really seem worth it. Maybe Cha/Agr, with the new Agr? I'd have to try it out, I guess.
As for my first-pick Khmer, I think it worked out as well as any civ could have given my already-mentioned oversight of a worker->worker->settler at size 1 opening. I mean, I wouldn't even have access to Oromos, Research Institutes, or Riesengardes at all yet, and at least Ballistas stopped Haram dead in his track once Grimace sent me some ivory to build them. I only built three Barays, but they weren't worth it everywhere in the end, probably. For 40 or 50 hammers, like in Exp RtR mod, they're worth it everywhere. Not for 100 though. You'd only build them where you need the health, and a +3 health aqueduct, which is what they are when you have shitty access to health resources, isn't really very special.
Map Complaints
Well, I've complained about the map throughout this thread, but I just want to collect them all here as sort of a cathartic exercise. I really did dislike this map, or at least the part around me. It might have been pretty cool had it been better balanced, as the water was laid out very interestingly.
I'll put this in spoiler tags, as, honestly, who cares about someone else's complaints?
1.) First, we have my proximity to Haram and Parkin. Despite the size of this huge map, I was 12 tiles away from Haram *BEFORE I MOVED*, 14 from Parkin. My starting settler move, which I still don't think was a mistake in retrospect based on the information I had at the time, put me 12 tiles away from each. Contrast that to wetbandit and Gawdzak, whose capitals were 18 tiles away from other players and expanded in concentric rings around their capitals. This is such a huge difference! Both of these players, as far as I could tell, just REXed out to infinity with no pushback from anything. Mackoti and Gavagai, on the other hand, seemed to have a similar situation as Haram and I, with Macktoi as the aggressor, except that Gavagai was either caught by surprise or wasn't able to assemble defenses in time. Only one side's game was ruined here, instead of both sides, and Mackoti's snowballed from that into a runaway position.
2.) Next, those ridiculous V-shaped chokepoints. These:
First of all, why did they have two openings on one side but just one opening on the other? That's such a huge advantage to whoever controls the 1-opening side! Keep them balanced if you've got to have them. I had two of these fucking things, in opposite directions, 3 and 5 tiles from my capital - 5 and 5 if I hadn't moved. What the hell? I didn't see any other player that had to deal with these so close to them, and they were clearly hand-made constructs as they appeared all over the map in a similar setup. I was able to secure the southern chokepoint, which worked out for awhile until I grew too passive (too addicted to finishing up infrastructure and growing CY) but lost the northwestern choke to Parkin before I even understood that it was there. This is, again, partly my fault due to poor scouting, but I don't think I could have secured both of them even if I had known. I don't think I could have secured the southern one AT ALL except for my rush, it was just too close to Haram.
3.) Next, the copper. Ugh. Why did half of the players have riverside copper and half did not? (other than Seven of course, who didn't have copper at all???) If Haram and I had the same situation, either both riverside or both without, then either my rush wouldn't have happened in the first case or it would have been successful in the latter. Why not give everyone the same situation for something so important, considering that you can't plan around it until you can see it?
4.) My last big complaint is that I had really shitty access to happiness, health, and wonder resources resources. Haram had multiple furs, multiple ivories, gold, and silver available; I had silver. Haram's second city was ridiculously good to what I had available; it was even on a river for an auto-trade route! "My" river expansion had no food or happiness available at all. Everyone else also seemed to have lots of easy access to early happys as well; hell, Gavagai had all first-row-tech happys when he was still at like 3 cities! In addition, Haram and Seven had basically every single calendar resource, with multiples to trade of several; I had a single spices and a single sugar, 12 and 13 spaces away from my capital. Haram, Seven, and Parkin all had stone and marble, I had neither. Altogether, this was very frustrating!!! Not only did my early tech rate relatively suffer compared to other players from not having so many such nice commerce tiles to work, but my vertical growth was stunted much more than it should have been. Happy cap was a constant worry until I finally bit the bullet and teched Monarchy, one of the main things I wanted to avoid with my Cha pick.
5.) Finally, this is minor compared to the above but I still want to mention it, I didn't have access to a ICTR except for a single island that was much easier to access for Parkin than I. Other players, e.g. Gawdzak, had multiple islands they could settle.
Well, I guess that's it. I got it off my chest and now I feel better.
If it makes you feel better you can document how you crushed your friends in the other pitboss game. Was that the "BadMap" game you guys had me rush a map for?
Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon
Yeah, that it was! We actually have a whole subforum at our home at badgame.net where we did RB-style reporting for the game, but you'd have to signup there if you want to read it! (if you have trouble with the anti-spambot questions in the signup process, just let me know and I could tell you the answers)
It wasn't supposed to be a "BadMap" though, there might have been some mis-communication there... some players' land was indeed quite sparse, which was one of the reasons the game ended a bit early in a concession. We still had a lot of fun overall though, so thanks again for rolling and balancing it for us.
![[Image: Napoleons_retreat_from_moscow.jpg]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Napoleons_retreat_from_moscow.jpg)
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