[SPOILERS] By the Rivers of Babylon, FIN has no effect (on krovice)

[Krill]

And how do you define 'everything'? Everything Dtay currently owns? Just the stuff you can march to? Just the west?

I dunno if that's even a reasonable question, though. Probably what you really mean is 'everything my army can take, I'll find out what that is when we fight'.

I want to win. Nothing less.

Other question: In retrospect, should Dtay have invaded you instead of Pindicator? Or could you have made that a fiasco? Did he do anything wrong strategically, or just get unlucky?

The only thing dtay had to do differently is to not lose the second shrine city and I wouldn't have invaded him. I suppose that means that if he hadn't lost those units against Pindicator, then he would have been fine. Beyond that I just don't have enough information to comment.

Hope you're feeling better soon.

I feel better now thank, just need another week and I should be back to my normal health. Just a week spent eating healthily at Christmas is not exactly easy to do

Oh who am I kidding, I usually eat shit anyway and only cook for myself, so I just have to not be stupid. Not like I even celebrate Christmas (I just grudgingly acknowledge it's existence and don't go into stores that play music).

[Ichabod]

Oh who am I kidding, I usually eat shit anyway and only cook for myself, so I just have to not be stupid. Not like I even celebrate Christmas (I just grudgingly acknowledge it's existence and don't go into stores that play music).

By the way, I laughed out loud when I read this. I really didn't expect it after that cute smiley.

[Krill]

I'm grumpy, I know...but fuck it, if it's torture to play the same song at someone for hours on end in a detention centre, why the fuck isn't it in a supermarket?

[Krill]

Other question: In retrospect, should Dtay have invaded you instead of Pindicator? Or could you have made that a fiasco? Did he do anything wrong strategically, or just get unlucky?

I think I'm going to try and answer this in a way that explains why I don't like the map as well. It might not come across brilliantly, but it's worth a try. I'll start from the beginning of the game.

Basically, on T0 some people got 2 hammer starts, others didn't. We didn't, and dtay did. dtay started off faster than us, and got 2 cities down before we could plant our first settler on T37. At no point did we ever have an opportunity to be able to dictate events in this game to dtay, except by forcing him to react to our dot map after this point. We could not expand faster, we could not tech faster, we could not build military and kill him with chariots. So over the following 25 turns we planted as far away from dtays cities as possible without giving him the possibility of planting towards us again. We took as much land as we could whilst making our cities as difficult to capture as we could. We neglected to get copper hooked, or even settle for it, but bowmen are bitches to deal with. We also fucked Whosit hard but that didn't bother dtay (although as you can tell now it kinda does).

What were dtays options at that point? He'd settled his luscious land, he'd teched most of the way to Judaism for what has become an uber shrine. What could he do? In hindsight, maybe he could have decided on a HA rush at T30 and tried that. It could have worked (actually, it would have worked against what we did but he wouldn't have known that at the time). So he could either change tack late on, or just plow ahead into economy. I think he made the right choice here. So on T62 dtay double downed on his efforts to tech and kept on expanding. Oracle>GP>shrine, settling land vacated by Barry Lyndon (scumbag), settling up on Whosit, teching faster than anyone else could keep up with.

Then he gets to knights and stacks up. By the time he can invade, he has a choice of Whosit with nothing or us with War Elephants, and the Stable quest giving us a bunch of HA and about double the pop to whip. What does he do? He takes hte easy option, takes out Whosit.

And this is the problem with the map. dtay had 2 options to attack. He lacked the infrastructure and hammers to attack anyone else over the water. He couldn't interact with them. Instead dtay then goes down a route that leads him to owning more land than anyone else, more cities, more tech, crop yield and beakers and basically, on T150 is sitting on a fucking win button in any other game. Because not only is dtay in a position to take those cities, no other player can attack him. Really, who the fuck attacks into a person that has knights when you barely have maces or HA, and you have the build the navy? No one could put pressure on him, except the team with a bunch of slow WE and cats. Knights murder WE unit for unit, if not hammer for hammer, so attacking into knights, against a hammer deficit is not going to work for taking and holding cities, not with the best defensive unit that gets bonuses being a spear.

So anyway, back to dtay. T150. Sitting there, ton of cities, land opponent is just about starting to get the tech you had 30 turns before, players on other continents and slowly choking down one opponent when you've already eaten 2. What can you do?

At this point, dtay could have theoretically stacked up and hit us quickly. Might have worked. No certainty though, and it looked like he had a lot of time to consolidate and then attack with cav and rifles.

What happens then? We've burnt 2 golden ages just about consecutively. We've finally spread religion and built SP to get into Theo, but we've also take Police State and Drafting, and can get Muskets out. And maybe doesn't know, but Steel is in the pipeline, not far away. We're solidly fourth in demos, and overthe next few turns we blow up in power. At some point, dtay could have attacked a bit earlier into us, again that might have worked, not that much certainty though because by this point other opponents are starting to catch him up and look threatening. Does he take a risky shot and potentially stretch too far, giving other players the opportunity to catch up, or god forbid, get Astro and start stabbing him in the back? If there were more land routes to people, than maybe dtay could have taken smaller chunks but more often and it would have worked out better for him, but it would also have been better for the other players not getting frozen out of land acquisition.

Because that's the problem. dtay has constantly put off attacking us because we've always been a risky opportunity that regardless of the reward would have had a high cost. That's how we've played this entire game: we've always tried to be too prickly to eat so attacking us doesn't make sense. Now, we're said before that stubborn defending will make people less want to attack you, but stubbornly attacking into dumb situations and stalling out doesn't make people defend against you any less, does it? dtay doesn't gain anything from being stupid, so he opnly attacks us if he thinks he gets something out of it, something more than he can get from attacking another player.

Unfortunately, Willow Lake and the weak spine from this continent being protected would have been a damned good reason for a limited war to raze and replace Feeble Position and Pigeon English at least.

[Mardoc]

Thanks!

So this is not a blitz to kill your rival, that will be over in 10 turns. This is a grand strategy that will take a long time to play out.

[novice]

Dtay withdrew. Have fun, Krill.

I divided our EPs between FinHarry and BGN. We want to spend the 7EPs to get BGN's graphs back.

What is the tech status now, btw? Dtay has Rifling but has fallen behind elsewhere, with us fielding cannons and FinHarry fielding Frigates.

[Krill]

Astro and plan to wreck Ruff to grab some more land there before BGN takes everything. Then PP, then reassess.

[novice]

Yeah, I was just wondering what the total beaker count ranking looks like currently.

[Krill]

Fucking horrendous. But I was being brief because I was trying to eat lunch.

I can't play the turn this evening, because we are technically in a three way split with OldTourist (we do have units in the same locations). I'll try to post those beaker totals, but please remember that the known tech bonus skews things a bit.

[Krill]

Thanks!

So this is not a blitz to kill your rival, that will be over in 10 turns. This is a grand strategy that will take a long time to play out.

Anyone that thought that deciding to attack dtay should be based of the simple hope of taking a few cities and ignoring any longer term future is a fucking moron.