[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Ceiliazul]

Interaction. Not infection... whatever germs you're communicating, I don't want to hear about it!

[Old Harry]

I'm mostly thinking RP-Rifling for our eastern needs. As I said cleverly in our chat, SoL is worth a couple of cities, but couple of cities is also worth a couple of cities..

Didn't we agree that SoL was worth 270 beakers (before bonuses or GP points) so it's more like five cities? Another plus for getting RP earlier is that 5 extra hammers per turn should speed up the SoL .

Mardoc - good point, I'll get on and build some Galleons for our next invasion.

FluffyFlyingPig - good point, we'll get on and make some more blood for our next GG.

retep - good point, but please don't post here again, we don't want this game to go the way of all your others

Ceil - good point, but 2500 posts was a bit intimidating so I just skimmed the end of that thread. I'll add it to my bedtime reading and let you know when we make it. (Fake edit: promoted from 12th to 8th by post 101!)

[Fintourist]

I'm mostly thinking RP-Rifling for our eastern needs. As I said cleverly in our chat, SoL is worth a couple of cities, but couple of cities is also worth a couple of cities..

Didn't we agree that SoL was worth 270 beakers (before bonuses or GP points) so it's more like five cities? Another plus for getting RP earlier is that 5 extra hammers per turn should speed up the SoL .

Yeah, "a couple cities" equals five cities, obviously..



And yup Ceil, I read through pindicooter's PB13 thread. I probably missed lots of good stuff there, but rankings are something that always catch my attention. One of my favorite parts was to read their excitement when we went with OH's artist bomb plan and used it to capture a city from mackoti (unfortunately it was only temporary in the end).

Sometimes I think that writing about macro and overall game situation is boring as much of that is at that time probably clear and obvious for active lurkers, but those are exactly the type of posts that are IMO most enjoyable when one reads about the game months later + they are probably nice for the more casual lurkers --> So I probably keep being captain obvious and post "BGN has a fair chance to run away" and "dtay's position is now a lot weaker than before his pindicator attack" on regular basis.

[Fintourist]

Since the turns are moving slowly, let's continue with shameless lurker entertainment. Before the game started, we ranked all our competitors very provocatively (apologizes..) into tiers indicating their chance to win this game. So let's see how that forecast differs from the actual game situation.. We divided players originally into 4 tiers:

Tier 1: Contenders
Tier 2: Also-Rans
Tier 3: Unknown Unknowns
Tier 4: Cannon Fodder

Here is the comparison:



I have to say that it's amazing how well the current rankings are aligned with our prediction. Sure,
- BGN was listed as an unknown
- AT and Oxy probably should not have been in Tier 4 in the first place
- I'm not sure there is a reason why dtay and TBS should be in a different tier
- etc.,
but that's collateral. Personally I believe that in a non-mirrored map as this one, land quality + neighbors + luck has such a big impact that it over-weighs big skill differences and that's why I'm actually surprised to see that the correlation of our prediction and current ranking is so high.

--> I guess you can interpret this at least in 2 different ways:
1. Player skill+effort differences have a higher impact on the outcome than I believed
2. Land+luck+neighbors have a huge impact, but skill+effort differences in this game are just ridiculously big

I think I still go with option number 2 and say that if you just play 10-player "vet games" (say, random 10 players from top 20 RB players) and the map randomness level is something like PB13, skill differences will show the best player if there are enough repetitions, but similar correlation between predictions and outcome does not appear when you look at an individual game, and one can easily end up with 5 different winners out of 5 games. I'm once again just thinking out loud.

[Old Harry]

Sometimes I think that writing about macro and overall game situation is boring as much of that is at that time probably clear and obvious for active lurkers, but those are exactly the type of posts that are IMO most enjoyable when one reads about the game months later + they are probably nice for the more casual lurkers --> So I probably keep being captain obvious and post "BGN has a fair chance to run away" and "dtay's position is now a lot weaker than before his pindicator attack" on regular basis.

Heh, I'm pretty sure that it's my detailed head-in-the-sand stuff that people skip over in search of your metagame observations, THH's military histories and Retep's unarguably absolute predictions. Lurkers - we need a poll: Which of us is more boring?

I have to say that it's amazing how well the current rankings are aligned with our prediction. Sure,
- BGN was listed as an unknown
- AT and Oxy probably should not have been in Tier 4 in the first place
- I'm not sure there is a reason why dtay and TBS should be in a different tier
- etc.,

- Was it Commodore or Ceil who suggested we'd rated BGN too low straight away?
- AT and Oxy/BaII/CH both seem to have done alright - good play or good neighbours?
- We were right about TBS and dtay being in different tiers up until some idiot ruined dtay's game .

but that's collateral. Personally I believe that in a non-mirrored map as this one, land quality + neighbors + luck has such a big impact that it over-weighs big skill differences

Communist! Isn't it obvious that we're where we are because of our innate quality and filmstar good looks? (Our neighbours getting into that scuffle obviously had no effect on our deserved supremacy.)

[Fintourist]

- Was it Commodore or Ceil who suggested we'd rated BGN too low straight away?
- AT and Oxy/BaII/CH both seem to have done alright - good play or good neighbours?

I think Commodore raised his eyebrows immediately reg BGN. And I think I've seen AT playing well in a PBEM and Oxy has performed well in other games too so probably we just plainly put them into wrong tier. Yeah, tier lists, the best RB innovation ever..

[Old Harry]

Dtay just logged in so when (if) he finishes I'll jump in to kill Azza before BGN can steel our XP... Then I'll go to bed and finish the turn tomorrow.

Edit: Or I'll just go to bed .

[Old Harry]

Turn 178 prologue

I jumped in before BGN to grab the XP:
- Cuir vs archer 99%... WIN (one hit)
- Cuir vs archer 99%... FLAWLESS WIN
- C2 Musket vs archer 96%... WIN (one hit)
- injured C2 Cuir vs archer 85%... WIN (three hits!)
- injured C2 Cuir vs archer 85%... LOSS (awwwww)
- injured C2 Cuir vs archer 99%... FLAWLESS WIN (three hits!)
And Azza is finally dead. Sorry it took so long!

Losing that 85% shot also lost us 4XP towards our GG - we're on 171/180 now - so two or three naval battles should do the trick...

In the east dtay had to move his Cav stack as expected to defend our naval units, we'll plunge deeper into his territory this turn .

I'll finish off later on, but I set research to 100% and we're making 2702 base beakers at -1094 gpt (Alfie is making 666 beakers!). Constitution is 5175, Democracy is 8452, RP is 4657, Rifling is 7245 and Corporation is 4830.

[Fintourist]

Now the continent is finally ours



GG Azza (if you end up checking here)!

Sorry for forcing you to hit enter so many times. First we became busy destroying Mardoc's production before he produces too many Elephants and LBs and then we became busy with distracting dtay...

Anyways, I wrote it already here before but I repeat myself: I highly respect the fact that you put in the effort and constantly logged in and whipped defenders until the end.

More general observations about your game:
- I felt that your early expansion speed was good and in the early game we thought with OH that we were pretty unlucky with having you as a neighbor. Of course the conflict between you and Mardoc changed our luck.
- That being said it seemed to me that you spent too many hammers on monuments and too little on granaries as your early infra builds and you would have needed more/some cottages as research quickly became the weakest link of your economy
- Regarding the above: Based on a wounded animal + that we were able to get so many huts it seems that you lost your scout early. That also surely contributed to struggle with research as tech costs are high in this game and one free tech or a pile of hut gold would have helped significantly
- After your conflict with Mardoc your economy of course started hurting more and we were able to attack you from a position of clear advantage. Tactic-wise I don't think there is too much to criticize you reg our war. Due to your conflict with Mardoc most of your forces were in the west and counterattacking e.g. your capital would have been suicidal. In hindsight dividing troops between Dental Plan and Boo-Urns was probably a mistake as concentrating everything in one place and sacrificing the another city would have stopped/delayed the capture of one of those cities. During the enter-pressing phase there were some turns when you could have threatened our closest cities and create us problems (sometimes we did have enough support in range sometimes they were a bit out of position), but of course you could not know when to do that and probably those gains weren't anyways worth the risk of losing all the units (incl. a bunch of archers) in the open.

Those are my first thoughts, happy to hear your side of things if you feel like it.



OH,
- Just take into account that dtay has the first split and he might can also throw a bunch of freshly finished frigates into our forking stack.
- If we grab corporation first our max beaker rate goes well above 3000 and Replaceable Parts maybe even becomes a 1-turn tech thanks to known-tech bonus.

[Azza]

GG Azza (if you end up checking here)!

Sorry for forcing you to hit enter so many times. First we became busy destroying Mardoc's production before he produces too many Elephants and LBs and then we became busy with distracting dtay...

Anyways, I wrote it already here before but I repeat myself: I highly respect the fact that you put in the effort and constantly logged in and whipped defenders until the end.

Eh, every turn I survived was a mini-victory to me, even if you could've crushed me earlier. In the end I was just aiming for as much whip unhappiness as I could muster since it's always good to have a goal, no matter how futile it is in the grand scheme of things.

More general observations about your game:
- I felt that your early expansion speed was good and in the early game we thought with OH that we were pretty unlucky with having you as a neighbor. Of course the conflict between you and Mardoc changed our luck.
- That being said it seemed to me that you spent too many hammers on monuments and too little on granaries as your early infra builds and you would have needed more/some cottages as research quickly became the weakest link of your economy

Definitely underbuilt cottages, but from memory I was building granaries as first build unless I needed the monument for food sources. Also, early expansion was strong, but you guys successfully forced me to the west (combined with failed scouting of the east) which seeded the conflict with Mardoc. As always seems to be the case on slightly larger maps for me, my initial expansion was strong but things didn't come online like I hoped they would in my head, I lost sight of the need to continue to expand and simultaneously failed to expand my economy, and ended up in a situation where I knew I was fucked well before the Mardoc wars.

- Regarding the above: Based on a wounded animal + that we were able to get so many huts it seems that you lost your scout early. That also surely contributed to struggle with research as tech costs are high in this game and one free tech or a pile of hut gold would have helped significantly

Sounds about right. I pretty much hadn't scouted any further than where my cities lay, so for a long time I didn't know that it was just the 3 of us on the continent. For a while I thought you or Mardoc might've been blocking a neighbour from contacting me, since I figured being wedged between two other civs wouldn't have been fair from a mapmaking perspective.

- After your conflict with Mardoc your economy of course started hurting more and we were able to attack you from a position of clear advantage. Tactic-wise I don't think there is too much to criticize you reg our war. Due to your conflict with Mardoc most of your forces were in the west and counterattacking e.g. your capital would have been suicidal. In hindsight dividing troops between Dental Plan and Boo-Urns was probably a mistake as concentrating everything in one place and sacrificing the another city would have stopped/delayed the capture of one of those cities. During the enter-pressing phase there were some turns when you could have threatened our closest cities and create us problems (sometimes we did have enough support in range sometimes they were a bit out of position), but of course you could not know when to do that and probably those gains weren't anyways worth the risk of losing all the units (incl. a bunch of archers) in the open.

Those are my first thoughts, happy to hear your side of things if you feel like it.

I knew a long time before you attacked that it was only a matter of time your troops got good enough that you wouldn't be afraid to just roll over me. The aim was to set up my galley for city razing to cripple Mardoc, and then hopefully roll through him and give myself some even footing for when you eventually did attack. Didn't pan out that way for various reasons, but I knew taking you on was doomed to failure so I focused on the war I thought I could win. Definitely agree that the movement of troops out of Dental Plan was an error, I thought I'd have a couple of extra turns to build fortification bonuses and Boo-urns was my best hammer city so at the time it seemed worthwhile to try to defend it, but I regretted it as soon as you rolled up those couple of turns earlier than expected.