[SPOILERS] This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land. But Mostly Mine.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Loose lips sink ships. Like when Airship Two just got sunk.

Bollocks. That was very clearly the Hindenburg.

[Krill]

That ship went down even worse though.

[DaveV]

Well played. You picked a very high visibility game to have your breakout performance.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Next time leave me alone in my sandbox damnit.

And where exactly were the borders of your sandbox? I left you contained on your islands. My continent was not your sandbox. You did let much of your sand spill out from your box to great distances to troll me. I've given up being pissed off about that horseshit but now you're trying to rewrite history and saying that you would have won from my position with someone such as yourself actively sabotaging every move I could make? If you were the only person actively working against me for no gain to his civ, perhaps I could have won still. But I think you have an outsized opinion of yourself and what belongs to you and how others ought to treat with you because you are Krill. I was happy to leave you alone but it seems you had no intent to do the same.

Or did you mean something besides your failed invasion of Ruff? If it was having sole province over torturing the lurkers' island I wish you'd have just said so.

GG BGN!

p.s. Don't leave large naval stacks in ports!!! The temptation almost got the better of me!

Which port? Are you talking about Uberland Strass or whatever Xenu's last city was? For a while, having a large garrison was necessary to prevent cultural revolts from happening because plako had a strong cultural presence. I kept an eye on your transports each turn by scouting with bombers or airships (I can't remember exactly the period this refers to) and made sure to count/mark tiles to avoid just this kind of mishap. Did you ever have units within a single turn's striking distance? I don't know of any other locations where I had ships in port for any significant time unless maybe you're referring to your scouting galley? I do know I had generally good visibility around my borders and scouted thoroughly each turn.

Well played. You picked a very high visibility game to have your breakout performance.

Thanks! This was the first game that I did any sims or kept close track of micro. It really does make a difference. Keeping an updated sandbox (note: RtR 2.0.6.2 required for sandbox if anyone wants to look at it) by the time I quit (~T130) was becoming prohibitively difficult due to time and potential for burnout so I stopped. A teammate would have been tremendously helpful in keeping that going because I do think it greatly enhanced my performance. There's no way I could have opened as fast as I did with PHI/CRE without tedious simming to get everything I could out of available resources.

[Krill]

And where exactly were the borders of your sandbox? I left you contained on your islands. My continent was not your sandbox. You did let much of your sand spill out from your box to great distances to troll me. I've given up being pissed off about that horseshit but now you're trying to rewrite history and saying that you would have won from my position with someone such as yourself actively sabotaging every move I could make? If you were the only person actively working against me for no gain to his civ, perhaps I could have won still. But I think you have an outsized opinion of yourself and what belongs to you and how others ought to treat with you because you are Krill. I was happy to leave you alone but it seems you had no intent to do the same.

Or did you mean something besides your failed invasion of Ruff? If it was having sole province over torturing the lurkers' island I wish you'd have just said so.

Straight forward point: Don't antagonize people you don't need to. That's all you did to me and Joey. If you played out the Ruff war in pretty much any other way you'd have been better off. Eat Ruff alive and push to border me ASAP, and I can't do anything to hurt you, because I have to focus on defense. Ignore me for 30 turns and come back and eat me with tanks like I was waiting for you to do, and you'd have been fine again: I had 7 none coastal cities at the end of the game, there was no way for me to defend. I couldn't hurt you unless you let me. Split Ruff and hold a border, I can't walk into your culture with cannons and muskets when you have infantry.

I was never a threat to you until you gave me a target. I, and I suspect most players here, will not let anyone, including you, expect to intervene with no reprisal. And it's you who is being arrogant to think that, not me. You picked that fight, you don't get to complain when I fought you on turf where I could win instead of getting slaughtered fighting in Ruffs land where you had OB.

[Krill]

Oh, and it was one of Plakos cities at the end of the game. You left your naval stack in a position where anyone could have declared on you and moved a single land unit in to destroy the entire stack without even taking one fight.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Oh, and it was one of Plakos cities at the end of the game. You left your naval stack in a position where anyone could have declared on you and moved a single land unit in to destroy the entire stack without even taking one fight.

Ah, that makes more sense. I remember a turn or two where I relied on OH's units to defend against TBS. I hadn't considered that anyone else would be interested in fighting at that point. It would have been a well-learned lesson.

As for pushing to fight you in your borders, there were cheaper conquests elsewhere for basically the entire game. You could build frigates and then destroyers fast enough that I couldn't overcome your naval stacks with efficiency. I wasn't playing with eliminating you as the goal, I was playing to win (though for a while killing you felt much more satisfying but I got over that). This dictated different actions. I didn't need to build 40 destroyers to kill you when I could have built 8-10 and killed AT. But that didn't work out because I picked a fight with Joey, who I did antagonize with my backline city plant. This was probably my biggest strategic mistake in the entire game. Given relations up to that point, I didn't think he would respond as strongly as he did. While I see the threat from his perspective I don't think he ever really acknowledged my legitimate need to have a way to open a front against TBS. I guess since he was acting as TBS' bodyguard he wouldn't want to have allowed me to hit TBS anyway, but that's another matter completely. Having two civs who I deemed willing to fight me everywhere possible, placing me at a tactical disadvantage anywhere I'd try to expand, made further conquests improbable and likely prohibitively expensive. All resources are valuable when trying to keep up in tech with someone who is not facing the same tactical/strategic handicaps. Dtay went to war at the end for revenge (I assume) but I don't get the sense that he hobbled OH/Fin nearly to the same extent that you (Krill) and Joey bound me.

Another reason not to push borders directly to you is that I would have had to have more troops available to defend my holdings if I didn't build up (even more) troops to attack you directly. Keep in mind that I had to have an entirely separate force available to counter Joey once we were hostile toward each other. The value wasn't there for me to do this with other options to attack more cheaply. The cheapest thing was to weakly garrison Ruff's cities and have a counterattack force available, which I did. At the time, I thought I'd have a better chance of winning the space race than slogging through war after war and initiating a dogpile where you and Joey would fight because you hated me (legit or not, it would have probably happened), then AT fighting off an invasion, Molach fighting because he'd logically be next, and so on. This could even have encouraged the most passive of the passive, WLP, to get in a few kills. And then a very broad front with OH/Fin who would be highly motivated to stop me before I got too big to contain. TBS on the other side of the map would be the winner in all of this because there would have been no one else available with the capacity to stop him.

The size and scope of this game really dictated moves from the expansion phase onward. Expand however you can and keep up in tech. Always increase land holdings to stay relevant with whatever may be happening on the other side of the map. Don't risk too much in any direction where you can lose an army and be counterattacked. Go all in when you are sure to see it all the way to the end without destroying your ability to defend elsewhere. I never felt free to really extend my holdings after killing wetbandit/Ruff without having to either massively invest in more military (even though I was #1 in power already) or falling off the tech pace, where I was already playing catch up to OH/Fin and needed production to go toward wealth builds to fuel research. TBS being totally on the wrong side of the map where I would have to risk my units to either you or Joey en route made dealing with him that much more difficult. By the end, and probably 15-20 turns prior to the end, Joey had a significant local power advantage over me and could have caused me great harm on Nakor/wetbandit's island. I was very aware of his transport/galleys positions and always checked for unit upgrades in these stacks. I kept units on transports to counter and kept other transports empty as a bluff/threat but would certainly have lost a good chunk of my economic power if he had sensed weakness and decided to fight. And I thought he surely would have done that given half a chance. What better way to end the game than to hamstring a contender? I'm glad he didn't do this at least. The risk to my economic output was too great for me to risk further aggression if I was going to be competitive in the space race. I don't remember how many turns behind OH/Fin I would have finished the internet, but that pretty much sealed the space race looking back. I don't know how much faster I could have built that if I had focused on that goal because I don't remember what was happening at the time. But I know I didn't have any overflow chains set up because the turns took too long by then and I didn't have any stomach for sims or planning.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

The End

T268 - redux

Since the agreement to replay the end had been made and I could not do anything to effectively change the outcome to enhance the probability of me winning, I didn't bother to replay T268 as I had previously, which would have taken much, much longer. Previously I had set cities for unit builds and set the slider at 0% to raise gold for Cossack to gunship upgrades. All of that was meaningless and would have just slowed things down when the only thing to really decide was between OH/Fin and TBS. So I sat in game as they played and took some screenshots and just set cities to mostly easy to manage things to speed the turn along. A lot of the demos in the coming screens are inflated over what they otherwise would have been, except for the power numbers which would have been higher aside from the tanks to dtay program (for him to hopefully scrap OH/Fin's spaceship) that never materialized in this alternate reality ending. But those guys are wily and it never would have worked. Even so, I had to try something. In the end, they had too many troops in coastal cities and the capital for dtay to chew through in a single turn with his available transport capacity. Dtay would have needed to kill 40 units to kill the space ship, so probably would have needed at least 15-20 transports available. He had five or six available if I remember correctly. So this plan was never going to work. Old Harry told me over chat while waiting for TBS to finish his half of the turns during the final blitz session that they were watching for dtay's transports anyway and that they had about five cities prepped to build a quick capital just in case that was needed. Good thinking. So the bronze medal is my reward.

Now the pictures. You can't tell a lot from this far zoomed out and I'm not familiar with the picture stitching programs, so this is what you get. If anyone wants to do a better job, grab the save I posted from the last turn and do it and I'll put it here, with gratitude.













The last two space ship parts finished EoT after this.



























The lurkers...live?

The Blitz: T269-75

With little else to do except to try (and fail) to repeat my previously set up spy sabotage mission, I decided to clear the rest of the tech tree while building up more power. This matters basically not at all but I got close, within a turn of finishing the entire tree. Yay for small, empty victories?

And yes, these pics are probably just self-aggrandizing for little to no purpose, but I put a lot of effort into the game and wanted to see it played out to the end for closure. And it's my thread. So nyah...

This is probably the biggest reason why it is a good thing that plako never acceded to my repeated attempts to sell me either of his GA or GE. Switching to Rep/Free Religion is worth ~3000 GNP, virtually all beakers. I don't think I rush bought anything of significance, no military units for sure, after obsoleting The Kremlin, so getting into better tech civics sooner would have made some sort of impact. Looking back and knowing how things have turned out, I'd rather not have that controversy. So, plako, thanks!





























I never did build a shrine. This is a huge regret but it just never worked out. The trade off was the low odds GE that ended up being Taj (I think?). I haven't looked through threads yet to find out so I don't know. But six (!) golden ages. That's got to be a record, right? Too bad the last one came too late to make a difference. Maybe next time, eh?

I'm very happy to have played in this game and enjoyed the competition immensely. Thank you to everyone who stuck it out to the end, even when the fun had long been lost. GG to Old Harry/Fintourist and to The Black Sword.



I've had my say now and my game is done. I'll keep on watching until the next game finds me.

[Qgqqqqq]

Love the end-of game report! Especially the culture stuff - if I'm honest, this is the first time I've really understood where everyone is placed.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Thanks, Q. But don't say "culture", it's a dirty word in this thread.

I found some pics I took after the victory conditions rolled over on T275. Game in review demos with all players that I didn't have previously. Since I have them here you go...

RNG favors space? I like the pic OH put in his thread better.



I just love those nosedives into the afterlife.



Dtay really had the potential to sprout up into something huge. I'm glad he got dragged back to the pack. I also like the ambient background noise that is the lurker civ's constant GNP, right up until the end when they got what their PYFT rating had so long required.



Let's play count all the golden ages! I think a big strategic mistake that I made (caution, car metaphor incoming) was trying to make my diesel engine bulldozer MFG powerhouse civ try to keep up in a race with OH/Fin's leaner racecar tech machine civ. I should have instead used a lot of this MFG to (try to) overwhelm both them and TBS. I was in the race but I wasn't playing to my civ's strengths. I should have slowed the race to a crawl instead of trying to keep up once I was behind. I'm not sure this would have worked any better but it could have.



Again, dtay in an early strong position that could have exploded into a huge led if he'd had a different set of neighbors. I was slow in breaking out, due in part to a diversion to take Music, The Great Library, The Parthenon, and the miserable failure that was Angkor Wat, which never resulted in a shrine for me. What I still haven't figured out is whether that low odds (4%) Great Engineer on the second prophet failure, itself only possible because of a 9% failed missionary spread attempt that necessitated running the engineer for three turns. IF I could have still won Taj without using the GE then this was a massive setback. If someone else would have taken Taj, and that someone could only have been dtay, this could have been a very different game. Perhaps, depending on if he could have used the golden age to leverage a swarm of units (Rifles) to pound a competent neighbor. Interesting counterfactual scenario. Can someone point me toward the posts where someone was headed toward Taj?



The dips at the end are highly misleading, just units deleted prior to the end game blitz between OH/Fin and TBS so the AIs wouldn't be tempted to interrupt the outcome.

This is more or less what you'd expect the graph to look like. Dtay built up and conquered first, followed by TBS, Krill, me, then OH/Fin more or less in lockstep until the end. I think that OH/Fin had to continually replenish their forces due to attrition while I mostly built and kept my units. Their units lost post shows a lot of modern area units dying (fighters and destroyers). My biggest losses were catapults. That's usually a good sign.



Quite effective. I haven't read TBS' thread so I don't have much more to add to this just yet.



Lurker swan dive!

The espionage use toward the end is pretty crazy. TBS had to fend off sabotage attempts from both me and OH/Fin. Dtay used espionage to steal techs and catch up for his revenge war against OH/Fin? All of my espionage was passively built through buildings. I never used the slider because I couldn't spare the commerce. I wasn't far enough behind for an espionage economy to be reliable. All OH/Fin would have had to do to lock up the space race if I went for espionage would be to counter-spend against me and close borders. Done deal.



I suppose someone could figure up how much I helped my opponents' GNP rates by that awful export deficit. That's pretty bad.