The Pen vs The Sword (Gandhi of NA)

[Gazglum]

Mega congratulations!

[The Black Sword]

We ran through the turns from 268 and I couldn't quite get enough culture by EOT273. Weldyn went Legendary early but I needed Basilisk to hit 22k or Elensefar to hit 50k to keep it down to 8 artists.









So we agreed a tie. My cities would go Legendary EOT274, the same turn the Aztec spaceship completed it's journey. Or they would have if I had remembered to bomb my artists T273.




Sid was not impressed.




K/D ratio:



The only thing I remember from the alternate timeline on T279 is that I had killed 53 Fighters and lost 52. Over 250 years of dogfighting.

Not sure which of these post game graphs are my favourite:





Who am I kidding?

[Haram]

Congratulations TBS!

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Great game and very sporting at the end. I'm looking forward to reading this thread.

I'll see you next time around.

[AutomatedTeller]

what a great thread. It makes me wish I had followed through with my thought to try a cultural victory, though I wouldn't have been able to hold off BGN nearly as well as you held off Old Harry - he would have razed my cap from the sea the instant he saw it coming

Great game.

[The Black Sword]

Thanks AT.

Your post in the tech thread about just waiting for the spaceship to launch was pretty amusing at the time.

[AutomatedTeller]

yeah, I'd pretty much checked out at that point, other than checking to see if I had to defend against BGN, who had beaten me by 1 turn to an astro-only island with boating distance of my cap

[Old Harry]

Just finished reading - a very enjoyable thread and I *think* I like being a Drake - did you write that before or after the sky-pillaging? Nice work overcoming your Middle Bitch (© Pindicator) position to conquer your aggressors! Also your Eiffel Tower build taught me a trick I didn't know before .

Yuris - sorry about razing Frontline right when you took over - it felt like a low thing to do, just bad timing on the vacation. (Also I'm sure TBS would have made the same mistake .)

I think our big mistakes were not thinking of espionage sooner (it was only when the SAM Inf showed up that I gave up on the frontal attack and thought laterally, so perhaps GJ helped us out ), assuming dtay had checked out (his wardec killed something like 15 spies who were due to land the next turn - possibly enough to delay you beyond our space date), not realizing how the tech costs and map size would make culture more viable and not wanting to switch the turn order back after yuris subbed in (mostly because I was finding the small window normally left to play turns when playing second really stressful).

Also you were right, we did launch the spaceship a turn later due to sabotage from BGN... So while he gaveth aluminium allowing us to put enough hammers into wealth to shave a turn off our tech time he tooketh away that extra turn with his spies .

I did enjoy fencing with you hugely, but would have preferred a toroid map to make things easier , we were 10ish turns ahead of you on tech, but then it took about ten turns to get anything we built over to you . The exception was our bombers - I wish Joey hadn't gifted you those SAM Infantry as I thought with the bombers and some highly promoted Tanks we *might* have been able to chew through your coastal defences. As I said elsewhere you seemed to have an answer to everything we threw at you so I wonder how you'd have countered that...

On the CONTROVERSY:

I guess I'll hold off on reading more threads for now while the tech thread gets resolved. Though I don't really see how the game can continue from here.

GG, though I'd have liked to see you not use Joey's artist. Good job recovering from the loss of Frontline

Hmm, disregarding the legality of the offer, the artist felt like the most obviously justifiable deal to me. It was clearly a mutually beneficial deal. You might as well complain that I won while keeping my borders open with everyone. Though, I was willing to push the price a bit higher GJ.

The troop gifting - I don't think GJ should have gifted the troops he did tbh. It was pretty clear you didn't want the stuff I gave you in return. I was going to give you a few more tanks until you left the ones I gave you in range of Fallenstar! But I was gifting stuff back and the other two weren't bringing enough troops to stop me anyway, so it didn't really matter.

-Could I have won without buying the artist?

I think I would have. I didn't need 4000 culture only a couple of hundred in Basilisk or Elensefar to win on T273. It's not even clear right now whether Basilisk will be stopped. But I think all that gold a few turns ago would easily be translated into the culture I needed through dry-rushing stuff.

-Could I have won without any help at all?

I'm inclined to think no. Things were going down to pretty fine margins at the end, and even if I just divert some extra production from wealth to units to make me feel safer, that could have made a difference. On the other hand, we did have a very good in-game relationship and I think some co-operation could have been expected.

Ach. Neighbours are food, we had luck in ours crippling themselves with a grudge war, you had luck in that I made one mistake on the pb25 map . Although vasselizing RB's second-most-spiky-neighbor-called-Joey can only do wonders for your "son of Mackoti" rep.

Finally congrats TBS - have you played a game (not featuring actual Mackoti) you haven't won?

[GermanJoey]

Ach. Neighbours are food, we had luck in ours crippling themselves with a grudge war, you had luck in that I made one mistake on the pb25 map .

One mistake, eh?

Also, because I'm sick of you and FT slandering me by insisting on that I "threw" PB18 because of the PB25 map:

From March 3rd, 2015: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid526197

T0 of PB25 didn't start until March 11th, 2015: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...407&page=8

At that point, I certainly had no ill will towards you and even hyped you up to Borsche when you volunteered to fill in for wetbandit.

Likewise, I didn't start flipping out about the PB25 map until April 29th (here), when I got HAK's map trade, but at that date in PB18 I had already gifted TBS a bunch of 18 XP infantries, after y'all had invaded him and BGN did his........ "thing." Which, really, was a way way way bigger motivator for me to fully ally myself with TBS as compared to anything with Team Aztec.

[Fintourist]

At that point you had not gifted the artist though, which is still another level compared to not doing anything to stop your neighbor's victory (in truly competitive environment you, BGN, WilliamLP and others should have attacked us and/or TBS in order to boost your victory chances, but due to RL reasons and low odds of succeeding it's kind of acceptable to just wait and see who wins).

No reason to start this all over again. I will always consider your actions here despicable and unsporting - and you will disagree with me. I'll just try to forget this as well as possible when discussing something else here in the forum, in possible future games and whatever other occasions.