[49 spoilers] Miguelito, pindicator and Adrien take Shiva by the hands

[Aurorarcher]

Regarding that Sheep: no. But if you select your worker and move the mouse over that tile it'll tell whether or not the Sheep is improved or not.

EDIT: wait, I guess it works with any unit... can't be sure. That's how I remember it anyway.

[Miguelito]

PM:

Hello, misclick aside, messaging to let you know we are now at war. Good luck.

(bolded by me) Is that the famous Canadian politeness I've heard so much on (US American) comedy shows? I hope he regrets that wish.



Mahadeva should hold, at least during the first turn, and I'm bringing reinforcements. Maybe he expected a more axe heavy stack, but the thing is, the last war was against Comm's horchers.

On the island it's looking bleak:


I'm not sure if the swords are enough already to break through, but I will take some losses surely and then he's probably bringing more soon enough with his 3 galleys. My triremes where somewhat out of position, as I was trying to move the new one unseen around the south of the island. If he moves his boats towards the cap I might get a hit on one of them though (that might be not that smart an idea, as the wounded trireme in turn may be an easy target for his galleys. But maybe it's just best to reduce his transport capacity).
If the city survives the new axe from Nataraja can go there. I decided to keep the 10XP axe from the general on the mainland, else Mahadeva's defense would be shakier.
Of course the graphs had been telling:






But what was I going to do? Keep the focus on whipping ancient units? To be clear, I did produce new units. Since the Commodore war (~15 turns ago), the non military builds have been one settler, two workers, and a missionary, rest was units. But of course, he seems to have invested his impressive MFG - world top, with 4 cities   - all into units.

If the island falls, the rest of the game is dedicated to getting it back, trying to use triremes to block him from shipping in reinforcements, then use cultural control and maybe catapults to take those swords out.
If Mahadeva falls then that's been it and I hope Cairo gets some benefit out of it, although I doubt he's pursuing a winning strategy here. His GNP hole is so deep that Commodore should have an easy time knight/catting him (or otherwise eat him with superior tech - cats and Samurai?). Comm would at least be easily able to at least split him and take my former land. That factors in the culture bomb that is former Pashupati


Also superdeath wanted my iron for 4 health resources, but I have no reason to antagonize Ruff, will probably lose it anyways, and if not may want to build swords for naval assaults.

[Miguelito]

PBspy shows he's taken a city (should be Nilakantha)

[Zed-F]

That factors in the culture bomb that is former Pashupati

Aka why you shouldn’t have pink dotted a civ with an experienced ancient-era pilot and better military bonuses than you. How do you think he felt about your greedy plant location and Oracle culture bomb? Turnabout is apparently fair play.

[Miguelito]

That factors in the culture bomb that is former Pashupati

Aka why you shouldn’t have pink dotted a civ with an experienced ancient-era pilot and better military bonuses than you. How do you think he felt about your greedy plant location and Oracle culture bomb? Turnabout is apparently fair play.

I've got several answers to that:

• First, I've already acknowledged that the Oracle was very likely a misplay, as I misjudged both cost and rewards (I am now, finally, hopefully, able to benefit of it for the first time with the triremes, but oh well, still got boated). Leaving the option for Oracle was part of my motivation for the city spot one tile north, as I wanted to have the forests first ring.,
  
• I can't really see a pink dot or greedy plant here. The spot is 4 tiles away from my second city, which is 3 tiles from my capital. In turn, it's 5 tiles from Commodore's 3rd city (founded afterwards), I don't know how many tiles that's away from his cap.
  
• At the moment of founding, I hadn't seen any of Comm's culture. I only knew his scout came from the NW, but I must have rather narrowly missed his capital culture on my own scouting circle. Adding insult to injury, before founding I had seen Raskonlikov's culture on the zoomed out view and had taken it for Comm's (because I was expecting him in that direction). If you read my posts from that time, I was actually pretty wary of settling up to Boudiccan Commodore.
  
• I realized the dimension of the culture effect of Oracle just only when Commodore planted his cities in front of it (count that as a noob mistake). Still, it didn't claim actually valuable land from him, just some dry plains and PH. Ok, and a green hill in his third city's second ring that he would have got back eventually, but would not be nice for him, as it allowed me to look into the city. Still, I don't think that he couldn't live with it, why would I ever attack him? It did secure the gold resource in the city's second ring though, and he probably has no easy access to another source.
  His two cities that really got hurt by the culture were founded afterwards, and would not be very good even without the culture pressure. I assume that he founded those to get his seven stables for the horcher quest.
• Ftr it's not a culture bomb in Comm's hand now because of the Oracle, but because Judaism was founded there despite my efforts. It isn't really a problem for me; I have my other, older holy city there. What I'm saying is that it could become quite annoying for Cairo if he took my land (of course he'd have the Hindu holy city assuming it doesn't get razed, but then that culture would be younger). For example Comm would be bound to get the jungle tile W of the rice, giving him control on the coastal road. Btw had I not spite razed that city of Commodore's, it would become an even worse thorn in the side of Cairo. Still felt good.
  

In the end of course, Comm now has the city and I don't so obviously mistakes were made. I've mentioned before some errors that could have let me defend the horcher attack (basically reading the obvious signs sooner), but the war was still straining my resources and setting me back an unsustainable deal. Commodore got a very nice city and the gold out of it. I still suspect he might have gotten a higher ROI by attacking Raskolnikov, who must have been quite debilitated by the war with Cornflakes already. That would have opened him more room, as I assume that behind Raskolnikov there is/was Elkad.

In the end the best thing I could have done would have been to tilt like I wanted when Cairo founded Sleeper Service and flood it with axes, but my dedlurkers talked me out of it (it wouldn't have worked, Cairo really values defense)

[Zed-F]

Look at it from his perspective. Those city spots he founded, even though not great, were the only places he could found and have a defensible border with a reasonable amount of land. Pashupati made those cities a lot worse than they had to be and communicated that you weren't interested in making friends. Planting the city on one of the more southern sites that was discussed (and favoured by your lurkers over the site you ultimately chose) would have caused less tension and might have wound up with a 2v1 in your favour (Comm+you vs Cairo) instead of against (Comm + Cairo vs you). That's what made it a pink dot - you didn't leave him with any viable choices but to attack you.

I'm not trying to suggest you knew this at the time. You've said you could have scouted better, so maybe it would have been knowable if you had. But with the benefit of hindsight, you should be able to see why picking the spot which grabbed all the gold and left Comm with no good options was so risky.

[Miguelito]

Look at it from his perspective. Those city spots he founded, even though not great, were the only places he could found and have a defensible border with a reasonable amount of land. Pashupati made those cities a lot worse than they had to be and communicated that you weren't interested in making friends. Planting the city on one of the more southern sites that was discussed (and favoured by your lurkers over the site you ultimately chose) would have caused less tension and might have wound up with a 2v1 in your favour (Comm+you vs Cairo) instead of against (Comm + Cairo vs you). That's what made it a pink dot - you didn't leave him with any viable choices but to attack you.

I'm not trying to suggest you knew this at the time. You've said you could have scouted better, so maybe it would have been knowable if you had. But with the benefit of hindsight, you should be able to see why picking the spot which grabbed all the gold  and left Comm with no good options was so risky.

thanks for the discussion, I'll come back to it later.

for now just the first combat results:



Cairo is trying to brute force his way into the capital. I attacked out on the immortals, now it's 5 of them left who can attack the cap. The garrison is a c2 spear and a fully fortified archer, over a river, and with hill/40% culture. We'll see how that works out. I'm also wary of him taking my copper, so I burnt a new GG for another super spear, this time with C2+formation+Morale (misplayed here, realized that danger after my moves). I had made a pretty big mistake in not pulling out the archer from the island (didn't realize how absolutely useless he'd be against the swords), else the cap would be safe.



The swords did better than I expected. The first axe loss was against odds (he had like 32%), but he had slightly favorable odds against the archer. I have to try to block his galleons from offloading the swords at the cap next, but actually that's pretty hard, as he has those ocean tiles in his culture where he can stage and I can't hit him.
Also lost his graphs like the noob I am

[Miguelito]

oh look, my first event:


could be worse  

but there's more in the log:


We're at war with Commodore   But so is Rasko
He's also whipped 3 times last turn, once for 2 pop.
Here's what I think what that means:
I had failed to cover Gangadhara (southern flood plains valley city) with a spear this turn, as I needed it at Mahadeva. Commodore had a C1/shock archer scouting there for a while, and it was in range, so he went for the low odds, high reward strike. That's the combat you're seeing. He didn't offer peace or a cease fire.
He hasn't sent in anything else so far though so I have some hopes that he's really attacking Raskolnikov. In that case, maybe the lack of a peace offer is ment to sow some diplomatic confusion among the other players.
The other interpretation is that next turn I'll have some 10 HA's knocking the door at Mahadeva, but how is that going to work with all of Cairo's units there? Or maybe he expects me to fall against Cairo's impressive power, and wants to ambush him while my cities are revolting, but how does declaring on me help that?
You also see that instead of going for the capital, Cairo pulled his five Immortals back, then threw them against Mahadeva, which was garrisoned with three spears that's Miguelito 9 - Immortals 0 so far (don't know how to count the retreats).
Our power ratio has improved from 0.54 to 0.68 (oh well, he got a city in that run )

The front:


I moved the healthy GG spear from the cap into Mahadeva after this pic, and also a new spear from Gangadhara onto the stone. On the galley I have a healthy spear and axe, maybe I can intercept retreating units on the coastal road or something. In any case, they are flexible to take action both at Mahadeva and Nataraja. All other units on the picture are single. If he moves his stack SE onto the hill I'll have to attack out to protect the cap. If he attacks into Mahadeva it's dicey whether my axes hold.

The naval theater:


Ref, do you see those three ocean tiles? I think they're placed pretty awfully: Cairo is guaranteed to get those two of them from t50 on, nothing I could do about that barring something crazy like putting a holy city there, or founding the third city overseas (I did that in PBEM64 ) and being CRE. Now they allow him to stack his galleys in a position where they can unload units into my cap any turn. In turn, while I have naval tech superiority, I can't do much about it, because I just can't attack on those tiles. For the record, I don't get a similar advantage.
I can imagine that you didn't think too much about it, and just put/left them there because it seemed natural. I didn't realize their siginificance until Cairo's first attack. But it's a pretty heavy handicap I feel. His boating prospects were already better without that (I'd have to cross a river, he doesn't).
Those are five swords, 4 of them promoted to CR2, one at CR1. Scary stuff. My defense plan right now is to put triremes on the two x'es (then that one culture free ocean tile should actually protect me). That falters the moment he gets triremes himself, although, have you seen his GNP? He can of course just ram through them with lots of galleys, or sail around them in the north. The other saving grace I see is that if I camp the PH mine, he has to move any unloaded units on flatland. Gotta get a lot of those freshly ground axes...

Demos/graphs because they're fun (not mine, but look what FT's showing there). Also Cairo's crazy MFG remains, he's whipping no more than minimally).

Look at it from his perspective. Those city spots he founded, even though not great, were the only places he could found and have a defensible border with a reasonable amount of land. Pashupati made those cities a lot worse than they had to be and communicated that you weren't interested in making friends. Planting the city on one of the more southern sites that was discussed (and favoured by your lurkers over the site you ultimately chose) would have caused less tension and might have wound up with a 2v1 in your favour (Comm+you vs Cairo) instead of against (Comm + Cairo vs you). That's what made it a pink dot - you didn't leave him with any viable choices but to attack you.

I'm not trying to suggest you knew this at the time. You've said you could have scouted better, so maybe it would have been knowable if you had. But with the benefit of hindsight, you should be able to see why picking the spot which grabbed all the gold  and left Comm with no good options was so risky.

to take this up:

On the first part I can't agree. Those cities claimed nothing of value for him besides one gold resource, which required him to conquer Pashupati. Just brown plains and hills. The border was defensible already, he had both border cities on hills, and good strategic depth. I can only see them as useful to fulfil the quest.
Of course I don't know what his NE, N, and W look like, so I don't really know if he had more room for expansion (he founded two more cities afterwards though). But I would think that Raskolnikov would have been more profitable at the time. I would assume that with 10+ HAs he would have taken that capital (and he's going that route now, at least that's what I hope).
As I said, I made some significant mistakes in the defense, and Pashupati didn't have to fall against what he brought (although of course, defense against Boudicca with the HA event would always have been troublesome). Then he'd spend all his capital for nothing. Now as the greenest player in the game, maybe he could bank on me making those mistakes. I also think I did some better moves that he wasn't expecting though.
I didn't know where to expect Commodore at the time - not sure I should have scouted better, I had objectively little motivation to go further north on the first round instead of scouting Cairo's cap, and the S/SW. I got further towards him than he towards me though. But the spot was 1 tile further also towards the position I was assuming for Commodore - but still pretty far away - and on flatland. So a position 1S or on the desert hill would have been adavantageuos.
Do I know though he wouldn't attack me had I founded one row further south? Maybe he just wanted the Or do you mean going beyond the jungle at all was greedy? Well that would have reduced me to where I was before the Cairo war - stalled out at five cities, with jungle on one side and desert on the other.

Sorry, this was pretty much rambling, hope you bear with me. To conclude, was the spot I chose for Pashupati an error? Yes, chiefly because the Oracle plan was an error. Further south would have been flatland as well, and the 3 animals would still have been appetizing, but of course he'd have at least one gold, so maybe he'd have gone west instead. Desert hill would have stretched further to the west, making defense more difficult, and required a border pop.

pindicator, are you still around? Any details you'd like to see? Also how has POE been, got to enjoy that jewel thingy? I've had a brief look at the new league. Seems pretty nice for another go at hardcore acutally. I don't feel inspiration for a build though, I do like 2handers which they're buffing, but I don't like slams (feel silly bashing the ground). Also could turn back to the cold dot Occultist I played in Synthesis, really liked that one. I may just decide when reading patchnotes if I see anything interesting. Otoh, civ is already pretty time intensive...

[pindicator]

I got a little worn out by PoE this league. I think the common criticism I heard of it being 'oppressive' was actually spot on for me. You just feel like you have to always go fast in order to enjoy the mechanic and that wears away at you after a while. So about a month ago I stopped playing it and now I'm just waiting for the 19th and the new Farmville league.

I'm definitely going to do a 2h build for this next league. Been looking at molten strike since I always come around to that one and it's fun. Though my brother makes fun of me for always trying to make glacial hammer work and this seems like a great time to try that one again

As for this game, you're on the wrong end of a 2v1 and you're stuck defending in your cities. Not much else to do but whip out units. I think your idea of ignoring Commodore and focusing on Cairo is correct; if Commodore comes at your far-flung city with a stack then oh well, that's life. But defending the core is more important. And once again: holy shit the mapmaker really does you no favors because they gave you such an exposed capital here that you have to constantly worry about boat landings too. Seriously, go sacrifice some goats to the mapmaker next time or buy him off or something. Sure you could have tried different things and planted cities in slightly different areas but you had no good options from what I saw.

Sure, I have some criticisms for your play too, but like every risk you take in these games you look good when it pays off and you look bad when it doesn't. Part of getting MP experience is learning better about when it makes sense to take those kinds of risks.

[Miguelito]

turn 93:

Commodore offered peace, after I had offered ceasefire. I took it. Later saw that Cornflakes had declared on him, but I still think it's a net positive. It may make Cairo a little more nervous of him interfering in our favour (not really, as he's busy in the west). It could also be a signal to Ruff, who's keeping a chariot in range, but they don't know each other yet  . In any case there's no chance in hell I'm going to move even a single unit towards him in the next fifty turns or ever again, so no point in a turn split.

Comm also took a major city from Rasko (Hippo, that's the second one, right?)


It should be in that chequered blob wrongly saying Rasko cap, correct?
So Comm and Cornflakes are fighting over who gets to munch on Rasko, hope there's some   there. Note that Comm is topping city count now. You can glimpse on a later shot that he apparently also refounded the city I razed, which I count as a win (means he cared enough about it to send a settler again, and increases pressure on Cairo). Yes, my standards are low these days

Wars of the world:




Incoming trouble:


he has at least those 5 swords on the galleys. If he breaks through the triremes, I'll have 3 axes (ignore that sign, that was the utopia to strive for) in the cap next turn - 2 of them on the galley, one C2/shock, also the archer, and 2 spears as warm bodies (they'll be better off attacking out, in fact). I can then whip the cap for the next axe (changed production after the pic), but it won't be pretty.

Fun fact, I'm still getting my gems from the island:


I hope Cairo doesn't realize that and just leaves the mine there for when he takes that culture.



That jungle has been blessing over blessing (when Cairo went in, I was just starting to cut down that tile )
He looks like he'll try to walk around Mahadeva and threaten the minor cities. I'll have two axes and a spear in Gangadhara next turn and would likely attack if he went on the stone. Else he can just gather forces in place, or move south onto the other jungle tile. That incoming sword is also spelling incoming doom.

Nice look, but it's lying:


I'm holding atm, but whipping significantly, while he isn't and just drowns me in like double my MFG. To think that he has 4! galleys

I got a little worn out by PoE this league.  I think the common criticism I heard of it being 'oppressive' was actually spot on for me.  You just feel like you have to always go fast in order to enjoy the mechanic and that wears away at you after a while.  So about a month ago I stopped playing it and now I'm just waiting for the 19th and the new Farmville league.

I'm definitely going to do a 2h build for this next league.  Been looking at molten strike since I always come around to that one and it's fun.  Though my brother makes fun of me for always trying to make glacial hammer work and this seems like a great time to try that one again

As for this game, you're on the wrong end of a 2v1 and you're stuck defending in your cities.  Not much else to do but whip out units.  I think your idea of ignoring Commodore and focusing on Cairo is correct; if Commodore comes at your far-flung city with a stack then oh well, that's life.  But defending the core is more important.  And once again:  holy shit the mapmaker really does you no favors because they gave you such an exposed capital here that you have to constantly worry about boat landings too. Seriously, go sacrifice some goats to the mapmaker next time or buy him off or something.  Sure you could have tried different things and planted cities in slightly different areas but you had no good options from what I saw.

Sure, I have some criticisms for your play too, but like every risk you take in these games you look good when it pays off and you look bad when it doesn't.  Part of getting MP experience is learning better about when it makes sense to take those kinds of risks.

Hm, Glacial Hammer could be fun, yes. You need a jewel for that to get AOE, don't you? Well, you are not obliged to trade just because you're in a trade league, right? (I generally have ended up doing so, because hard to let that opportunity go by when it's right there )
I think there's a pattern of alternating speedy and slwoer leagues, and I also prefer the latter. Metamorph was super deadly, but you could take all the time you wanted to kill the Metamorph. Betrayal was similar. I felt ok with the speed requirement in Synthesis, but hardly got anything out of Legion (also because the game regularly freezes when the monsters appear, and you have like <10sec), for example. I didn't play Delirium, partly because it seemed to heavily impose the speed requirement, again.
We'll do a postmortem at some point, hopefully not very soon, and then I'd appreciate very much your critique. I think some points I have touched already myself. the game has been a learning experience in a lot of ways, the question then is will I apply those lessons in the next game. Still having fun fwiw.