[PB56] NobleHelium Tells It Like It Is

[Charriu]

Amica has clearly played clock-games last turn in order to play after Noble. A quick look at PB58 is enough to see that he did play at his usual time - just not PB56. That clearly goes against rule 1 "Play your turn as soon as you can". Most likely he wanted to declare war and I''m sure quite a few people absolutely understand his behavior as he had to do it to get 2nd half. Well, I kindly remind everyone that thinks this way that it was stated several times that "You don't have a right to any part of the turn". Apparently Amica wanting the second half of the turn is somehow different?

In that case this leaves the question of how rule #1 and #3 should interact:

3. The person declaring war can choose which half of the turn timer they get, so long as they didn't move after the victim on the previous turn.

Rule #3 gives you the right to any part of the turn under some limitations. These limitations were not broken in this case, because Amicalola played before Noble last turn, which essentially gave Noble a double-turn.

[Charriu]

Note: In this case notifying the other player is not an option here, because that would eliminate the element of surprise by going second.

[Serdoa]

Quite honestly Charriu, the point you make is exactly what disappoints me: If Amica would notify Noble that he is going to war with him, his surprise would be gone? Noble and I both stated exactly that line on different occasions: "We cannot send a notification to the other player and should not be requested to do so because it would give away information". PB58 I can show you several people (players and lurkers) that stated clearly "Serdoa should have sent a PM to Ruff that they are in a turn-split.". So, in cases that involve me, my interest in not giving information to the other player is irrelevant, but when Amica doesn't want to give away that his 50+ units on the border indicate an imminent attack (...) that has to be taken into account?

The double-standard that is used in these situations is what upsets me. One player is told "Suck it up" while the other is being told that he definitely has all the right in the world. Why was it a controversy that Lewwyn can play his turn after SD finished his in PB55? Several people did argue SD letting the time run out was perfectly fine and Lewwyn should have played earlier and that this is his own fault for playing clock-games. But when Amica does play clock-games he is "astonished" that it has come to this? To what? That Noble played his turn at exactly the same time and the same length that he always does? 

To be quite clear: I do not care at all that he got a time-extension, that is fine with me (and in fact I stated to Noble yesterday that the game should be paused when he finishes his turn in order to give Amica enough time to play). I care about that it feels for me that as soon as Lewwyn, Noble or I am involved in these the standard is "You guys are at fault" no matter the actual situation.

As for how to handle this: In general I think my understanding of the rules is not commonly shared but no. 3 states only that you can choose which half of the turn timer you get. Insofar would I think "attack in first half, state you want second" is perfectly fine. Of course that gives your opponent a double-move to react. Insofar the other possibility would be to state in the tech-thread "I've no time to play right now, please add time to the game and pause it." 

Being not treated as assholes just for playing would be nice.

[Charriu]

PB58 was a different situation involving peace-time turn splits and settler races.

My comments here were not specific to the situation in this PB or meant to judge Noble or you, but rather how these situation should be handled in general with regards to etiquette #1 and #3. Yes "attack in first half, state you want second" solves the issue between those rules, but isn't this just the same as PMing the other side about your intentions and therefore loosing the element of surprise? That's what my additional note meant and what you also said with giving away information.

The specific question at hand is how can any player take the second half, without revealing this to the other side, while also not playing clock games, if the other side is late to the turn?

[Serdoa]

Insofar the other possibility would be to state in the tech-thread "I've no time to play right now, please add time to the game and pause it."

[NobleHelium]

So this turn is probably a huge turn for us, although I can't be sure until I can log in and see what happened. Given that, I want to play the turn with Serdoa which we would normally do sometime in the next ~6 hours, but I need to leave the house in less than half an hour and may or may not be back in time. So if I don't make it back in time for us to play the turn together today I would very much like a ~24h extension so that we can play together tomorrow. I hope that is not a problem.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn, Amica didn't attack. He did declare war and his sentry or sentries disappeared, so our theory is that he moved in and saw too many units and thought better of it and just deleted the sentry. He did shuffle some units around so he may attack a bit differently than he originally intended in the next turn, but we've made some moves to account for those possibilities so hopefully things will continue to hold as is. In the larger picture there are some other issues which I may get into later.

I have not forgotten about the gap in reporting but currently I'm not really in the mood to fill the gaps in, maybe I'll feel better about it in the near future. Apologies to novice.

[NobleHelium]

El Grillo managed to find a bug in the original game. For the whole detail please look here: Explanation

The summary is that there is a problem with war declaring between multiple parties and the teleportation of units. Consider this example by El Grillo:

Alice is at war with Bob and has a stack in Bob's territory.
Charlie has open borders with Bob and a unit sharing the tile Alice's stack is on.
Charlie declares war on Alice, and Alice's units end up teleported out of Bob's territory.

I deem this a bug and would fix it in the following way:

1. If a player declares war, then their units are first looked at and teleported.
2. Only after the player will all other units be looked at and verified.

This fix would be applied to both CtH and RtR.

I also want to respond to Old Harry here:

If Charlie declared war I'd expect his units to get teleported, not Alice's. Are you saying that isn't what happened?

If Alice declared then I'd expect her units to teleport, but would be surprised if they teleported out of Bob's territory.

The first example would be guaranteed with my fix. With my fix Alice units would still be teleported. I would need to investigate further if they would leave Bobs territory.

This situation may come up next turn in the game. It says the bug was fixed in 1.5.3 which is the version that's being played, but since the situation hasn't actually come up since the bug fix I would like to make sure that it is actually fixed and cannot be abused. I will try to post a screenshot or two explaining everything shortly.

[Charriu]

It should be. But just in case please make sure to log off before "triggering" the exact situation. Therefore we get a save state to reload back to.

[NobleHelium]

Here's the situation.




civac has his 10 BEs + 1 Catapult on the highlighted tile. We have lots of units 2SW of Standstill, including many damaged knights that we want to protect. What happened was that Laz had a big stack on the hill that was sitting there for several turns and this turn the tile north of it flipped to our culture which allowed us to collateral his stack and obliterate it. We then moved to cover our damaged units until I remembered that ballista elephants get to target mounted units outside cities, so in essence we cannot cover the knights from a counterattack.

What we're planning to do is to move units to block the tiles in front of the damaged stack so that it cannot be reached. We're planning to put several units on the two dye tiles (one flat land and one on the hill) to block the elephants from attacking profitably. If the bug is fixed then there is no problem; if the bug is not fixed, then potentially our blocker units could get teleported out of Laz's territory if civac declares war while having units on those tiles. So I want to make sure that our units can't be unfairly teleported off their tiles because of the bug.