In case anyone reads this after I change my forum avatar to a picture of Gandhi, know that as I'm writing this, I am currently Montezuma. And he inspires me:
"Beauregard II" was a trireme of Amicalola's that ended its turn in Izmir. I don't think he could have known I had a chariot in the area, although perhaps we had spotted each other. I can't remember. Regardless, "free" kill. No great general points, alas.
When I say "free," I mean "free so far." Amica can and likely will pillage a net of mine.
But perhaps this enables me to kill another trireme in a couple turns. We'll see. (If he pillages the clams, it takes 3 turns to deploy a trireme in the area.)
And I don't have any chariots in Hornblower, so if the axe pushes up, I'd have to sacrifice an axe of my own to kill it, which is a shame, but oh well.
Why am I antagonizing Amica for seemingly no reason? Doing a small injury, etc.? Well, I've long been of the opinion that the pacification of Superdeath was one of the worst crimes of these forums, and someone needs to take his place.
More to the point, that trireme was on a circumnavigation mission. I've delayed Amica scouting to the East by a good 20+ turns. That's 20 fewer turns of known tech bonuses, 20 fewer turns without circumnavigation. If he gets circumnav via map trades, so be it, but that trireme was more than just a trireme. If it sparks a bit of a war in which I lose a clam tile and an axe, so be it. Not the end of the world. (And I'm still mad about his ridiculously unbalanced capital. )
(June 14th, 2021, 18:49)Lewwyn Wrote: Funny, I love everything about it.
By the way, I should walk back a criticism prediction I made earlier. I said that the map layout would discourage conflict. In reality, that doesn't seem to be the case: civac and AT; Superdeath and Tarkeel; Superdeath and Joshy(?); Commodore and TBS (?); Ichabod and Frozen; Cairo and Pindicator. And that's just off the top of my head. Of the players I've met, more have been involved in conflict than have not. Very nice.
Hey Pindicator, I'll remind you that Amicalola conquered more of your cities than me. Surely you should harbor much bad feeling towards him?
Who would've thought that antagonizing two of my neighbors would bring them closer together? Oh well. I wonder how invested Amica is in Pind's security or if he is harboring plans to eat our middle term.
Amica grabbed the Great Library. This isn't too unsurprising for the Industrious builder of the Great Lighthouse, but it's still very annoying. Seriously, this continent is a hell zone. Mack and Amica are very strong (Mids, Lighthouse, Library, Stonehenge between the two of them). And you can bet that Pind would be another dominant contender if he hadn't had a setback. Man this is brutal.
I also circled a mine that Pind's capital's 4th ring took from me. I knew this would happen but really had hoped it wouldn't be so soon.
I know I've been complaining, but the tradeoff for my complete openness, transparency, and honesty with the lurkers is that I let myself whine.
Well, this is embarrassing, but I kind of missed a huge new item last turn. (In my defense, I played that turn very late at night my time.)
Mackoti dropped the hammer on Cairo, conquering what looks like six cities in one turn. Hot damn. I'm trying to get a chariot to Cairo's lands to see what's up. I lost Cairo's graphs a couple turns ago (he's building Sacrifical Altars, so he's got beaucoup Espionage Points). I'm not going to bother getting them back. I figure I can guess what they look like now.
It is impossible to overstate how good Amicalola's position in this game is. Admittedly some of this has been luck (he neighbors two cripples and his starting area was orders of magnitude better than anybody's on his continent. (I know that it slipped through the balance pass; it happens. I just keep mentioning it because it's super relevant to our two positions in this game.)), but his skill should not be diminished: he nabbed the Great Lighthouse, burned ahead for forges, and now has the Great Library. He realized that this map is a turtler's late-game paradise, and rather than investing in land troops, he's built numerous triremes.
I showed one already:
We'll see what he does. If he tries to make an end run around me, I might just stack my ships and push into his territory.
That one was accounted for. Much more annoying is this one:
Huh. It takes 10+ turns from Amica's closest territory to get here and I declared war three turns ago, so this trireme had to already be deep in Pind's territory and close to mine. Unlucky for me, but why wouldn't he have ships far from his territory? He borders the fangless Pind & Cairo. As I've said before, so long as he can put some archers into the two bottlenecks in his territory, he might as well focus on preventing the naval threat.
It's important to me to get peace in a couple turns, but I can't offer a ceasefire now. He wouldn't accept it while it looks like he can do damage with impunity. In a turn or two, I'll have plugged the holes in my naval defenses (barring no more surprise triremes. Seriously, everything in this game is turning up aces for Amica.) Then I'll offer peace. If I offer peace now and then again when I've defended, the repeated peace offers might smack of weakness and he might refuse on principle.
On a happier note, Charriu found me. (Note the name of his work boat.)
I actually don't remember where I met Charriu and I can't find his territory on my explored map. In fact, it would be even funnier if he just named his work boat this, so that every player he encounters gets this cute message. I love it.
I love this. Two work boats far from home following each other on an epic quest around the world.
You know what doesn't warm my heart?
That is an army. I'll try to keep my tourist chariot around to see what happens. By the way this
(June 18th, 2021, 09:29)naufragar Wrote: Mackoti dropped the hammer on Cairo, conquering what looks like six cities in one turn.
was incorrect. When I lost Cairo's graphs, I lost track of all his cities I couldn't see. I noticed this because I've also lost Amica's graphs and I know he hasn't lost any cities yet.
Speaking of Amicalola, it turns out that southern trireme is more interested in circumnavigating
It's named after a wonderful retelling of Treasure Island. I've used gifs from this movie before, and now that I think about it, I've got a clip from it linked in my first post. Excellent movie. Shame I have to kill the trireme. I had forgotten that circumnavigation in this mod requires Optics. It makes Optics more important than I was thinking. Because I didn't realize this, I'm actually going to circumnavigate before I get the circumnavigation bonus. Bummer.
I really wish that trireme had just been on a pillaging mission, for reasons I'll explain in a later post.
Well, let me tell you folks. Whew. Last night Pind sent me a PM letting me know we were at war, and he was claiming the second half. Hmm. I had moved a worker (covered by an axe and spear) near a city on his peninsula. I wondered if he killed that. I wondered if he some how sussed out my ill intentions (which I forgot to tell lurkers about. Oops.) and was preemptively grabbing the second half of the turn timer. Well imagine my surprise when...
Hot damn. You can see that I had 6 axes, 1 spear, and 1 archer in Hornblower. I got sloppy. I should've had more spears and elephants here. I had seen Horse Archers from Pind before. In the battle, Pind lost six units, which is a little light (on his second combat, his horse beat my spear at 20% odds, which skewed things). But this is all on me: I got complacent and paid the price.
I moved up a little to see what I was dealing with.
I'm mousing over the further stack. The two units in Hornblower are two full-health Horse Archers. I believe a unit on Hornblower cannot see the banana tile on which I've got a few units.
I should mention that I was literally singing to myself while playing this turn, not because it was a good turn. Losing Hornblower and its incredible production was bad, bad, bad. No, I'm genuinely happy Pind's fighting back. I love a good fight. (Sometimes. Sometimes I'm conflict-averse. It's complicated.) I had kind of been watching his pop points and didn't see many whips, didn't suspect the horse archer amassing. All in all, I was thrilled to be surprised. I've been the underdog trying to make an aggressor bleed in so many of my games, I would be hypocritical to not root for Pind at least a little, even if it's at my own expense. Very well done.
Pind has twice this game displayed an uncanny game sense. He couldn't know that I was planning to declare war on him on turn 120, but he preempted me perfectly. I was just a hair behind where I needed to be, although I did still have enough in the area to recapture.
You may notice in the bottom left that Pind's horse archer is at 5.5 out of 6. I promoted a catapult to City Raider and sent it in first at something like 75% survival odds. (I have too many catapults, a fact we'll return to.)
I cleared out the garrison pretty easily and revealed a nasty surprise.
The smaller stack is Pind's one-movers, protected by a solo horse archer too slow to join the attack on Hornblower. Ok. I get what Pind was going for. He sees my power rising and he thinks Hornblower is a more defensive spot than his capital. He amassed a very strong two-mover stack to crack it, and the next turn he would reinforce with a force of axes and spears.
This tells me what I need to do: hold Hornblower at all costs. I had realized a few turns I was overbuilding cats. My ratio of cats to killers was way too high. And the worst part? The real units that I did have were stationed in Hornblower! I had counted on those six axes (and one spear) to be the tip of the spear (or axe). Pind doesn't know how good his attack was. I have enough cats to collateral anything to atoms, but it doesn't matter because I'm desperately low on units now. Damn.
Alright, so we have two facts: we have to hold Hornblower and I have a superfluity of cats. Here's how I moved in response:
These are the units relevant to the next turn. I've got a handful more coming down, but they won't be in time to defend Hornblower. (By the way, that galley is loaded with a sword and a catapult. In my previous (turn 118) report, you can see Calcutta starving in order to produce a catapult in one turn. If you wondered why, it was so I could make this galley move and unload the units in Hornblower on Turn 120, the turn on which I planned to move everything up and declare. Seriously, Pind beat me by just a hair. Notice Amica's axe in Pind's stack. That'll be important later.
So basically, I decided I needed to tip my hand and show Pind how many catapults were headed his way. I think flanking doesn't apply in cities. If it does, I'm so hilariously screwed. I needed to move the catapults in, so Pind can't move up his one-movers as a garrison. Pind can hit Hornblower next turn with 5 Horse Archers and 3 Chariots with varying promos and health, against which I have 2 War Elephants, 1 Horse Archer and 7 catapults. Now here's a question: how many two movers does Pind have on the tile 1E of his capital? If what I see is what I get, the city shouldn't fall even if I lose every combat. (There shouldn't be any way that happens, right? ) Seriously, I'm chewing my fingernails to nubs worrying about how many extra units Pind has streaming up. Even two more horse archers there screws me. Man, it's terrifying.
I moved some units to threaten Pind's city of Sandheaver:
But it's likely that nothing comes of this. He can whip more defenders than I can bring it. I'm not unhappy if my little poke keeps some of his units tied up here, I think.
A very interesting question is: How's Amica going to react to all this? Sure they seem like bosom buds now: [There was supposed to be a screenshot here showing Amica and Pind mutually trading Copper, Fish, Horse, and Ivory. All the resources a growing boy needs.] But if push comes to shove, I think Pind will evacuate all his western cities to defend his core (if I can threaten it, which is in doubt). At which point, I think Amica forgets how much he cares for Pindicator.
I was very happy, even excited to play this turn, which means I don't have the heart to pen the screed I'd been drafting in my mind for the turn 120 attack. I think it needs to be said still, but I worry I won't be nasty enough for it to come across. I'll try my best, though:
The Rant in spoilers for profanity
Fuck this goddamn game. From the moment I discovered the map design, I have had zero strategic choices. None. There has been some micro and some technical satisfactions, but the entire course of my game has been preordained. I realize that I said much of this in the turn 100 report. It's been a month for me, although for a reader it's only been a few pages, so I apologize for the repetition. This map is a symmetrical donut. Not only is it a symmetrical donut, each player has a large area designed for themselves, set off with dense jungle in one solitary chokepoint on one side and one on the other. At these chokes are peaks for extra defensive visibility. The design of this map, as far as is possible with a land-based map design, gave players a sandbox and forbade them from stepping outside it.
I am Joao (Imperialistic/Expansive). Imperialistic enables a player to grab more land/tiles. Other traits, such as Financial, Philosophical, Charismatic, and Organized don't help you grab land. Instead they make your tiles better. Due to the design of the map, no Imperialistic player is able to grab a significantly greater share of the tiles. We run into maintenance problems before expanding out of our area, and nobody should be able to push into the jungled areas in the Classical area. (Someone has been on a very low land-score for dozens of turns and looks to be eliminated soon. I'm very curious as to what happened there.) Any successful pushes (even mine) are flukes. Since each player has the same amount of tiles, the Imp trait is worthless. Expansive is terrible because of the same reason, although if you want, we can talk about why it is still better than the utter trash that is Protective on this map. Pity the Charlemagne (Imp/Pro) player.
We can take a tangent to talk about islands. The handful of three and four tile islands should not be worth conquering. A couple archers and a settler are far cheaper than the equivalent forces to take them. And after you've gained three or four tiles, that's the extent of your additions.
So from turn zero I'm screwed because I have neighbors who, rather than get more tiles (impossible), make their tiles better. (Industrious doesn't really fit into this matrix, so nabbing the Great Lighthouse was a brilliant move by Amica. He turned Ind into a trait that made his tiles better.) Alright, I have zero way to make my tiles better than other civs and leaders can't do better. (Cheaper buildings, easier civic swaps, whatever.) What does that leave me? Well.......war. And that's it. If I have the same amount of tiles as Pind, Amica, or Cairo, I lose. Mackoti was in a bad spot with Imp, but at least Aggressive makes your tiles better. (Every hammer that goes into a melee or gunpowder unit is better for an Agg player than a non-Agg player.) I'm low on the totem pole; I have to get more tiles.
You all know how I decided to get more tiles: I attacked Pindicator as early as I could when I sniffed out that he might be weak. Before this, I was planning to bulb Machinery for a crossbow rush. That's how desperate I was, although I wasn't talking about that plan while I was doing it. You might consider this a choice. It was not. I was compelled to attack a neighbor; because of my worker micro I happened to have a city near Pind before I had a city near Mackoti; Mackoti happened to be better defended than Pind. No choice. Had to be Pind. My attack against Pind shouldn't have worked. He got caught a little flat footed, unfortunately, so he lost his city. Even more unfortunately, Amica had units on his West to opportunistically snipe more cities. He wouldn't be looking so bad if he only lost the two cities that I took, instead of the five cities that Amica and I took in total. I got very lucky. For the next couple dozen turns, I had very strong demos due to my land advantage. But this was going to wear off as Organized people, Financial people, etc. etc got stronger and stronger. So I needed more land.
I had to attack Pind with catapults as soon as possible. Amica with his Lighthouse would pull away from me and beat me to Guilds and/or Astro by a million years. If I waited for either of those techs, Amica would already have eaten Pind or Amica would retaliate and annihilate me after I was worn out from fighting Pindicator. I had no choice. Nothing else improved my position. Every single other option left me stagnating while Amicalola exploded into a greater and greater threat.
And so here we are now on turn 120 turn 119, in a war in which we have a considerable power advantage (well, maybe not anymore after Hornblower...) but thoroughly depressed. This has been inevitable. The worst part? I don't know if this helps at all. Even if we make gains, which is always an uncertainty, Pind almost certainly throws everything he has East and lets his Western neighbor devour his cities for free, partly out of defensive pragmatism, partly because it's vengeance on the guy who wrecked his game. Misery through and through.
Of course, as I said, I was very happy with this turn. Pind putting up a fight enlivened me, so I'm not nearly as cranky as I would have been. We'll see how this turns out.
Double-move Stuff
[Pseudo-edit: In the (very long) time it's taken me to write up this report, Amica and Pind have responded to a PM I sent and this section is unnecessary, but I include it because I said I would.]
I've sent a PM to Amica and Pind asking them to keep a turn order between them (nauf->Pind->Amica). Amica went after Pind and so he was able to see that Pind took Hornblower, so he moved up his axe. (You can see it in Pind's stack.) If Amica then went ahead of Pind, he could attack into my elephant and do far more damage than Pind's mounted units would with a first strike. That axe wouldn't have been there if a turn split had been maintained (if Amica had gone first, he wouldn't have just wandered his axe onto flat land in front of my city), so it seemed unfair for the "team" Amica and Pind to be able to get an optimal battle order in turn 119 by flipping the order they had in turn 118.
[But again, I protest too much. It looks like both are fine keeping the split.]
Pind didn't try to retake Hornblower. He'll play for time. He's got a massive defender's advantage (which I'll talk about later). So I moved up some troops.
It's possible this stack gets attacked and the catapults suffer flanking damage. I'm not hugely concerned. This stack isn't strong enough to push on the capital anyway. It would be nice to burn Proudfoots, though. (ProudFEET!)
Notice that Pind was able to reach Construction.
Yippee. Now I'm fighting an opponent at tech parity where he as all the advantages of a defender (shorter supply lines, better vision). I'm not sure how I can make any progress...and I have the second largest military in the world. Fuck this game.
Speaking of F this game, I continue explaining why this map causes me physical pain to play on. There's no more stuff about the turn, so you can stop reading here.
I should also say that I'm going to express the opinion that the design choices behind this map aim, unintentionally or not, at destroying any choice, strategy, or dynamism in the game, but I honestly have no ill-will towards the map maker. My EitB 54 map was...let's say less than loved by the players, so I know the feeling of having one's darling skewered.
There are 13 tiles between my capital and Pind's. This is the rough distance between everybody's capital. Here is a square map representing a 13 tile distance.
In a standard game, you'd expect both players to more or less fill up the land equally, barring greedy land grabs, better micro, faster traits. Nevertheless, this is what a breakdown generally looks like. I didn't draw other cities in, but you can imagine that the blue and red players have different angles of attack into each other, whether on the left, right, or center.
Imagine, as often happens, one player attacks the other and gains some land. The hash marks are Blue's conquest.
You can see that the distance between blue's territory and red's capital has been shortened. In a war, however, this isn't a straightforward shift. Blue might have more cities now, but those cities are generally less productive, and blue's army has an increased travel time from his core productive cities to the front. Blue has gained a land advantage and may convert that into further advantages later, but in the war, he's going to start losing steam: instead of blue and red each having a 7 tile travel time to the front, now Blue's reinforcements have a, let's say 9 tile distance to cover, while Red's only have to travel 4 tiles. The double-speed reinforcement can likely cover a lot of defensive problems.
But Blue isn't unhappy. You see above the area of land he has gained. He'll stop his war and consider his next move. Now think about the way the real map was designed. There was a single narrow choke in between each player. Imagine Blue (naufragar) has advanced on Red (Pind). How much has Blue gained?
As you can tell from the area in this screenshot, Blue has gained very little, but now all the same disadvantages apply. Red has a shorter reinforcement distance. The double-speed is an effective force multiplier of 2. Blue needs twice as many troops to compensate for distance. I (Blue) have the number 2 military in the world, even after losing those axes at Hornblower. It doesn't matter. Pind can whip cats and eles faster than I can whip double Pind's cats and eles. I laid out before how the symmetrical donut map with single choke points punished conflict and rewarded passivity by benefiting players who sat on their hands the entire game. I'm point out here that not only does the overall terrain discourage conflict, it tries to make conflict as costly as possible. This is the map wagging its finger at you: "You tried to get out of your sandbox! Bad boy. Get back in and keep microing up to Knights or Galleons (or hope you neighbor someone checked out) You remembered to choose only late-game traits, right?"
It's hard to keep motivated to play this out. Despite multiple turns of heavy, heavy whips, I'm something like #7 in Food, #7 in Land Area, and #4 in Hammers out of 24 players. Don't care. I have zero interest in playing on this map, fulfilling my turn zero destiny as a mild yet manageable inconvenience for Amica. I'm kept from resigning to AI by sportsmanship, and I can't just play ten minute turns. It's not in my nature. It's quicker on the defense. Log in; look around; whip everything. You've got nothing to lose and everything to gain. On the attack, if you step onto flatland, if your stack's too small, if any of a million things happen in the fog, you're dead. So, because of a stupid competitive streak, I'm compelled to keep spending hours of my life on a map in which I had lost on turn zero. (That's a very slight exaggeration. I had the choice to go for Pyramids, but again my start's tech requirements could not have been higher and Pyramids should have fallen way earlier than they did. Seriously, who let Mack get them on turn 92?)
When a map's imbalanced because of terrain glitches, whatever. It happens. I'm not so riled about the insane capital imbalance, because that was a mistake. Thing's slip past; so be it. The grander philosophy of this map, however, was a conscious effort to be fucked. ("It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to. Cry if I want to.")
In the cold light of day, it seems like I've been losing my composure over this game. My apologies, all. I try to edit earlier angry posts, but the petulance remains. I'll try to be a bit more detached.
Speaking of detached, where do all these trireme detachments ( ) keep coming from?
As I've mentioned, there's a 10+ turn travel time for a trireme to get from Amicalola's lands to mine. He must have had these ships in Pind's waters before I declared on him. Surely I'm due for some luck, right? By which I mean, surely Amica doesn't win the 33% role against a trireme on the coast, right? That would be quite bad.
Pind pulled back his Swordsman from Proudfoots ProudFEET and in the interturn produced an archer.
I killed it with a horse and burned the city. By the way, did Close to Home monkey with the formula for infrastructure destruction? A lot of infrastructure seems to be surviving the various city captures.
Because it was late at night and I'm not very good at this game, I split my stack as I advanced on Pind's capital of Baggins:
I don't think he can destroy my mini-stack on the mine. Even if he uses roads to attack from the corn, he still suffers the river-crossing penalty. He would take extreme casualties. It's very possible that he can get flanking damage onto my catapults if he attacks with all his mounted units. I would probably lose some hitters, but the flanking damage shouldn't be enough to kill any cats. I might have miscalculated. I don't think he takes the shot, and even if he does, I'm happy to mop up some of his units outside of his cities. The plan of attack into Baggins is complicated. If the composition of the garrison remains largely unchanged, I just attack with everything I can bring to bear in 3 turns. That 60% cultural defense won't matter as much if half his defenders are mounted. On the other hand, if Baggins gets reinforced as I expect it will, I think I'll bombard the city defenses for a turn, which is a very scary prospect against a roughly equal stack when you know your opponent has catapults in the fog. Still not sure. Would have to run some sims.
Speaking of reinforcement, Pind abandoned Sandheaver; it completed a Spear on the turn roll; I killed it with a sword (which took far more damage than it should have ).
I don't really care about the survival of these units. If Pind attacks me up here, it's valuable time during which those units aren't reinforcing Baggins. I'll be honest: I have no idea what my objectives are for this little army. Cause some chaos? Inhibit capital reinforcement? That's about it. Remember that these were trash units cobbled together because Pind attacked me before I was ready. The only real teeth (the cat and the sword) were already in a galley heading for my main force.
Compare my hasty, hodgepodge, diffuse military with Mackoti's scalpel:
Pardon, I didn't feel motivated to stitch together all of Mack's forces here. (I've got the screenshots but got bored.) It'll be a close battle, I think, but Mack can wait a few turns and turn it into a rout. You can see that Cairo has built sacrificial altars. Civ4 is a little screwy about when it updates the bridge graphics, so it could be that Cairo can in fact build bridges (and so has Construction), but I don't think so. I suspect he went for Code of Laws ahead of Construction and now pays the price.
Here's a broader diplomatic overview on my quest for circumnavigation:
Notice any patterns? Hell continent indeed. Every member of my continent is at war and of the 20 out of 24 players that I've found, not one outside of my continent is fighting. But there I go again drifting into depressed hyperbole. Obviously there were wars, even one conclusive enough to end with AT's elimination. And while I was logged in, Mjmd got a Great General fighting somebody in the fog.
I'll continue with more foreign notes: I met Rusten/Miguelito, whose GNP is ridiculous. I don't have many espionage graphs, but I would guess they're at the top. I checked the wonders screen, and it looks like they stole the Colossus from TBS!? (The color of the wonder owner changed from bright purple to Rusten/Miguelito's blueish purple.) It's a shame that the last continent I have to meet seems to be the one with all the fighting.
Speaking of fighting, have a fun picture:
I don't know who the blue is, but the yellow and purple are Superdeath and Commodore respectively. The yellow on the mainland is not Superdeath but Tarkeel. Last turn, I saw Superdeath and Commodore's workers on that island both working the terrain. What is going on over there??
Edit: And just after I post this, I check Civstats to see that Joshy was eliminated 5 minutes ago. (I suspected he was the blue in the previous tricolored picture.) GG Joshy. I too have felt Superdeath's fire.
![[Image: niemals.gif]](https://www.civforum.de/images/smilies/niemals.gif)
)
Who would've thought that antagonizing two of my neighbors would bring them closer together? 
If what I see is what I get, the city shouldn't fall even if I lose every combat. (There shouldn't be any way that happens, right? 
).
