[SPOILERS] naufragar is not a number; he is a free man

[naufragar]

Cairo does have Construction:


I believe he emptied Ilsa to buy himself some time. I'm not sure, but I think that's what happened. Interesting to see the tactical dance up there.

As for us, obviously tactics don't matter.


Did you think I would win a crucial high odds battle? Ah, you must be new to the thread. Welcome! Glad to have you. Name tags are on the table and self-flagellation whips are in that corner.

So instead of setting up a galley convoy from my Moai city to the front, I'm building more triremes and delaying repairing my nets. 32% isn't an unreasonable roll, but it coming in this fight instead of one in a 20+ unit stack stings. But we are treating this game with grace and serenity and so are thoroughly unperturbed.

[vanrober]

Hey Naufragar, i liked your thread a lot, really nice to read your opinions, and over all it was a fun thread!

I hope to see more soon!

[naufragar]

Hey Naufragar, i liked your thread a lot, really nice to read your opinions, and over all it was a fun thread!

I hope to see more soon!

Thanks, Vanrober! I hope I can find a balance between giving myself space to release my frustrations while still being entertaining. Thanks also for keeping the game moving at the beginning, and good luck in PB60! (and PB61.)

We will need to make some tough decisions soon:


I spotted Pind's catapult stack. Hopefully he doesn't have a second stack able to hit me this turn in the fog by his capital. The decision we have to make is: do we attack or retreat? We don't have time to bombard the defenses in Baggins even for a turn. Next turn Pindicator can hit us on flat land with his catapults and our stacks are pretty much even. So the question is do we throw our army into the meat grinder and hope to beat his 60% cultural defenses or do we back up?

If we don't win this war decisively, the only path left to us is to hunker down in our land until Mackoti or Amicalola kills us. It's win or die, basically. But if I attack and fail, that too leads to death. So can we win the attack next turn? Ugh. I'm really going to have to sim on my weekend, huh? For what it's worth, I don't care about any of the units or my city in the north. Those only exist to pull capital defenders away. I suspect that Pind destroys that stack next turn, but if I keep even 1 catapult from moving down, I'll consider that a worthy trade.

Amica has ships in the water here, and I've moved up aggressively.


He can kill my trireme but he loses units to do it. There's no way he wins another low odds naval battle, right? Right?  I'm moving up like this because I want to discourage him from trying any galley shenanigans aimed at Madras. I'm ok if Pind pushes that city and saps his defenders. I don't want Amica to burn it for free.

Here's the Power graph:


You might wonder how I can have such a higher Power ranking (#2 in the world) and yet have an equal stack size with Pind. This is that bottleneck effect I was talking about. My capital is 13 tiles away. Other cities are even further. Hornblower is great, but imagine if instead of one good production city, I could fit three mediocre but whip-able cities on the front. That would be so many more units. As it is, Pind can pour everything into the choke. I have to take the capital because of its cultural dominance. There are no other reasonable targets. But Pind can get 6+ cities worth of production into it, while I have to trickle units in from far away. It's really rough.

I opened the turn up to this diplo offer from Elkad.


I hadn't realized that different continents had different luxury distributions. This is an excellent feature. Credit where it's due. (Sorry I've been so mean lately, Lew.  )

[naufragar]

Pindicator retreated most of his troops from Baggins. Annoyingly, he whipped walls in the inter-turn.


So I sent in a couple of City Raider catapults and lost both, which was improbable and got Pind a great general from it but with the way our luck's gone...

We captured with a horse archer:



I've kept the city. I'm not sure if that was correct. Only the capturing horse is in there. If Pind wants to retake he can, and we can keep ping-ponging this city between us. We have roughly equal stacks, so whoever gets to hit first wins the war, essentially. My production is much higher but look at the long and narrow path I have to cross:


Imagine if that jungle bottleneck was 5 or 6 tiles wide instead of 2. Nothing left but to grind it out and see who wins. You can see Amica's triremes continuing to be annoying. I really didn't account for him having two triremes in Pind's southern waters a stone's throw from me when I attacked. And I obviously hoped he wasn't going to win that crucial 32% roll. But, alas again, this is one of those games.

[naufragar]

No turn report this time, just some musings. I’m reading PB61 reports and catching up on PB60. (Seriously, turn around twice and they’ve gone through 80 turns. Amazing pace.) And I wanted to talk a little about the way people evaluate traits. I’ve seen a lot of people say something like “I want one early game trait and one late game trait.” This is a bad way to look at combos, and I’m going to try to use this game to explain why.

I feel embarrassed about how much I’ve raged about the current map, so the PB59 map design will only come up tangentially.

Consider this graph, on which I’ve roughly plotted what I consider to be the power-level of my, Pindicator, and Mr. Cairo’s traits over time. (One thing to keep in mind is that this is about the strength of the traits, not of the resulting civ playing the game with them.)



Obviously, since I don’t have real units of measurement for power, this graph is pretty touchy-feely, but I think it should make intuitive sense: Imp/Exp has a massive power spike at the beginning, but once they’ve settled their land, those traits are done. They stop contributing. Charismatic/Philosophical has a slope up as they get their very first Great Person and start doing things with their extra happy, but they too reach a cap. Philosophical, even with the CtH buff, doesn’t really get more Great People. They just get them sooner. Nevertheless, the power ceiling is higher than Imp/Exp due to the Charismatic happy. Fin/Org is different in that they don’t reach a peak. The longer the game goes on, the high costs go (due to inflation or more expensive civics). When analyzing Cairo’s position back on turn 100, I said that you can’t win a game by out-developing your neighbors. What’s that old physics joke? “Sure, that’s true in practice, but how does it work in theory?” In theory, yeah, if everyone plays the same game, Fin/Org does out-develop to a win.

The thing that people get wrong when saying “I want an early game trait and a late game trait” is that this graph has no relationship to victory. You can’t just pick the curve with the most area under it and consider it the best. All this graph tells you is, all else being equal, at what point will each trait pair have a relative advantage over another. (And yes, that “all else being equal” is doing a lot of work.)

Barring inevitable neighbor luck and freak mishaps, you win the game by leveraging your relative advantage over your neighbors. If you’re Imp/Exp, you use that power spike to do something: horse archer attack, greedy pink dot, whatever. If you’re Cha/Phi, you do things like bulb Astro sooner, get liberalism, maybe do some cultural shenanigans with Music. If you’re Fin/Org, you out-tech everyone to Alpha Centauri. Civ4 is beautiful because there’s nigh infinite flexibility in these based on circumstance, but the principle is the same. You don’t care about total strength (“one early trait, one late”). You care about when you have a relevant relative advantage and what plan you’ll make to leverage that advantage.

So an addendum about maps. Yes, maps (and specifically map size) can sometimes chop off the extremes on the X-axis. If Fin/Org plays on a map with 4 tiles between capitals, they have to be especially inventive. I’m reminded of our really interesting always war Australia game with 4 civs within a stone’s throw of each other. On the other hand, Imp doesn’t mind being on large maps at all. If you imagine that every player has an infinite amount of land to expand into, the Imp player might not have as easy a time as the Fin player, but after researching Currency, there are basically no more limits on horizontal expansion. Each new city contributes around 8 gold per turn (through trade routes, city tile, one hammer building commerce if necessary) even before working cottages. Even if each new city increases empire costs by 10-12 gold, you should be able to outscale your costs, especially as you get courthouses online and those new cottages grow towns.

If you want more practical proof, look at every large Pitboss played: PB18, PB38, Civforum PB73. The winner in every singe one is Imperialistic. PB88 Spoilers:

Civforum PB88 isn’t over, but an Imp player is going to win that one too.

I realize as I write this I might be inspiring an Imp nerf in a thread in which I complain that Imp was literally useless on this map. That would be ironic.

So yeah, traits don’t matter without a plan. I guess that’s the nutshell version.

[naufragar]

One of these days a naval battle will go poorly for Amica. Today is not that day.


The naval war would be very different if he lost this 50% up here or the previous 32% a couple turns ago. Lesson learned. Amica is the lucky one. I have to drastically overcompensate. Man this is frustrating.

I advanced on Pind's city of Took. He whipped a spear in it, but he's been moving the bulk of his army to a staging tile 1SW of Brandybuck.



Took was taken...


...and burned.

I'll remind everyone that Pind started this war with a despicable sneak attack on my city of Hornblower. The Village's honor could not take this insult by the Shire. We now, however, consider the debt repaid.


We hope that Pind repents of his warmongering ways and realizes that peace is the only way forward. I look forward to the future harmony between our peoples that this deal could initiate.

[naufragar]

I opened up this turn to much confusion. Pind does not yet have peace in his heart. Remember how I said that Pind was staging his army 1SW of Brandybuck? Well, it disappeared!


And the garrison of Brandybuck is gone, too. This caused me much consternation. Why would Pind reject peace but then move away from a fight?

I wondered if Pind was trying to get some sneaky revenge in with roads and a worker:


(In PB45, while I was beating Superdeath, he snuck an army into my core and burned three cities as a final, kamikaze middle-finger, and now I live in fear of something similar.)

But it turns out, Pind is not trying an end run. He's just pulling back.


I don't understand, and what I don't understand scares me. I pillaged some more tiles and moved up to threaten Brandybuck. He should be able to defend it, but I'm just trying to give him more reasons to accept peace. I feel I am being very magnanimous. After all, he did declare war on me twice. 

And in addition to my magnanimity, there's always the fact that Amicalola is a stone's throw away from Guilds if not there already. (He revolted into Hereditary Rule/Vassalage, although he seems to still be spending gold teching.) I'm not really worried for myself. I've still got the third largest military in the world, and elephants and catapults on the defense perform well enough against knights and catapults on the attack. Rather, like a good neighbor, I worry for Pind. I'd hate to damage his army when he could be facing an existential threat shortly. 

And yes, Amicalola is thousands upon thousands of beakers ahead of me. The reason?


Holy smokes, empires are expensive. But even without my unit costs, Amica would be blowing me out of the water. Look at that civic maintenance! And inflation is a percentage of total costs, so Amica, counting courthouses, spends some 75+ gold less on expenses. I didn't have and I don't have enough land to overcome the efficiency of Organized.

[naufragar]

The theme song for this turn is Little Richard's "Good Golly, Miss Molly."


Good golly, Miss Molly.



Pind accepted our peace offer and promptly declared war on Amicalola. Unfortunately, Amica plays after Pind, so he'll easily whip defenders to stop Pind's attack. (Nothing Pind or I have comes close to cracking Longbows in hills.) Still, I respect the grit. I had suspected this was Pindicator's intention when he retreated his stack east instead of north. Unfortunately, I think Amica was on to Pind's plan, too. I don't have good screenshots of Amica's land, but I believe that last turn Amica whipped a border city for 3 pop. The only thing this could be, if I read my screenshot correctly, is a longbow. I hope Pind can do great things with his army, but I worry. I've offered him Open Borders in exchange for my Iron. If he gives them to me, I'll try to reinforce him. After all, I bear him no ill will for the two times he declared war.

I also offered him a no-strings-attached Fur. I pillaged his Gems and Ivory, so he's likely desperate for happy. If he accepts my open borders, I'll give him a silk too. Otherwise, I'll offer open borders in exchange for the silk.

Mack posted in the general forum again asking for a replacement. I won't speculate as to why now, but I've got a few guesses. It frustrates me: Mack and I seem to have decent relations, currently symbolized by a fish-for-fish deal. And I was sort of hoping that his conquest of Cairo would put him in conflict with Amica and that he and I could put pressure on our continent's runaway. If a non-Mackoti player takes over, that new player might not have the same opinions about our demilitarized border and likely won't be as competent at holding the line against Amica.

Still, that's a back-burner consideration. For now, we're figuring out what we do with this astounding turn of events. Pind attacking Amica. I don't hold out hope, but it makes me all tingly nevertheless.

Good golly, Miss Molly.

[naufragar]

[naufragar]

More naval combat. Let's see how it went.



It's not enough that I have to deal with the bullshit unbalanced starts that screwed me, the bullshit map design that screwed me, or the perfectly bullshit neighbor draw in just the right screwed up order,* I also get to never win a single sea battle. Not just not win, lose in spectacularly unlucky fashion, watching as what started as equal forces snowballs out of control as Amica gets more promos and I have to keep whipping more triremes. There are, like, three players still interested in this game, and the turn pace is through the freaking floor. Euthanasia anyone?

*I realize I never complained about this. My neighbor order was perfectly fucked. Seriously, switch anybody on my continent and see how the game plays out. Switch Pind and Amica and I get to kill the much softer Amica instead of fighting the wolverine Pindicator. Same thing if you switch Amica and Mack. Switch Cairo and Mack/Pind, and I get to eat Cairo. Switch Cairo and Amica and I don't worry about anybody vulturing Pind. Seriously, perfectly bad ordering of neighbors. Amazing.