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

[naufragar]

I was cranky and wanted to hit something. Amica left three frigates around, so I hit those.


It looks like we won the exchange, but Amica should clean up my 3 Frigates this turn. One is full health but unpromoted, so it's not getting good odds.

I had an embarrassing but hilarious moment in turn. I had 91 gold and a caravel. It takes 110 gold to upgrade. Luckily, Piccadilly (a player from Civforum) was logged in, so I rang him up on the diplomacy phone. He opened the window and I tried to put it my terms but I could only put in items from my side of the window. (I wanted to borrow 20 gold and pay it back at 3 gold per turn.) So I tried to apologize and explain myself in my atrocious German while looking up words on my phone, and I'm sure this was painful as I look up "offer" and have something like 8 different words. Anbieten? Andienen? We seemed to understand each other, and I thought we put in the appropriate offers, but I went from 91 to 108! So 2 off my Frigate upgrade. And my gold per turn when up by 4.  I have no idea what happened, but when I went to upgrade the caravel and saw the button was still greyed out, I just ended my turn and logged out from schaem.

Edit: I worry that I offered 3 gold for his 20. If that's the case, I'm very, very sorry.

[naufragar]

I am reduced to two sad little islands, so I offered my oppressors peace treaties. They neither accepted nor have made moves to actually invade.    (Well, perhaps Amica has.) Cairo is content to just blockade me and continually force me off a fish tile.


Every turn, I select the fish to work and every turn he moves a frigate back over it so that I can't.  The Cairo-Amica situation is fascinating. Cairo has had more land continuously and now gains even more, but as far as I can tell, Amica is way ahead on tech. No idea how that'll turn out.

[naufragar]

Not looking so good for Calcutta. Those with eagle eyes might notice that I have a wounded Frigate. I attacked with all three and won once. 

[naufragar]

After Amica took his pound of flesh, Cairo decided it was his turn:


He has no siege units (no Steel tech) but he has the base combat strength to kill everything I've got, so I figured it was time for one last charge with cannon and knight.



We drew some blood. Now, time to die.

[naufragar]

Well, this is anticlimactic:


That makes twice that I've suicide charged into Cairo and he has declined to counter-punch. He brought up siege and a couple more units, but as you can tell from looking at the wounded on both sides, he could have killed me last turn if he pushed in. I strongly suspect that gaining Lahore a turn earlier would outweigh whatever losses he would've taken by just brute forcing the attack. Oh well.

Now, for real this time, time to die.

[naufragar]

On a strategic level naufs game has been a dumpster fire.

[So this post-mortem got really, really long, and on re-read, I want to make sure people know that I love everybody I name. I call out some bad takes (specifically from Krill, Lewwyn, and JR4 :P ), but these (and all lurkers at all times) are wonderful people for whom I have no ill-will. ]

First things first, congrats to Amica and Cairo for taking me down, and thanks Lewwyn for the map. Whatever I feel about particular turns of Civ4, playing Civ4 in general is a joy and you all facilitated that. Pind, sorry we had to be neighbors. Mack, sorry you weren’t having fun. It’s always a particular kind of stressful fun when I’m next to you.


The Post-Mortem, or “Please Let’s not Keep Making Symmetrical Donut Maps and Then Compound the Problem with Natural Chokepoints and Free Backlines”

I hope that people are already convinced that symmetrical donut maps with two neighbors per player screw any leader/civ combo that can’t rely on winning through turtling. If people haven’t been convinced by the pages and pages I’ve written in this thread on it, I’ll think I’m an even worse communicator than I suspect. So I’m not going to rehash that.

The corollary to the map screw is that my choices were preordained. So, in a sense, I agree with Krill. The strategy the map mandated for me was a dumpster fire. So what did I do?

People seem fine with my first attack on Pindicator. This surprises me. There was no reason this attack should have succeeded. Yeah, it did, but only because Amica cut Pind’s copper for a turn (unknown to me). Otherwise,

Want to know something crazy?  I still think I can hold off naufrager.
[...]
Naufrager made the smart move of razing proudfoot - really, he has done everything right so far; it's just that I still think his strategic thinking for this war was flawed in the first place.  (He might just get bailed out by me having a stupid neighbor on the other side.)  And if he doesn't bring up more units then he is going to stall out at the capital then wish he had made more.

If I had waited to bring up more units, Pind would have had his defense in place. If Amcia hadn’t cut the copper, Pind would’ve stopped me cold at Hornblower. My attack on Pind was required by the map, and it still shouldn’t have worked. Pind hits the nail on the head here. Whipping your empire for a pile of axes against a competent neighbor 14 tiles from your cap doesn’t win you games. Too bad for me it was my only possible play.

The wind is changing, I can smell it in the air.  The fell easterly clouds are losing their strength and now a wind from the west will blow them away.
[...]
I am really curious to see what he does next turn.  Does he realize his window is closing?
[...]
The wind is changing, people.

That very turn, Pind had a peace offer from me. I’m going to count this one in the “naufragar has impeccable strategic sense” column.

I played a longshot and made a very early attack. I stopped it precisely when I needed to, took my winnings, and left. What had my other continent mates done? Amica had landed the Great Lighthouse. As I’ve already said a dozen times over, at this stage, Amicalola is winning our continent. When everyone has equivalent land and no means of expansion, Ind/Org with Great Lighthouse wins. There is no secret micro magic to overcome that, even if you’re Mackoti. (So Mackoti built the Pyramids.) Let me say it again, Amica is winning at this point. He was always going to have an advantage if he could snipe some of Pindicator’s land while I did the heavy lifting (which I was required to do. See above.) but now he’s winning even without sniping.

As I was building up for my next attack, Pindicator struck first, wiping out a stack of axes and retaking Hornblower. I recaptured and began my invasion. It looks like people thought I was too cautious in this invasion (which was kicked off too early by Pindicator’s own attack). Pind seemed to speak for the group:

There was a point where I was about ready to give up on my revenge plan for Amicalola and just throw everything at Naufrager because he was being such a wimp about invading a weaker neighbor.

Here’s the best overview shot I made, a couple turns into the invasion (June 26th):



You tell me. Does my army handily beat Pind’s? Those of you thinking about the bigger picture, how much can we afford to lose when Amica’s lurking right next door? How much does Pind have in the fog? (Remember he has another city in the fog we haven’t seen, as well as an island + galley.) What about Amica? How likely is it that Amica will send in troops to assist Pind?

In a few turns, I will have a stack that I can send to assist Pindicator. I think I at least owe him that, considering my part in putting him here. He's losing by himself, but the two of us combined might actually be able to beat Nauf's stack.

And give that we’re winning at great cost (and at that, only against the troops we see), you want me to be more reckless? (And remember, the map is forcing this aggression on me. I am compelled to wage offensive wars, while the Fins, Orgs, and Phis can sit and tech.)

But I think that instead of listening to Pindicator in the lurker thread, we should listen to… contemporary Pindicator:

June 26th (day of the above picture)

If naufrager didnt' have a constant stream of units coming up I might have delusions of thinking I could hold just past the capital. [Editor’s note: Look and see if I have a stream of units coming up. ] But he has a lot of units now and while I'm willing to make naufrager work for it, I still have my secondary plan in mind.

June 28th:

Really though he's just playing this so timidly that he's giving me time to actually whip up defenses.

June 29th:

Good split by naufrager this turn
[...]
The horse archer stack will mop up my southern cities easily and when he saw my catapults at Brandybuck that was the right call.  My only quibble is he should have done it last turn. 

“Naufragar’s a genius! He’s an idiot! He’s a genius!” As I said at the start, I don’t mean to rag on Pindicator. I mean to rag on lurkers! Pind can’t see my vision, but y’all can. You know my goals, too. I’m trying to make gains against Pindicator, while trying to limit what Amica can grab (against him or me). An impossible task, but this is my point…

I suspect that lurking behind Pind’s annoyance at my slowness is his frustration that I was not facilitating his delightful, meme-y plan to attack Amicalola. When he declared on Amica, I carefully selected my turn report’s theme song: Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” I thought about using The Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited,” but that didn’t fit, because I knew Pind was going to get flattened like a bug on a windshield.

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.
Good golly, Miss Molly.

My feeling isn’t “I’m so excited.” It’s “Good golly, Miss Molly. You sure love to ball.”

Meanwhile, let’s check in on how Amica feels about Pindicator’s doomed meme-attack.

These are dark days. We've lost our grip on the demos, despite our Golden Age.
[Ed.: In spoilers, with commentary.]

[Amica is top 3 in GNP, top 2 in Mfg, and top 7 in Crop after whipping every one of his cities for knights. If these are dark days, sign me up. ]

Pindicator continues tearing up the south. His invasion has smashed through the walls of All Neon Like, and he's razed the island of Aurora. [Ed.: The tiny island Amica originally took from Pind and the jungle choke city that had been defended by 2 units.]
[…]
As the Vespertine Empire loses its pre-eminence on the world stage, I can think of only one plausible path to long-term relevance. And God, does it hurt:



Every city is being whipped into the ground. There are no exceptions; not our islands, not commerce cities, not even our cottage capital Unison, or our (future) Heroic Epic city of Cocoon.

Translation: My war-torn enemies are now sending their horse archers after me, after I’ve been able to use peace to put both forges and courthouses in every city (!) and now I’m whipping a massive amount of knights to crush them. Amica consistently drastically underestimated (and still as of turn 196 underestimates) his position. It’s excusable for him, very obviously suffering jitters from playing with the likes of Mack and Pind. Lurkers, what’s your excuse?

For anyone interested, Naufricator currently field 86 units for the invasion. My defending force currently numbers 31. So obviously things look pretty bad.

~a short while later~

That is easily the biggest battle I've ever fought. We lost a total of 4 catapults, 1 knight, and 1 horse archer. We killed over 1/2 of their forces, and (hopefully) damaged the rest too badly to retaliate.

Who could have predicted that? Folks, Amica is allowed to misjudge how strong it is to whip knights from big, forge-endowed cities to smash your neighbors’ ancient era trash. What’s your excuse? To return to my theme, obviously this was going to be the outcome. Amica has been winning up until this point and is now using his strength to build a knight stack. The symmetrical donut did not allow any change of fate. Remember how depressed I was even as I was beating Pindicator? Remember how I said it all didn’t matter because Amica kept going from strength to strength, while I was forced to keep striving? Yeah…

So, let me sum up the situation. The majority of those 86 units lost were Pindicator’s. He basically has 0 soldiers now. Amica has a force of knights and catapults on Pindicator’s borders. His cities are defended by longbows on hills. He has engineering. His borders are 4 tiles away from Underhill, which is Pindicator’s front city. My borders are some 20+ tiles away and I have nothing more advanced than Construction units, which have been taking a beating in the two dozen turns of war I’ve had with Pindicator. This is the context. So when I read an exchange like this:

Any thoughts on naufrager basically giving up Pindicator's land to Amicalola without a fight? I'm really out of practice with civ and I've never been good at the macro...

On a strategic level naufs game has been a dumpster fire.

I feel like I’m losing my mind. Twenty years in Afghanistan wasn’t enough for you? Am I supposed to fight the vastly more powerful Amica to defend Pindicator while getting nothing from it, just to screw with Amica? (Oh, by the way, Mack had eaten Cairo by this point…)

And both Pind and Amica independently refer to it as a backstab! In what universe do I want anything other than to eat Pindicator in peace? Why on earth would anybody think I’m an ally of the guy I’d spent the last 60 turns plotting to kill? When Pindicator decided to throw his army away what should I have done? Because the end result was always going to be the same. Amica was going to conquer Pindicoria with knights. The only question was whether he was going to be killing my units to do so, or not.

I feel like I’ve beaten this theme to death over the past few months, but once more for old time’s sake: this map brutally penalized any aggression (as was Lew’s expressed intent) while also guaranteeing enough space that late game combos could grow without hassle. This meant, well, that Imp/Exp and Imp/Pro were screwed from turn 0, but moving away from that and being determined to play to win anyway, these combos had to attack with the odds desperately stacked against them. It was no surprise when these attacks failed and the later game combos could capitalize with ease.

I’ve never written a post-mortem like this because I’ve never felt like justifying my play. The reason I’m trying to justify my play here is because it’s evidence for my criticisms of the map. It’s very easy to dismiss my criticisms as sour grapes: “Oh naufragar just didn’t play well. The map was fine.” And lurkers buy into a narrative divorced from facts all the time. (I do it. In fact, that story making is one of the joys of lurking.) But you’ve got multiple angles with which to test your story, so you don’t have to say something like this:

Wow, The Black Sword is good at micro. I mean, he`s already 30 food ahead of the next player at t71.

When you’ve got players pointing out obvious imbalances:

OH i bet 10 dollars that the leader in food for firts 70-80 turnbs wasa dude in amica pozition.

Is TBS good at micro? Is naufragar bad at macro? But if you’re thoughtlessly buying into these stories, you’re missing the full picture, which, ironically, some players are explicitly giving to you.

As I said at the beginning, Krill, Pind, Lew, JR4, you’re all wonderful. I don’t mean to nag you individually. Thestick, you are, as always, the best lurker.

[Amicalola]

I'll be honest, this was the first thread I wanted to read once I got some free time, and Pindicator's is probably second. My fondest memories of the game are of the Nauf/Pindicator/Amica dynamic. I really don't think you did much wrong, other than letting me get that big flank in (there is probably a good argument to be made that you played better than I did this game), but had probably the second-worst leader for the map (SD was worse. ). I totally agree with all your comments about the map forcing you to attack earlier than would have been ideal, and I thought your attack on Pindicator seemed very well done (even if you did receive some misguided assistance ). I still don't quite understand how you prepared it so quickly. I also sympathise with your slow advance on Pindicator the second time - maybe I would have been wrong too, but I would have done the same thing. After my last few games, I think from the lurker perspective it's easy to over-estimate the strength of attackers (or at least, underestimate the damage a committed defender can do even against overwhelming odds).

On that note, it's interesting to see that you thought I should have kept pushing after taking Hornblower - I could probably write a similar post to your final one about it.   I think with some whipping, you would have easily been able to assemble a counter-attack and wipe my knight stack. Obviously you would have been knocked out of the game even worse, but that doesn't help me if my own army is killed in the process. Do you still think I should have pushed, or has time changed your opinion?

It's also interesting to see that you think I underestimated my position frequently. I have plenty of issues with my play, but I don't know if that's one of them. Rather I think you are falling into the trap with me that lurkers and Pindicator fell into with you. I don't think there's any point wrecking someone else's game if it also damages me significantly - that just leaves room for a third-party to profit the most. This was when I was still worried about Mr. Cairo whacking me, too. My worries with the Pindicator invasion weren't so much that I was dead in the moment, and I agree that would be fairly ridiculous. But it was more that Pindicator had knocked me out of contention and I was long-term dead, from such a promising position 10 turns beforehand. I don't think that was unreasonable, FWIW - the result of me getting Pindicator's whole core was pretty best-case scenario, and even then my demos were pretty garbage for a long time (around T140 they were the worst of every player living at the game's end, and a lot of dead player's too).

I thought this:

Amicalola
Ah. Vendetta to the death, huh? I didn't realize Amica is as good as he is. In the time since the Pind war, I've read his games. He's quite good, and he spends a ton of time on his turns.

Was actually kind of interesting. I sometimes wonder if a big advantage for me in recent games is people thinking I'm still greener than I am, a lot of opponent analyses for PB60 seemed to describe as 'decent but not a threat,' for example. On the other hand. I suspect that I am going to have the opposite problem in future - people underestimating how lucky I got this game, and thinking I'm better than I am.

Speaking of which, you were totally right to complain about my naval combat results early on - that was some bullshit. That I still lost control of the seas regardless for a little while is pretty unforgiveable on my part. The luck evened back out in some other combats on the other side of the world, but it mattered way less by then, and also didn't exactly help you.

Really though, I just wanted to say that the thread was fantastic, and that you played way better than the results and the lurkers gave you credit for. I would love to play on a team with you sometime. But at the same time, I will never forgive you for whacking my circumnavigator like 3 turns after I let yours be, and you're dead to me.

[naufragar]

But at the same time, I will never forgive you for whacking my circumnavigator like 3 turns after I let yours be, and you're dead to me.

So yeah, this was a mistake. I had already committed to total war against you, but I don't think you had come to the same conclusion yet. This didn't help... Plus if memory serves, you got circumnav through map trades anyway, so I didn't end up delaying that any. A blunder. 

I thought your attack on Pindicator seemed very well done (even if you did receive some misguided assistance ). I still don't quite understand how you prepared it so quickly.

Joao doing Joao things and my willingness to pull units off garrison duty even if it meant an unhappy face. In hindsight, that first army was a bit of a paper tiger. I had like 4 axes & 4 chariots, and the 4 chariots were completely useless.

On that note, it's interesting to see that you thought I should have kept pushing after taking Hornblower - I could probably write a similar post to your final one about it.   I think with some whipping, you would have easily been able to assemble a counter-attack and wipe my knight stack. Obviously you would have been knocked out of the game even worse, but that doesn't help me if my own army is killed in the process. Do you still think I should have pushed, or has time changed your opinion?

I can't remember, unfortunately, and I periodically delete my screenshots folder because it gets so bloated. Regardless of the attack's feasibility, I take your point that you couldn't see what I had in the fog and every further step increased the risk of stack wipe. You certainly didn't lose out by waiting, yeah.

I thought this:

Amicalola
Ah. Vendetta to the death, huh? I didn't realize Amica is as good as he is. In the time since the Pind war, I've read his games. He's quite good, and he spends a ton of time on his turns.

Was actually kind of interesting. I sometimes wonder if a big advantage for me in recent games is people thinking I'm still greener than I am, a lot of opponent analyses for PB60 seemed to describe as 'decent but not a threat,' for example. On the other hand. I suspect that I am going to have the opposite problem in future - people underestimating how lucky I got this game, and thinking I'm better than I am.

What's that Jay-Z lyric? "Would you rather be underpaid or overrated?" But I'm very glad to hear this isn't the end of the Amicalolan era. (There's precedent. One player, named Pocketbeetle, played and reported the best Fall from Heaven thread on here, dropped his mic, and vanished.) To be frank, Civ4 isn't designed for this many players or a map this big, and who even finishes their single player games? You played a knock-out of a game under absolutely brutal conditions, and I hope in time Civ can return to being a source of joy instead of stress (perhaps with fewer players...). If you have to contend with your winning reputation, I have no sympathy. 

Edit: And after rereading my rants, I should repeat my appreciation of Lewwyn. Thanks for map that generate a lot of great stories.

[Charriu]

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.

Charriu (and now Mjmd too) warm my icy heart:


I love this. Two work boats far from home following each other on an epic quest around the world.

I'm so glad somebody noticed that. Mjmd and I were logged in together at some point and someone came up with this idea. I hope people will forgive us this small moment of diplomacy.