[SPOILERS] Woden and ljubljana like boats

[Woden]

One thing we have to do sooner, rather than later will be buy a settler out of Baulder to settle the island east of Baulder that is in reach of suboptimal's capital. We have a little time but if we can't control the seas around Baulder, it might be difficult to get the settler over there. Also, China/Indonesia have done a round of settlers, so we might be under the gun with them settling it. I will take a look around and check on alternatives in case they do settle the island. We want the attack to happen all in 1 turn, so nobody has time to react.

[ljubljana]

True, although settling it early has issues too as it will give away what we are planning (why else would we spend all our gold on a settler and send it all the way over there?). I wonder if any of the Australian cities on the island are in range? Probably not but it's worth a look...

Yeah, their team is clearly still playing for the win it looks like, and China in particular has been going crazy with the economic rebuilding and extorting Russia hand over fist in that coal deal. I respect that a ton but I don't like what it does to our chances .

[ljubljana]

wait, what

[ljubljana]

I...is it just me or is this game actually really far from being decided? We were maybe the slight favorites before the fight between our modern navies, but they took a great trade there and are ahead in MP again now, plus they have full control of the seas around our homeland. Admittedly you killing their battleships means they will have to upgrade more and can't easily convert that into killing our cities (probably the immediate reason for them to consider concession), but they can pillage our harbors at will now or go for your TRs, or return home and sweep my outdated fleet off the seas.

My estimate was that they would beat us to nukes by a good margin too if that last tech they discovered was indeed Fission. If they bought a few builders, they can chop out the MP in Sissoi Veliki in a handful of turns and beat Thor to it handily. But maybe they did not go for Fission after all, and they did just spend all their gold on Chinese coal, so perhaps they were far behind on nuke timing for that reason. And the uranium issue is pretty significant in the drawn-out nuclear war on the horizon, plus they may have concerns about their long-term ability to outproduce us in nukes on the raw hammers axis as well.

But I still don't really get it. We may yet be slightly favored long-term but that is based on vague concerns relating to who could win a long nuclear war, which definitely have not been proven over the board yet. And I still see plenty of options for them to prevent a nuke against their homeland, if they bring their modern fleet back home we have nothing there to contest it. If they get 2 nukes of their own before we do and retake the Australia cities it seems like they're back in it.

I don't get it, there must be something big that I'm missing here. Perhaps they are much further from nukes than I thought they were, but they can't be more than 10 or so turns behind as that is how long it would take to get Fission if they started on it right now. I am just confused, really....am I missing something?

edit: I see you posted in the tech thread that they didn't get Fission last, so maybe the above is essentially the reason, yeah. Still, I have to admit that I was pretty sure they were something like 80% favored to win as recently as 34 minutes ago. Maybe that says more about me than it does about the game though...

edit2: Another, more shameful confession is that I actually contemplated concession on the walk to get coffee this very morning, contingent on them beating us to the Manhattan Project in 5 or so turns and then dropping nukes on your production centers around when you were finishing the MP. Not seriously contemplated, but I thought about it. Yet another reason why having the resolute and indomitable Woden as a partner was the #1 thing I did right this game <3

[ljubljana]

i do tend to do that yeah

[Woden]

I would have given us 75% chance of winning at this point. Even if he research Nuclear Fission and chopped out the MP, unless he had 6 builders to chop everything at once, he would have finished it only a few turns before me. But I think I would have still got the first nuke out unless he had an army of builders ready to chop his core completely. I haven't looked at the save but I think most of his best cities are hovering around 40-50 production and that will drop as he chops. I will have Thor and Open Government north of 100 production by the time the MP finishes and I have a bunch of other cities that I could get above 60 production once I start planting trees.

But, say he gets nukes first. Where would he fire to make the biggest impact? He could hit a city or 2 in my core but I was planning on building nukes anywhere I could in a decent timeframe. Would losing my core cities hurt...yes, but much like PBEM, where Ichabod razed a bunch of my core cities, I had good cities all across the map and the impact would have been acceptable. With 50% more cities, spread across a larger area, and having access to a lot more uranium with a larger capacity to stockpile it, it was only a matter of time before we came out on top.

I suspect his concession comes from having a huge deficit income, little pillage opportunity in the near future, his inability to make gains on land, and not really making much gains against our coastal cities either, all played into the concession.

[Woden]

To win Russia needs to harm Norway. So far it didn't happen and from here it will be much more difficult.

Exactly this!

[ljubljana]

Yes, that is probably about right. England and Japan coming online probably sealed it, his core did have cities around 70 hammers but that was before amenities, and I can only imagine how bad those must have been at the end. He had an angle to beat us to nukes but if the first nuclear exchange traded nuke-capable city for nuke-capable city, you would win simply by having more. He likely would have had to either beat you to the MP by a LOT and hit Thor while it was in production, or go for the Hod and the Australia cities first to deny us counterstrike capability his core. The latter might still have worked, I think, but maybe it was a tall ask. And I didn't think about the income (figuring he lost enough ships in your battle to offset it) but if it is really bad then with only 800 in the bank it does start to look tough overall.

Let me take this opportunity to give my deepest and most profound thanks to you for sticking it out with me all this time! Oh my god, you were absolutely indomitable! I came close to concession multiple times in this game (TAD's attack and the Battle of (W)oden) but your spirit never wavered, and you talked me down and rallied when things were at their most hopeless. Your strategic vision and game sense were impeccable as well, and I will be trying my best to internalize them probably for the rest of my playing career here. Not to mention your turn times, which I know I will not be able to duplicate

I could not have asked for a better partner, and you can consider me thoroughly in awe henceforth   My hats off to you, friend, and I do NOT look forward to running into you on the other side of a battlefield much, either

edit: What is your record now, by the way, 3 wins in 3 played games since GS came out? You are amazing

[Woden]

You are too kind. My record is now 3-2-1 with 5 kills.

You need to give yourself a pat on the back too. Your tactics are top notch and you fought a more powerful TAD and won! That, in and of itself, is no small feat and only a few here can say they did the same. I am going to try and put some thoughts together on this game over the next week, I think it deserves it.

[ljubljana]

No self-respecting retrospective is without its self-criticism, so:

Things I Did Wrong



5. Continuing lack of strategic focus. This is a long-term issue for me that was on full display this PBEM, as I muddled through the early game in a very sandbox-y manner, with good focus on the development of my civ to leverage its economic bonuses and hit its strategic breakpoints but without even the faintest idea of what I would do once I got there. The game-saving war against TAD was not my decision, oh no...I wanted a DoF so I could pile on against China! Not hyper-pillageable England, not what was even then an obvious runaway in Russia, but the same China with heavily fortified inland cities that even mighty Russia failed to crack all game long. And, if successful, that vulture attack would have inevitably drawn us into conflict with said Russia over the split spoils, with TAD knifing us in the side at the first opportunity over Akkad. Yikes.

Fortunately, the right strategic decision came upon us despite my best efforts, and then I never had to pick an attack target ever again for the whole rest of the game. But let no one labor under the delusion that there is any reason to think I will be better at this in subsequent ventures...

It also deserves specific mention that my reaction to Jongs appearing on the scene was literally just "wait, Jongs unlock at Mercenaries? Um, good thing they're not currently attacking us!"

No, LITERALLY my reaction was

Wow, am I ever glad sub's Jongs apparently have someone other than us in mind. Our game would 100% be over if we had to fight off them right now, at least as far as remaining competitive for the win is concerned.

Yeah, you don't say  Ouch.



4. Throwing away a giant fleet outside (W)odin. I am surprised at how little criticism I see of this in the lurker thread and the threads of the other players. It deserves plenty! This deploy, which sacrificed any hope of a first strike against Russia and committed to our fleets being fought separately and defeated in detail, might appear inevitable as I needed the extra turn for walls and an IC fleet upgrade to stop williams from walking into Abugida unopposed. But WHY was I in that situation in the first place? You can see that it is not because I lacked Steam Power tech, and it is certainly not because Woden with his mass of Terracotta Army-buffed ICs lacked Industrialization tech. Oh no, it is because I neglected my wall upgrades in peacetime and I forgot to upgrade an IC on t171 here. And our fleets were not massed because...well, because we just didn't mass them! Why did I not move my ships south of Balder and fight williams side by side with your ICs like we did at every other point in this game? There is no explanation for this other than that I was not paying attention and committed a major tactical blunder, and it should be recorded as such

And williams thought it was a disaster for Russia when they snapped this line in half and waltzed right up next to my exposed frigates with Woden's ICs out of range and ineffective on his turn. They should have a little more confidence in their tactical abilities as they totally crushed me here!



3. Not enough ships for England. There is no real reason why I should have been so decisively outmassed in the face of the Renaissance Era English attack. We have identical gold bonuses in our half-cost harbors, and as we all know currency is the font of quantity at tech breakpoints in Civ6, not production of cheap outdated upgrade-fodder units. I had loads of extra biremes sitting around when TAD attacked and ended up throwing them away scouting instead of body-blocking for frigates.

So, where was my gold? Was it not building enough harbors? No. Was it lack of lighthouses? No, not really although I was a little slow here and it showed. Was it...spending a crapton of gold on useless stuff like a lighthouse purchase and a TILE purchase in the face of an imminent invasion? You better believe it was  But the worst part of all this was my decision to go all-in on 0-gold Isolationism trade routes instead of beelining Wisselbanken and running all my TRs to (W)odin for the whole game. Just LOOK at TAD's income on t125 - on the same turn, I was at 91 GPT with a much smaller fleet and 5/8 trade routes, and really that is the whole story right there.

There is also the CH in Cuneiform, which I now see that CMF singled out as a  decision even at the time. Amusingly, they didn't even know the half of it, as TAD started running multiple TRs to Cuneiform shortly thereafter. That CH was worth 5 GPT to me in the leadup to our final war...and 24 GPT to TAD from boosting 4 intercontinental TRs. Yeah.

My choice of engagement in the war could have been better too, in retrospect CMF's suggestion to move aggressively on the northern fleet and first-strike it in port was the best play. It worked out anyways, but if not for Woden's cooler head prevailing I probably would have turned in exactly the kind of timid strategic performance PBEM19 me was known for, a fatal error in this context.



2. No Oligarchic Legacy card! This was a staggeringly huge and completely avoidable error, as has been covered many times in these pages. Thankfully it is simple enough that I can now make promises like "I will never in all my born days repeat this catastrophic screwup" and actually be reasonably confident of my ability to deliver on that  

But how impactful was this, really? Well, we can derive a crude measurement of raw fleet striking power by converting promoted units, fleets, combat bonuses, and the like into units of raw unpromoted modern ship equivalents (let's call this unit a frigavel = FV). So a caravel with Embolon is worth e^(7/25) ~= 1.32 FV, a fleet frigate 1.5 FV, an armada 2 FV, etc. An OL caravel is 1.17 FV by this metric. Since combat bonuses in Civ6 are multiplicative, an OL Embolon caravel is (for instance) worth e^(11/25) = e^(7/25) * e^(4/25), and it's reasonable to say that adding OL multiplies the FV value of any melee ship fleet by a factor of 1.17, regardless of the other bonuses and promotions on those ships. The upshot of all this is that, according to according to an only somewhat-crude approximation, lacking OL meant missing out on a 1.17 multiplier on the striking power of every melee ship and every group of melee ships I ever put together at any point in the entire game. My 5 caravels in Australia could have fought like 6, my 10ish caravels vs TAD like 12ish, and so on and so forth forever, all from being in the wrong government when I finished the Ancestral Hall. Wow

This was no accident either as Woden repeatedly told me the right move and I just as repeatedly overruled him. Let us be thankful that I did not make a habit out of that one.



1. Classical Era attack on TAD that made us a game-long enemy in exchange for 1 city-state. CMF mentioned that we should have been using this time to raid everyone with longships instead, and while I doubt there was that much to pillage in the Classical Era that assessment is still dead-on. Amusingly I think their Russia would have been the best target, as they were furthest from us and CMF will sometimes bury the hatchet when circumstances change, while TAD loves dead-hand forever wars and attacking Indonesia would have swiftly brought a Jong-borne hammer of retribution down upon our heads.

But yeah, this war, while a nominal strategic victory for us, was as Pyrrhic as they come, as I flushed 30 turns of development down the tubes to go after someone because they beat me to a size 2 city-state. Not just anyone, but TAD, who is well-known for swearing gamelong vendettas against those who commit exactly this kind of diplomatic blunder and has a well-earned reputation for obliterating his foes on the battlefield in game after game. Judging by the other threads, I do not need to elaborate on why I consider this the #1 mistake we made in this game

Things We Did Right



5. Civ picks. We had great civ picks! Norway has not had much success in PBEMs so far, as they are difficult to play and I think in an FFA game they are somewhat win-more-y, offering a huge power spike once you are already in the process of conquering someone but little help in actually getting to that point. But in conjunction with a Phoenician civ geared towards fleet-fleet combat, and with our team in a position of relative weakness but with a conquest opportunity in front of us, oh my god, they were spectacular! No other civ in the position we were in on t130 stands even a chance of catching up to Russia tech-wise quickly enough to field ICs when they attack 40 turns later. And Phoenicia is a somewhat linear but very strong civ on water maps that is really hard to screw up too badly unless you, like, forget to build Cothons and settlers or something .

We benefited from a huge lucky break here in drawing the 4-5 picking slots and other teams passing on these choice picks, but we definitely made the most of it. And all in all, I do think something like Norway/England could have accomplished basically the same gameplan had we been less fortunate, as +50% hammers is not really more impactful than England's free RND ships (since it is not multiplicative with Press Gangs, it is only a 5/4 increase in ship numbers instead of the 3/2 it appears to be on first glance, which helps explain why we were unable to outmass them).

It may not seem like it since both our civs are known mostly for boat-spamming, but I think there turned out to be quite a bit of synergy in our picks too when it came to actual naval battle and conquest. You provided the tanks, and I provided the firepower to clear out ground troops and city defenses so your raiders could get in, with both of us leveraging our production bonuses to do so. Not much going on economically, but militarily it worked out beautifully, and really, that was the idea anyways



4. The crash-rebuilding and "bog them down in Phoenicia" approach we took following the battle of (W)odin (which I now realize was actually called Diomede, much more poetic than the purely descriptive name it had over here). You were the one who consciously articulated this as a strategy and deserve major props for that, it worked out beautifully. After destroying our fleet they sailed up to take weak-looking Phoenician cities, and were sufficiently committed to doing so that even once their DS increased they did not change tactics. I almost blew it by messing up on wall and fleet IC upgrades until the last second, but that may have worked in our favor as it meant I looked soft enough to draw them in but turned out not so soft once they got there. Would that I could have planned that, but nah, dumb luck all the way down, of course



3. Not splitting the blob. MJW cited this in the tech thread as our best move, but I am narrowly rating it #3 (or #2B, more realistically) as it is predicated on first acquiring a blob to successfully not split in the first place. But yes, I think this game shows pretty conclusively that in a 2-person team game, it is more efficient to choose one teammate and build them up as much as possible with the spoils of conquest rather than attempting a partition between the two. Had our cores been of equal size in the final confrontation with Russia, we would have managed precisely 0 of our game-saving defensive upgrades, Russia would have creamed us in the race to battleships and destroyers, and nukes would be but a gleam in the eye of an erstwhile PBEM18-lurker like myself. We would have been defeated in detail like a badly-positioned fleet. In a team game, it is crucial to keep not just your ships concentrated but your cities as well



2. Era Score and loyalty management. This means Free Inquiry, yes, but that's not where the high rating comes from. More critical were our twin HSD Industrial Golden Ages to hit Australia's fleet, keep their cities, and flip back mine to stall the Russian attack. But the BEST single move we made this game was the Norwegian Renaissance GA to enable not just pillaging but conquest of England and Japan. Normally early Dark Ages are a two-edged sword offensively in an FFA due to loyalty, but in this team game, my Dark Age with Twilight Valor to win the naval combat plus your Golden Age to hold the cities worked out beautifully, and helped us stumble upon the #3 best move we made this game too. The snaky shape of their continent helped a TON as well which would have been a major reason to pick them as a target, had we been given any choice in the matter. But I am confident that without your GA our attack would have stalled out at Open Government like Russia's at Cuneiform, and no amount of pillaging transmutes that situation into anything but GG.

Interestingly, I think Free Inquiry had an unexpected downside here as it ensured I would go Dark around the same time I hit frigates, which is great for fleet combat but makes conquest impossible right as my civ hits its power spike. You solved this with your GA, but in an FFA game it would likely have been fatal. Food for thought on FI moving forward.

On the other hand, the HSD dark age dedication makes Dark Age -> Heroic Age plays super reliable on water maps, and as our team and Russia both demonstrated, HSD Golden Age is a winning factor tactically and anyone who neglects that is seriously missing out

And I'm not quite sure how to rank this, but



1. Teamwork and emotional support. Our coordination was top-notch all game long and that showed itself again and again in game outcomes over the board. Other teams committed serious errors based on nothing more than lack of coordination, most egregiously Japan not joining England's attack and Australia passing up Work Ethic + Desert Folklore . But we did everything together - we fought together, planned together, and even swapped battle maps back and forth and iterated on them before committing! On turn 194, we spent hours agonizing over our deploy in the Rodeo attack, and I now see that williams had an ENORMOUS ambush waiting for us in the fog and we picked the exact right option to deter it and force him back. By the end of the game we were doing that for almost every turn - that's amazing! Major, major props to you for remaining energized and sticking it out with me for as long as it took to get to this outcome

It is looking more and more like a major factor in the concession was the kind of wartime attrition that is measured in emotions rather than in ships, and while our game situation was often tenuous, we were by far the best-positioned team to withstand that kind of conflict. We had each other's backs all game long, while the Russia/Australia team was constantly changing and, by the end, valiant williams was isolated and exhausted, without much support or discussion to buoy their spirits. I was in a similar place emotionally at many points in this game (see my insane psychological meltdown on the very turn we cleared the Australian fleet) but you were always there to cheer me up and keep me defiant. The ultimate concession came at a game state probably no more hopeless than ours after Diomede, but I think the psychological toll of all the sunk battleships and flipped cities and reversals of fortune proved decisive in the end.

Not that there's anything wrong with that either, of course! We all have lives here and williams has been managing a world war for 3 months straight in a game they did not sign up for. Williams, I think you did a spectacular job in a very tough situation and I don't have praise high enough for your level of play. I literally could not have kept fighting for this long without Woden and would certainly have conceded after Diomede but for his intervention. I'm sure this is cold comfort but, if I were you, I would be quite proud.

I do wonder if any of this has to do with geography in addition to our level of game focus. At the end of the game especially our windows for play and discussion were tightly synced, with you sleeping around midnight CST and me and my insomniac lifestyle happy to discuss for a while and then play after until something like 3 AM PST. Team suboptimal and roland were an ocean apart and could never have managed that, and CMF and MPF moved around multiple times and sometimes shared a continent, but sometimes not. It's simply not possible to squeeze the same level of discussion we were able to achieve out of the 1 post + 1 response per turn that a situation like that allows for, and I wonder if that outweighs the concerns about wartime first strikes that motivated our initial team rolls.