[PB65 Mjmd] Off to Sea Once More

[Ginger()]

Carefully, painstakingly counting out possible production times and observing worker micro to know when a singular unit pops up?
Squinting at a graph and counting square grid divisors in order to divine the disposition of your foe?
Lose a 70% roll and the campaign is over? (SoonTM)
Yup, it's ancient war time 

[Mjmd]

For those who play magic the gathering: who's the beat down? Ancient era it isn't phil Arabia that is for sure. Might as well probe a bit. I do think I messed up by not going all in, but I swear I'm a builder at heart!

[Ginger()]

For those who play magic the gathering: who's the beat down? Ancient era it isn't phil Arabia that is for sure. Might as well probe a bit. I do think I messed up by not going all in, but I swear I'm a builder at heart!

These sort of decisions about how much to commit really fascinate me. I'm also pretty cautious so I can sympathize. Personally, I work around this by never playing beatdown if I can help it
For post-game analysis, when you make your war report in the coming turns, can you give us an estimate of which additional forces you might've had in position if you'd hit that whip button more? Just to see if in that alternate history it would've made a decisive difference. 

On a fun tangent, if you had to assign each player in this game a color set for their deck/civ draft, what would it be?

[Mjmd]

For those who play magic the gathering: who's the beat down? Ancient era it isn't phil Arabia that is for sure. Might as well probe a bit. I do think I messed up by not going all in, but I swear I'm a builder at heart!

These sort of decisions about how much to commit really fascinate me. I'm also pretty cautious so I can sympathize. Personally, I work around this by never playing beatdown if I can help it
For post-game analysis, when you make your war report in the coming turns, can you give us an estimate of which additional forces you might've had in position if you'd hit that whip button more? Just to see if in that alternate history it would've made a decisive difference. 

On a fun tangent, if you had to assign each player in this game a color set for their deck/civ draft, what would it be?

This question bodes well for my attack lol. A lot of my decisions were based on seeing the southern city on T47, which was same turn I saw the settler. If I had gone all in this turn I could have had two axes (less 1 impi). Requiring whip from  hundred years ago AND a lot of roading. I obviously could have had +1 impi from a whip if I went all in later. Sooooo I've had um poor experiences with Commodore 'balancing' copper in the past (ie he hasn't). However, this map seems loosely mirriored and I honestly wasn't expecting any metal units based on the below picture. It means Cornflakes horse and copper were closer together than mine and ALSO his copper was on a river. Also, his decision to strand the fish. He isn't the beat down, there isn't any reason to settle for horse really unless you aren't planning on settling a city that direction for a LONG time. I don't know maybe his micro is just insane and he has 3 more workers and it was 2nd ring. I still can't make sense of that spot lol. Why not 1W? I I mean if his copper is also on that spot that I guess it might make sense (from Cornflakes perspective not map making). My decision to send so few units was heavily influenced by these various thoughts.



Draft I'll play whatever is open; I've cashed one GP in sealed / draft.  I brew my own decks elsewise but I love B/G midrange beatdown. Here are two decks I've taken to SCG events (sadly I just missed top 64 cut off in a GP with another so no list).

I present the WORST deck to ever cash an SCG open (14th). It was my first big event EVER and also first week of Theros standard. And yes I alted Vraska the unseen 3 times this tournament including twice in the same game.


Here is a deck a few years later when I knew a bit more about deck building, like that prophetic prism, verdant haven, and mind rot are draft cards . It was a 2nd day big standard event (also like 1st or 2nd week ofa  new standard) and I think I was 13th? SCG took their deck lists down, so glad I could find both of these.



 I'll think about the other players and report back later.

[Mjmd]

T52

F&#* me. Sometimes it isn't your day. I go do micro work and totally forget the primary thing thing I needed to remember this turn. CHECK FOR HIS WARRIOR!!!! I literally tested the scenario last night and had it in my mind all day to declare war by moving my axe into his territory. I of course totally forgot upon logging in today   . Now mind you my sim tests were a little iffy on if it would work. Sometimes my test warrior would bounce and sometimes it wouldn't, so maybe this was better because I got to kill the axe..... For future reference is there any reason that moving into territory to declare war would bounce the unit somewhere else if there was no unit where you were trying to move? I know its been discussed before, but I can't remember. I guess in the scenario that it would bounce my axe anyways I at least got a painless kill on the warrior. 

Oh I also accidentally moved my worker with my impi. SIGH. Although, for some reason he now has two workers on forest my impis can reach, so that is some wasted turns to make up for my wasted turns.

AND the micro work I did is wrong because for some reason Come Roll Me Over isn't lined up with my sim. GAAH.

[Mjmd]

So I woke up kind of mad this morning. Last night I was in a little bit of a funk, but now I have a serious question:

If I had declared war by moving units into his territory would it have worked or would it have bounced? Again, I did some tests, with mixed results....

Should players be able to put units under stacks to purposefully try to teleport them? Lets say a player puts two units in territory and 1 unit under stack. Since stacks attack 1 unit at a time even if the mechanics worked the way I think they should they should the units would be teleported.

IE I'm accusing Cornflakes of being exploitative of a mechanic, IE I think he was a jerk.

[El Grillo]

Yeah this is one part of the rules I'm a little iffy on, it gets especially messy when neutral 3rd parties with OB are involved, as you can end up creating some nasty teleportation scenarios to get a first strike in that shouldn't have been possible.

[Mjmd]

So I think there are two scenarios:
1) Using teleport / beaming to attack. I know Ramk used A LOT on my in PB59, but after a German game they seem to have determined that maybe it shouldn't be allowed and Ramk then spoke out against. I know there was talk of trying to fix so units couldn't attack same turn beamed ect. 

2) Using teleport / beaming to prevent an attack. Again this could be done on a much larger scale than 1 unit, so seems like its a bigger problem. Later in the game there isn't a lot of neutral space but certainly can happen if you are in someone elses borders.

I guess from a "is it a jerk" prospective it depends if you consider beaming a bug or a feature. I certainly wouldn't consider it part of how it makes sense the game should work / players should behave. If you are getting attacked defend via normal means. Don't try to game the system. Now if you don't know you are being attacked and it accidentally happens /shrug, but in this case it was 100% intentional that he abused teleport rules. I know we don't have anything in the code of conduct specifically on this, but in my mind it violates the golden rule of 'don't be a jerk'.

So I had run some tests of declaring via attacking borders and it seems like sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. In that test game I got it to work 1/3 but unit ended up attacking from a different tile then it started on, but did go to the tile I clicked. I reran test on a new map and got this funny result:



Again 1/3 times the attack didn't work and unit got bounced out. In this case  I did enter borders, but funnily enough NOT to the tile I was trying to. For the record it seems like the attack can work if there is an open tile to the left of the unit. I would have to run more tests to confirm.

[Miguelito]

I once read on CF that in neutral territory in PB, it is a matter of player ID who gets teleported. Point being, single player tests might not be too helpful for solving that riddle.

I would agree that it's bullshit, but also hard to legislate, because you can't really forbid for people to have a unit shadowing other people's stack. And in any case, people have been trying to abuse teleport (sometimes with hilarious mishaps) since forever, so can't really fault CF here.

after a German game they seem to have determined that maybe it shouldn't be allowed and Ramk then spoke out against.

Imo a story worth sharing: GT declared and got their OB scouting chariot teleported across half the enemy's empire into a culture hole, from where he could just walk right into an undefended GLH (unnerfed!) city and thereby neutraliye the runaway.

The new rule applies in CFPB90, and actually could be abused pretty hard by someone doing something like Cornflakes here.

[Mjmd]

I mean attacking at least there is a chance it goes hilariously wrong, but defensively there isn't as MUCH chance (although with teleport who knows). I think attack abuse of teleport just comes up more offensively because defensively its harder to pull off outside of specific scenarios (IE like this one where its neutral territory and we had a peace treaty where I couldn't prevent earlier).

What is the German rule out of curiosity?

The obvious rule is "try to avoid if possible". Just play the game and don't try to exploit a weird (using instead of bug for simplicity) mechanic.