[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[ljubljana]

The White Peng

The history of professional baseball in the United States dates to the late-1800s. Innumerably many legendary players have come and gone in that timespan, but the all-time greats, the ones in the pantheon, the Babe Ruths and Lou Gehrigs and Hank Aarons, predominantly belong to the mid-20th century. Wayne Gretzky retired in the late 1990s. Michael Jordan played his last game on June 14, 1998, about 50 years into the storied history of the NBA, and no one who follows basketball will dare to tell you otherwise.

The history of sumo wrestling in Japan stretches back into prehistory, and holds a significance not just cultural but religious and mythological as well. The first attested sumo bout was between two gods, the stakes no less than ownership of the Japanese archipelago. Early sumo was unregulated and gladiatorial, and sometimes ended in the loser's death - it was even once banned in Edo in an effort to tamp down on excessive street violence. In feudal times, sumo matches were sponsored by the imperial court or the shogunate; superfan Oda Nobunaga once held a tournament with over 1,500 participants. Most rules and conventions of the sport, as well as the fifteen-day, six-times-a-year tournament structure, have remained completely unchanged since at least the Meiji Restoration. A match held in 1890 is visually indistinguishable from one held today, down to the strictly-regimented dress code and chonmage haircut worn by the wrestlers, which once marked a member of the samurai class and is now worn exclusively by sumotori. Sumo is ooooold. Old and vast and eternal, part sporting event, part strictured monastic order, and part monolithic cultural institution.

The greatest sumo wrestler of all time retired last year, in 2021. His name was

69th Yokozuna HAKUHO

Only double-digit rikishi in the immeasurable history of the sport have attained sumo's highest rank of yokozuna. Upon promotion, a yokozuna ascends to the status of national icon, their ring name and handprint literally etched in stone on the face of a granite obelisk in Tokyo. A yokozuna can expect to be called upon as not just a sporting figure but a religious functionary, their pre-bout ring-purification ceremony repurposed for sanctifying actual shrines as well.

Unlike all other ranks in sumo, a yokozuna can never be demoted, so the promotion criteria are commensurately strict, and demand a display of mastery so comprehensive that the promotee can be reasonably expected to remain a top wrestler for the rest of their career. To become a yokozuna, a wrestler at the second-highest rank of ozeki must be the outright winner in two consecutive top-division tournaments, which are each grueling 15-day affairs featuring the 42 top-ranked rikishi in the world. In rare cases, an exception is made for "equivalent performance", but this usually entails taking two tournaments from three outright coupled with a strong second-place finish in the third.

So, get to the ozeki rank, itself a lengthy and difficult ordeal, then win two 42-person tournaments in a row, and you are good enough to be enshrined forever as a sumo deity. In return, a yokozuna is then expected to consistently compete for the win thereafter by going 10-5 or better in all subsequent tournaments - a strong one, like tenth-place all-time Akebono, might win as many as ten or eleven titles in their career. With 6 basho held every year, 11 career wins equates to roughly two years as the undisputed best in the world. So, win two tournaments, and you get your name on the stone. Win ten tournaments, and you're in the conversation for the greatest of all time.

Hakuho has won 44 such tournaments.

That's a record, and it's not close - second-place Taiho won 32 in the 1960s. From 2007-2016, Hakuho won 36 of the 59 basho held, and placed second in 16 of the remaining 23, for an 88% win or place rate. For the seven years from 2008 to 2014, he did so in all but ONE tournament held, the sole exception a more-than-respectable 10-5 finish.

For much of his early career, the rising Hakuho was locked in competition with brash, combustible fellow yokozuna Asashoryu. Asashoryu is iconic in his own right - his confrontational behavior often got him into trouble with sumo elders for failing to uphold the dignity of his rank, but his 25 electrifying tournament wins place him fourth on the all-time list. He and Hakuho were not just fellow yokozuna but fellow Ulaanbaatar natives, as well - Hakuho had idolized Asashoryu as a child, and Asashoryu had a hand in his recruitment and had practically raised him during his climb through the lower divisions. But when he realized that his apprentice could surpass him, Asashoryu turned cold, and a mentorship and friendship became the most intense rivalry sumo had ever seen.

Here's what that looked like. Hakuho is a few inches taller than Asashoryu, on the right in the first bout.

Yup, those are all sumo matches, most the last match on the last day of a 15-day tournament, many with a title on the line. The basic rules are deceptively simple: the first wrestler to step out of the ring, or to touch the ground with anything other than the soles of their feet, loses. Bouts can last from under a second to over three minutes, though the latter are exceedingly rare. By tracing the temporal course of these matches, we can chart the narrative arc of their rivalry: first Asashoryu repeatedly putting the young upstart in his place, then Hakuho learning, growing, and finally igniting and blowing past his one-time mentor who had become his last and greatest obstacle.

[ljubljana]

Hakuho was not just the most successful yokozuna but the longest-tenured as well. Entire generations of rikishi grew up under his shadow. 31-year old Kotoyuki joined sumo in 2008 at the bottom of the sixth and lowest division, spent 8 years clawing his way up to the named ranks at the top of the top makuuchi division, suffered a series of devastating injuries, dropped most of the way back down over the next 6 years, and retired - all while Hakuho was yokozuna.

Asashoryu was forced to retire in 2010 after a physical altercation outside a nightclub with a former biker gang leader rumored to have yakuza connections. For some time afterwards, Hakuho stood utterly apart from the remaining competition, and over the rest of 2010 he lost just one match of the 75 he fought on his way to a record seven straight tournament wins. Lesser yokozuna rose, eventually - Harumafuji in 2012, Kakuryu in 2014, Kisenosato in 2017 - and fell - Harumafuji to scandal, Kisenosato to injury, Kakuryu to long, slow, age-related decline. Hakuho endured, alone and unchanging.

For professional athletes in what fans know to be a notoriously brutal combat sport, sumo wrestlers can have surprisingly long careers. The then-oldest active wrestler, Hanakaze, retired this January at the age of 52 (!), though he never had much career success and was rumored to have stuck around mostly for his masterful cooking skills (active wrestlers live communally with their coach in a stable, or heya, and share household duties). But as yokozuna, you are supposed to constantly justify your un-demotable pole position by winning top-division tournaments. The oldest wrestler in the top division today is 37-year old endurance legend Tamawashi, who has never missed a scheduled match in an 18-year career, but he's at the edge of the bell curve. Kisenosato was just 30 years old when he sustained the shoulder injury that would end his career; Harumafuji was 33.

In July of 2021, Hakuho was 36. His dominance had been on the wane since 2018, as injuries slowly piled up - most ominously to his knees, the deterioration of which is the most common cause of early-career retirement in promising young rikishi. He could still win tournaments; indeed, when in good health he put the rest of the top division to shame with showings like a 14-1 rout in December 2019 and a 13-2 the following March. But…between those two basho, in January, he withdrew after two losses in the first three days, for what is treated in the sumo world as a 14-loss final record. Such is the fate of many aging yokozuna, who face intense and immediate pressure from sumo elders to retire if they seem no longer capable of winning, often mid-tournament if a losing record seems to be in the cards. In such conditions, it is common for a top-ranked wrestler to feign or exaggerate an injury and withdraw from the basho altogether to save face, and, perhaps, their career.

Hakuho had staved off this inevitability a few times before, following up one or two tournament withdrawals with crushing wins to silence his doubters. But, this July, things were different. He was FIVE tournaments removed from his last winning record, and one of sumo’s manifold, fractious governing bodies, the Yokozuna Deliberation Council, had issued him an exceedingly rare official warning. This is the second-highest level of performance-based censure a yokozuna can receive - the highest, given only once ever to Asashoryu, is a recommendation to retire. Fresh in his mind was the ignominious end of fellow yokozuna Kakuryu, who had tried to defend his rank a year ago under similar circumstances:

In what turned out to be his last match ever, the great yokozuna lost to a non-technique. Endo did not throw him to the clay, or push him over the straw bales at the edge of the ring - Kakuryu slipped and fell of his own accord, losing by what history would record as a koshikudake - an “inadvertent collapse”.

Hakuho’s career was on the line, and he knew it. In his own words: “The prospect for retirement was looming large, right before me, so I fired myself up more than before”. This is not how the White Peng, the greatest of all time, would be remembered. This could not be his legacy.

(to be continued)

[williams482]

Oh, a Sumo story? Nice!

That second city for Portugal looks fantastic. One issue does occur to me regarding feitorias, likely too late to do much about it: The tilepicker will take one of the second ring water tiles that connects to the turtles, likely as the third tile after claiming the two crabs. Claiming the tile W-SW of the city center would be unfortunate, but claiming the 2W tile instead would be worse (and equally likely). We may have to consider purchasing that otherwise useless tile just to make sure the tilepicker doesn't further damage our feitoria spots on the island city.

[ljubljana]

Turn 1 - Japan



Explored to the SW, which I am already regretting a little due to no fresh water down there. There is a lake in the east, but almost certainly in an inland spot. At least if barbs come down from the north, a warrior on the GFH behind a river will have an excellent defensive position against them.

Started a monument too, just to troll everyone :D

re tilepicker: will it really? I thought it likes land tiles over water, and isn't smart enough to prefer a water tile just because it is next to a third-ring turtle. If the tile picker does eat the marked feitoria tiles, we will be in trouble. But I am hopeful that it will leave the water tiles alone, even with a monument-first start by TAD, until I am able to get a settler over there sometime in the t60 range. I imagine we will have 7 border expansions onto land tiles before it starts picking up the blank coast, but if I'm wrong it'll cost us big-time

Thrawn has 2 era score already, so I think their chances for a DA are in serious trouble. All they have to do is build a longship (6 points), research Shipbuilding which they have to blitz anyways (1 point), and meet one other team and they will hit normalcy... Somehow Woden has SIX ES, wtf? Are we all on the same starting continent or something, with Woden earning 4 bonus ES from discovering it? Also, for some reason TAD + Inc both have an extra ES as well - TAD, do you know where that came from?

We also drew the beautiful deep blue alternate color palette for Japan, instead of the white Japan + green Portugal we were seeing in practice. Not complaining about that

[williams482]

re tilepicker: will it really? I thought it likes land tiles over water, and isn't smart enough to prefer a water tile just because it is next to a third-ring turtle. If the tile picker does eat the marked feitoria tiles, we will be in trouble. But I am hopeful that it will leave the water tiles alone, even with a monument-first start by TAD, until I am able to get a settler over there sometime in the t60 range. I imagine we will have 7 border expansions onto land tiles before it starts picking up the blank coast, but if I'm wrong it'll cost us big-time

The tilepicker priority is, more or less: 2nd ring resources > tiles that connect to a 3rd ring resource > 2nd ring best yield. Once a resource is adjacent to the borders it will no longer prioritize growing towards it, but it will want to get at least one.

Thrawn has 2 era score already, so I think their chances for a DA are in serious trouble. All they have to do is build a longship (6 points), research Shipbuilding which they have to blitz anyways (1 point), and meet one other team and they will hit normalcy... Somehow Woden has SIX ES, wtf? Are we all on the same starting continent or something, with Woden earning 4 bonus ES from discovering it? Also, for some reason TAD + Inc both have an extra ES as well - TAD, do you know where that came from?

Did you save the score data anywhere? I don't see it in the spreadsheet.

[williams482]

Woden has four Era Score because Gaul's unique unit is a warrior, and they get one at the start.

[ljubljana]

The tilepicker priority is, more or less: 2nd ring resources > tiles that connect to a 3rd ring resource > 2nd ring best yield. Once a resource is adjacent to the borders it will no longer prioritize growing towards it, but it will want to get at least one.

shit, really?? that's a big problem then and we should have picked the other start orientation. fuuuuuuck

TAD, please pay close attention to which tile your capital is going for next whenever it expands. Worst-case, at least buying the blank water 2W of the cap will preserve the five-feitoria location. We absolutely need to make sure the 1W-1SW tile does not fall into your capital's hands, as this will kill a feitoria spot forever. If the capital goes for a water tile after the two crabs, we may need to purchase the 2W tile ((((

Did you save the score data anywhere? I don't see it in the spreadsheet.

oh crap i forgot, will update it from my screenies now

[williams482]

It's not the end of the world. We'll lose one Feitoria tile, basically, but Archduke still gets the Celestial Navigation eureka and Japan gets the more productive capital. We're fine.

[ljubljana]

Woden has four Era Score because Gaul's unique unit is a warrior, and they get one at the start.

aaah the Azteca effect! got it, never played with Gaul before so I didn't catch it

i had to request edit access for the spreadsheet, but will update as soon as i can

[williams482]

Woden has four Era Score because Gaul's unique unit is a warrior, and they get one at the start.

aaah the Azteca effect! got it, never played with Gaul before so I didn't catch it

i had to request edit access for the spreadsheet, but will update as soon as i can

I approve of this request. 

If there's anything you didn't get a screenshot of, remember that you have a start-of-turn save to check back on. I found myself taking advantage of that fairly frequently in my games.