[PB70] The Cartographic Correction Committee convenes

[scooter]

PBEM 24, Mackoti's NAP-stab was pretty personally devastating. Although he had initially intended to honor it; it was only after I orchestrated (and darkly, reported), the plan for a record-pace CV that he broke the NAP. Gotta rank high up there, and ended Mack's career in diplo games.

This was one of the first ones I thought of when I made that remark. I thought of Mjmd’s as “worse” in the sense that it was deception from the start and utterly unnecessary, contrasted where Mackoti intended it to be followed initially, and then had to choose between “lose or stab” which I think a lot of people would at least understand that as a debate.

But in terms of outcome impact that one is unquestionably worse. My odds of victory if Mjmd never stabbed were probably still hovering around 50% at best for a few reasons. Quite good, but still very much in question with a lot that could go wrong. Your game was sewn up without it. Brutal.

[Tarkeel]

By the way, on a lighter note, I do want suggestions for both worst NAP-stab ever and dirtiest play. I care a weirdly high amount about the history of RB games, and I know I missed a bunch of games over the years. So please do volunteer plays that you think might be worse than this (or the Athlete/Slaze incident). A ranking or tier list of them might be fun.

From more recent non-diplo games, I think Superdeath in 59 deserves contemplation. Egging newbie Joshy into attacking TBS, and then running over him with horchers when he was commited the other way:

Day 120 
Before these attacks superdeath sent me a deal to say i should attack tbs and he would attack tarkeel, i was relieved that my back was covered. When the fighting with tbs began, superdeath even accepted open borders and copper for copper whatever that meant. So i started to believe that he would allow me to hinder the strongest player on the island while he took care of tarkeel. I moved some of my units from the border between us to help fight tbs. And then im sure you guys know what happened next. Backstabbed by superdeath, all i see is a horde of ~10 horse archers+ 5 axes come through the jungle and 2 galleys landed at sheep city, and another at corn city. I should have known not to trust him, i should have suspected something was wrong when lewwyn wrote in the thread asking about turn orders or when it was obvious that superdeath was taking his turns after me.

[greenline]

Another Athlete mention is when he lied in the tech thread or thereabouts in PB2 about 'misclicking' a warrior so it would be in range to attack regorarr's pink dot city. I think people were less harsh on him for that because it was settled so egregiously and then badly defended.

There was also that PBEM were the great merchant was killed in an NAP break

[scooter]

By the way, on a lighter note, I do want suggestions for both worst NAP-stab ever and dirtiest play. I care a weirdly high amount about the history of RB games, and I know I missed a bunch of games over the years. So please do volunteer plays that you think might be worse than this (or the Athlete/Slaze incident). A ranking or tier list of them might be fun.

From more recent non-diplo games, I think Superdeath in 59 deserves contemplation. Egging newbie Joshy into attacking TBS, and then running over him with horchers when he was commited the other way:

Day 120 
Before these attacks superdeath sent me a deal to say i should attack tbs and he would attack tarkeel, i was relieved that my back was covered. When the fighting with tbs began, superdeath even accepted open borders and copper for copper whatever that meant. So i started to believe that he would allow me to hinder the strongest player on the island while he took care of tarkeel. I moved some of my units from the border between us to help fight tbs. And then im sure you guys know what happened next. Backstabbed by superdeath, all i see is a horde of ~10 horse archers+ 5 axes come through the jungle and 2 galleys landed at sheep city, and another at corn city. I should have known not to trust him, i should have suspected something was wrong when lewwyn wrote in the thread asking about turn orders or when it was obvious that superdeath was taking his turns after me.

That’s definitely tough, particularly because it was a newbie. I did go back and read a fair amount of that game and was definitely in (for awhile) on the theories that joshybravo was a smurf. In general I put less weight on AI diplo as there’s some inherent ambiguity that full diplo does not have. For example, is a “Declare On” proposal a non-binding idea or a promise? Tough to say without context. So in a game like that, you’re sort of expected to align interests more carefully and scout more.

There was also that PBEM were the great merchant was killed in an NAP break

Oh yeah this is a good one. PBEM17 Novice got 4v1’d with a number of broken agreements due to an opening that appeared to be lapping the field.

[mackoti]

PBEM 24, Mackoti's NAP-stab was pretty personally devastating. Although he had initially intended to honor it; it was only after I orchestrated (and darkly, reported), the plan for a record-pace CV that he broke the NAP. Gotta rank high up there, and ended Mack's career in diplo games.

And actualy you are keep lieng about this one. You broke the  nap. The deal was not interere anyway in my war TT,or get any teritory there, and you planted a city, if i remeber right . But very conveniently every time when prezents this you forgot to say anithing about  this litle incident because you see people love and belive you more.

And i think my playing record shows i kept my Naps even many of those were not favorable for me, even the one which were without diplo.

That atack was totaly and your greed to take a litle city spot. I felt bad then when  atacked but over the years, and seeing how you usualy react i think realy was the right thing to do.

[scooter]

All that bad news and yet somehow this hurts the most.





It's so free .





He definitely should have burned this, so I retook it comfortably. There's still a very good chance he does it anyway next turn, though. It'll cost him several maces to do it as I have two promoted CKNs sitting inside. We'll see how many he's willing to give up. My quick Zulan math says it'll require 6 well-promoted Maces to have a 50/50 shot, so I suspect he'll pass on that, but who knows.


I think I sufficiently covered my other cities, though it could be a little hairy up in a few spots depending on what he's got in the fog. I'm not lacking for units, and Maces don't do too much against CKNs realistically, but so much of my military was in the east and my Galleons are obviously a bit out of position. I honestly think he should have waited one more turn to do this. I would have been way more screwed, but I suspect he was impatient and/or afraid Superdeath would blab.


Speaking of Superdeath, we had a little heart to heart today. I more or less pitched him on taking my side vs Mjmd's and pointing out he did agree to a NAP with me, and pushed him on whether he really wants to go down as the villain Mjmd will be remembered as. He said he'd be with me, but I know he's saying the same thing to Mjmd, so it's really up to him. I think I made a compelling pitch. He did share these screenshots - one from the day before the attack and one from the day of.









We'll see what Superdeath's D20 rolls this time. He and Charriu are about to add units. Just remains to be seen what happens with them.

[Tarkeel]

The most unorthodox choice I'm making in this invasion - outright ignoring this city. I will not be moving anything next to it immediately. He's piled 4 Skirms into it, but if the cities behind it fall, it's doomed. I figure there's two ways this plays out. First, he could make a mistake and try to attack out or leave the city in some way, and I gain that way. Second, he could hole up, and I can take it out at my leisure with units streaming in that are missing the first wave of attacks - such as the units all getting whipped from Shandong, Hangzhou, Xian, and Chengdu even after the attack is underway. To me I need to strike further more quickly, and spending 5 turns walking up, hitting it, healing, and then marching forward through culture would be a mistake. So I'm gonna come back to this one.

With the attack off, I want to bring up this one. I think it can be a very good strategy to bypass defensive strongholds on the border, especially if they have limited means of projecting strength. We did something similar back in PB58, but there we did park the stack of slow-movers at the fortress while the two-movers went deeper. The only real issue with it is the culture it projects, which can be an issue in many scenarios.

Edit: For a historical perspective on fortifications, I recommend reading The Pedant.

[scooter]

The most unorthodox choice I'm making in this invasion - outright ignoring this city. I will not be moving anything next to it immediately. He's piled 4 Skirms into it, but if the cities behind it fall, it's doomed. I figure there's two ways this plays out. First, he could make a mistake and try to attack out or leave the city in some way, and I gain that way. Second, he could hole up, and I can take it out at my leisure with units streaming in that are missing the first wave of attacks - such as the units all getting whipped from Shandong, Hangzhou, Xian, and Chengdu even after the attack is underway. To me I need to strike further more quickly, and spending 5 turns walking up, hitting it, healing, and then marching forward through culture would be a mistake. So I'm gonna come back to this one.

With the attack off, I want to bring up this one. I think it can be a very good strategy to bypass defensive strongholds on the border, especially if they have limited means of projecting strength. We did something similar back in PB58, but there we did park the stack of slow-movers at the fortress while the two-movers went deeper. The only real issue with it is the culture it projects, which can be an issue in many scenarios.

Edit: For a historical perspective on fortifications, I recommend reading The Pedant.

Yeah this was interesting. I’m confident it was the right choice though it’ll forever be confined to the dustbin of fun ideas that didn’t get executed, so I can talk about it a bit more. The key thing that really opened this up was the confluence of two things.

1. His units were really only productive when huddled in cities. If he left the city in any way with his Skirmishers, he’s significantly weakened his combat trading ability. They were 0 threat to my stack from behind or to my actual land, and in fact I’d be thrilled if he tried to get cute with them. So they weren’t a counter-attack threat.
2. It did no harm for him to keep adding units because my CKNs all do collateral. I mentioned in a post that there was very little difference between 4 and 7 defenders in terms of expected attacker losses. So with that in mind, I was fine letting them stack up when I could instead more quickly get through cities that weren’t well defended yet.


Generally if you’re looking for a case to bypass a front city, the most important thing is how dangerous those units are or aren’t on the counter-attack. If they’re not dangerous, it might be a viable plan. If there’s good offensive hitters in them, it can get a lot more messy fast if you allow them to stick around.

One other thing this type of maneuver can do is force the defender into uncomfortable choices. Most of the time a defender is outmanned and/or out-teched, otherwise they wouldn’t get attacked. So what they want to do is delay and buy time to combine their stack and wait until they have enough collateral + hitters to wipe your stack, then strike. If you deny them the ability to combine their stack, suddenly the main defensive tool at their disposal is gone. At that point you see a much higher rate of tactical mistakes because now what are they supposed to do? I was really hoping this strategy would induce some mistakes as it was stressing a lot of defensive points at once.

Alas, the dirty NAP-stabber knew this was going to work, so he whined about how I was such a meanie in negotiations and pretended like I was actually going to attack him in order to prevent it.

[Krill]

The one defence of the GM kill (and everything really) that happened in PBEM17 is that everyone conceded and it was a shadow game. Otherwise yes, very shitty.

Still think this is far worse though.

[scooter]

The one defence of the GM kill (and everything really) that happened in PBEM17 is that everyone conceded and it was a shadow game. Otherwise yes, very shitty.

Still think this is far worse though.

Yeah, this is even acknowledged in the pbemlist spreadsheet for that game, so it's a unique case. I do agree though that this is worse. I sort of threw it out casually initially that this might be the worst, but I've become more convinced that it actually is the worst one. I suspect he will have very real trouble playing diplo games in the future.