[PB73 SPOILERS] scooter's Oracle

[scooter]

To be clear, the above is not a concession. I will defend as well as I can and see what happens, but it's not looking super promising if I'm being honest.

LOL it's worse than I thought. Oxy already has Chemistry. I think I'm probably 10T away, and then I have to produce them somehow while being blockaded and then surmount his production edge thanks to Kremlin. This game is probably done soon, we'll see.

[Zed-F]

Sounds like the game was indeed decided during the snake pick and letting Oxy get the isolated start was game over. Pity, but we couldn’t have known, or done anything about it if we had.

[Qgqqqqq]

I was also very surprised by the isolated start. Sorry your enthusiasm has gone

[scooter]

Don't have pictures, but the misclick situation is basically this. Oxy and I agreed on NAP until T120. I offered him a warpeace a few turns ago (making 0 aggressive moves), but he declined. Offered him a cease fire, but he also declined. On his last turn (T118) he decided to soft break the NAP for some reason, killing a random Trireme of mine and moving Frigates into my waters and bombarding a city.


I honestly thought about just quitting/conceding very briefly because getting NAP stabbed yet again is exhausting, but whatever, it's not a diplo game. But the net effect was there were Frigates in my waters that I was technically at war with. Anyway I misclicked a fully loaded Galleon into a stack of them, costing me the Galleon and 3 veteran attackers. That's all I'm reloading for - I attempted no combat at all and hadn't really done anything other than build queues and moving some reinforcements internally.

[scooter]

I'll try to get some pictures up sometime soon. The basic situation is Oxy is about to come at me, but at this point all I've seen are Frigates and no Galleons, so maybe I have a few more turns. More likely they're in the fog, though he did get Astro fairly recently and clearly prioritized a Frig wave. I've loaded up front cities with Walls/Castles to slow him down and because I had Stone. I'm spreading my Galleons around in a combination of zone defense + threatening attacks. Some Galleons are empty/bluffs, some are very much not. I'm mostly just trying to cause headaches for him everywhere, because the truth is I cannot really defend head-on right now. He's got more numbers and tech than me, so all I can do is try to make him defend himself while attacking, tying down units. If he makes a couple correct guesses, he's got this game in the bag. If he doesn't, I will have a window back into this game I think.


I think he'll succeed ultimately, but I don't want to give it for free. My time may start returning to me a little bit soon, so hopefully that will help.

[Zed-F]

Good to hear you haven’t given up yet and that time to play turns and report on them will be more available soon! Hoping for some good luck and opportunities to sneak in a counter-stroke or two.

[GT]

Good luck! This is super exciting to read about

[Qgqqqqq]

Good luck!

[Ginger*]

Yeah this is a pretty exciting fight to follow, so pictures pretty please

[Tarkeel]

I was VERY surprised when it turned out this was a 2-1-2 situation instead of a 2-3 split - the 1 either won because they took an econ tech or lost because their military tech was absolutely worthless. "Pick a start" and "one of them is secretly isolated" was not a good combination.

A future version of this with 6p and a known 3v3 or 2v2v2 continent split could have some potential.

Yeah I agree. I even recognized the implications of Big & Small, but I was even slow to consider the possibility that one player would be outright isolated. I was pretty anything-goes with map instructions, so I'm not upset about that part at all, but I agree that your refinement here probably makes this game style work better.

I have some thoughts on this for you when the game is finished. Suffice to say that I don't think start unbalancing was necessary, and a future variant with equal start quality would be very interesting to see.