[No players] Big epic lurking - PB74

[Mjmd]

4) You can laugh all you want but you never explained what is wrong with what I am saying. I cited a lot of evidence from game data in other threads, you so far cited none and just offered your free-floating opinion.
It is certainly possible to outsnowball a leader in the late game under right circumstances. In PB66 I did to Plemo exactly that and Plemo had more advantage over me than I had over Mig and Com in this game. 

By right circumstances you mean someone else fighting the leader back? Can you understand after defeating all 3 why they might have been leery leaving only 1 of them trying? What happens when 1 player has to face the leader without backup most games? 

Which relates to # 2. They didn't know that you had offered to them both of them. You know that information, so that colors your judgement, but they didn't know that information so they have to act without it. If this was full diplo then maybe it is correct to go kill Tarkeel, but without knowing about the other NAP it isn't unreasonable to assume you will go after another major power a bit if they gave an NAP. Just because you wouldn't have, doesn't mean they were incorrect thinking otherwise.

[Gavagai]

I think me going after another major power would be a dream scenario for any of them. They should have hoped for this, not fear this.

[pindicator]

and Commodore could have doubled his territory at any moment without much effort.

Yes, and I'm sure you would have happily allowed this to happen and/or made 0 counterplays of your own...? You literally had the easiest expansion paths possible of the remaining players.

The most obvious evidence for what I am saying is that Pindicator gained a lot of ground on me during the war - and he was the weakest and most backward of my opponents when it started, also probably with the least room for improvement. And it's not that he was not building units - he was simply smart enough to industrialize first and build an army later. Mig and Com decided to build their armies and attack me before industrialization and most of the difficulties they had during the war could be traced down to this one decision.

Was that because he industrialized, or was that because he had, at most, 1/3 of your attention and would have been squashed like a bug in a 1v1.


I've never seen someone survive a dogpile this massive and say "actually if they simply let me keep snowballing they might have won."

Only reason we were able to industrialize was because we were on the opposite side of the world. If Gav had been out neighbor it would have been far worse for us because we were so far behind in production and also in tech.

We still weren't catching up in technology at the end and I'm not as confident as Hitru that we would have after spreading Sid's Sushi.

In my opinion the early corporations were telling. Maybe if Gav had just gotten one of them, but being able to spread both Cereal and Mining Inc everywhere just catapulted him so far in the lead - nobody wanted to give him the gold for spreading it into their own territories but then we lost from lacking in raw production.

[Krill]

Gav, out of interest, what did F5 look like? specifically, I'm wondering if you ever got to the point where number of tanks = number of Piccadilly's rifles.

Once you got to nukes more doors opened, but I do wonder if there was less pressure on you then you would have had that window to roll around the top of the map (only Piccadilly stood in your way, Plemo would have gleefully granted OB and then Com and PIn needed to shore up their north.

That said, congrats on getting out of that box. I was hoping to read scooters thread about getting Lizzie into a dominant position but everything conspired against that!

[scooter]

4) You can laugh all you want but you never explained what is wrong with what I am saying. I cited a lot of evidence from game data in other threads, you so far cited none and just offered your free-floating opinion.

I cited a lot of evidence, namely the fact that you fought all 3 of the other relevant powers in the game simultaneously and won. But don't ask me, ask the players in the game that looked at the situation in mid-June when the dogpile was kicking off.

uh how did that happen?

Gavagai offers to leave us alone for another while, he now has the most cities, no active wars, is fully industrialized, controls the two strongest corporations and has close to twice our power. We just got up the first round of factories. 

Ouch. Here's Commodore posting Power graphs a few days later right around when the dogpile started.

Counterweighting Gavagai has let Pin/Mig catch up, more or less, but he's still going to eat Picadilly without me being able to stop the train:

How exactly was someone to catch you? There were a lot of players in this game and even more watching the endgame, and not a single one thought someone else was remotely likely to win. In fact, the only person who seemed to think MAYBE you didn't have it sewn up was pindicator a few weeks before the dogpile:

Right now I'd pick Gavagai as favored to win 60% to 70% of the time.

How would you distribute the remaining 30-40%?

66% - Gav
25% - Comm
5% - Mig
4% - Me

And he looked at this and decided to dogpile too. FWIW I asked him for these percentages specifically because I thought his "60-70%" number badly underrating your position, and it seemed different from how other players/lurkers viewed your position. I assume his 25% Commodore number boiled down to him being the likely winner in a dogpile.

[Gavagai]

Gav, out of interest, what did F5 look like? specifically, I'm wondering if you ever got to the point where number of tanks = number of Piccadilly's rifles.

Once you got to nukes more doors opened, but I do wonder if there was less pressure on you then you would have had that window to roll around the top of the map (only Piccadilly stood in your way, Plemo would have gleefully granted OB and then Com and PIn needed to shore up their north.

That said, congrats on getting out of that box. I was hoping to read scooters thread about getting Lizzie into a dominant position but everything conspired against that!

I had something around forty tanks at the end against 70 Rifles in Piccy's main stack. The number of tanks grew very slowly as I was losing a lot of them in my offensive operations.
I strongly considered focusing on eliminating Piccadilly.

I flipped the tile 1N from Vija which made it possible to reach Ahmedabad (which had weak garrison) with mobility tanks through the hill. After its culture disappeared I would be able to strike at Piccadilly's main stack. If I killed at least half of it, he could be eliminated without much trouble.
In the end, I decided against this idea for two reasons. Firstly, to concentrate the necessary number of tanks I would need to cease all my offensive operations on other fronts and I feared to give up initiative. People now treat my victory in the war like an inevitability and even use it to argue that others were hopelessly behind at the start of the war already. But I was always acutely aware of my resource disadvantage and thought I should not allow opposition to get their bearings and become active, instead of reactive. Secondly, I thought that victory against Piccadilly would not end the war but victory against Mig would and I thought that the latter was attainable.
The idea of sending my land units through the continent I never seriously considered. I though about it for a split second and concluded it was too slow but I did not think I can just build railroads through Plemo. What was under a bit more serious consideration was the plan to land a force in Tarkeel's territory and send it against Pindicator's north (the prerequisite would be taking Commodore's northern islands). Your idea I believe is very strong but I think that I have resources to spare for such a large-scale and long-term operation, it means I already can win in a number of ways.

The latest F5 I could find, it's four turns before the game ended.

[Gavagai]

Scooter, I am not sure what you are arguing. That other players believed they could not catch up peacefully I do not dispute, it is evident from the fact that they decided to dogpile me. My point is that their assessment was wrong, you are not saying anything that would address it. What their alternatives were I described multiple times and don't feel like repeating myself.

[Gavagai]

and Commodore could have doubled his territory at any moment without much effort.

Yes, and I'm sure you would have happily allowed this to happen and/or made 0 counterplays of your own...? You literally had the easiest expansion paths possible of the remaining players.

The most obvious evidence for what I am saying is that Pindicator gained a lot of ground on me during the war - and he was the weakest and most backward of my opponents when it started, also probably with the least room for improvement. And it's not that he was not building units - he was simply smart enough to industrialize first and build an army later. Mig and Com decided to build their armies and attack me before industrialization and most of the difficulties they had during the war could be traced down to this one decision.

Was that because he industrialized, or was that because he had, at most, 1/3 of your attention and would have been squashed like a bug in a 1v1.


I've never seen someone survive a dogpile this massive and say "actually if they simply let me keep snowballing they might have won."

Only reason we were able to industrialize was because we were on the opposite side of the world. If Gav had been out neighbor it would have been far worse for us because we were so far behind in production and also in tech.

We still weren't catching up in technology at the end and I'm not as confident as Hitru that we would have after spreading Sid's Sushi.

In my opinion the early corporations were telling. Maybe if Gav had just gotten one of them, but being able to spread both Cereal and Mining Inc everywhere just catapulted him so far in the lead - nobody wanted to give him the gold for spreading it into their own territories but then we lost from lacking in raw production.

1) But I offered my neighbors an opportunity to industrialize in peace in the form of a fixed-term NAP. It was their choice to reject it.
2) Cereal Mills I founded on the very turn the war started, so it is hardly an argument in favor of the war. Mining Inc, I think, is the strongest argument for me being out of reach, as this is an advantage others cannot really replicate (unless they land CreCon but it is not easy to generate an engineer on demand). But others had trump cards of their own. Mig's monk wonders do not seem much but I think they were part of the reason he was able to keep up despite not developing his land. Commodore's Kremlin is arguably more powerful than Mining Inc but it really needs the right setup: hammer multipliers, biology, preferably a food corp. Also, with Kremlin you really want to fight profitable aggressive wars.
Commodore a) never even researched biology, b) built his grand army before industrializing, not the other way around, c) did not make any lasting territorial gains from other civs after building the Kremlin. So it is not like he had no answer to Mining Inc, he just did not use it.

[Commodore]

This might be the most astonishingly graceless winner's speech of all time.

[pindicator]

Yikes, that 66% feels embarrassing in hindsight. Way undersold