[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

This seems like the right time to pull the plug. Well played.

It's going to be hilarious if someone else inexplicably thinks they still have a chance and refuses to concede.

[ljubljana]

civac might! and to be honest, if they want soooo badly for us to fight on in the 2v1, i'd feel better about doing that. i'm just kinda assuming they've been swearing at me in their thread for a dozen turns at this point for not throwing it in..... but if they're in there unconceded and super hype about finding a way to stop india, then.... well, it wouldn't change my mind about the position being concedable, but it would make continuing to play on a more positive-feeling experience

that said, now that it's on the second page, bumping my request for a genlurker to tell me if the game is over or not, since i haven't played my 3-hour turn for today and don't really want to if i don't have to

[ljubljana]

missing this game already so, quick hits:

n dumbest mistakes  (unordered)

1. war logistics - i think both of my wars of conquest succeeded mostly due to really lucky breaks (GT building almost no cats and sending their army off to fight gav, greenline slightly mispositioning cat stack leading to a wipe). what.....exactly was my plan going to be if neither of these things happened? going to war with the stacks i used should have been pretty disastrous, GT because i didn't have enough to make progress vs cats beyond the initial two cities and greenline because, while i maybe could have finessed my way through eventually, it was never going to happen in anywhere close to the 10 turns that i had.....

2. assuming peace with 30 gold attached with ginger would be interpreted as an offer of 30 turns OF peace.... is there no actual way to canonically offer such a deal? i would not have taken this had i known it would not be interpreted as just a 10t peace with gold attached, and would have futilely thrown my 50 cuirs at ginger's core instead, resulting in a totally different game (but.... probably one in which i died much sooner and more ineffectually )

3. great scientist bulb of scimeth. subtle point but this was DISASTROUS, for a 3t bio acceleration i delayed our GA by.... 20 turns.... which trapped us in mercantilism that whole time instead of enviro/reps. at the time i thought this was bad because of the potential commerce loss, which is fair enough. but that's not the real reason! the real reason is that mercs locked us out of foreign corporation spread which as zulus is a gigantic deal. i should have starting spreading mininc around literally as soon as it was founded, it was always going to be the only way for us to catch up on production, so twenty turns of delay was completely disastrous and was something i really didn't grasp until well into the industrialization period

4. taking so long to get to mercs in the first place! there is no earthly reason why i should not have revolted to it with our second GA, the one that saw us end in slavery whipping all the way down into cuirs. we were in a close race to see if we could get miltrad before the GA ends, of course, which is an earthly reason, but i could have delayed like 3 turns to squeeze in banking research and saved myself a huge amount of depth on the tech hole we ultimately fell into

5. super SUPER late infra - i build most of my libraries and PRO markets like, right before factories, but the really inexcusable one was the FORGES which were crazy late! i couldn't have built them instead of knights during the second GA before whipping it all down into cuirs? they would have paid for themselves almost immediately if i had done so, most cities whipped out more than 480 hammers worth of cuirs, especially the big ones that, for the most part, still did not have forges! not that there ever seemed to be a GOOD time to build infra with all the continuous fighting we did after turn 160 or so, but the answer is that at some point you really must turn down an opportunity to do something you would otherwise like to do, or even that seems otherwise strategically mandatory, in favor of building all your basic multiplier infra. never thought i'd lose a game due to NOT ENOUGH builderitis

6. maybe deciding i had to whip it all down into cuirs in the first place to have a path?? i badly underestimated the impact of replaceable parts and printing press here and delayed them way too long in so doing.... i see ginger speculated in their thread that i might have beaten them to rifles had i just kept our pop intact and researched normally, and that might be true.... it would have left greenline a sitting duck to obliteration by ginger's cav stack but then we'd have much to gain from the resulting anti-ginger coalition with mjmd.... anyways whipping down was an ok choice i guess but maybe not the best one, and certainly not the only one with any play like i thought at the time

7. following the vague logic that a sufficiently deep tech hole could be clawed out of enough to reach relevancy with enough surplus land. i mean this was kinda true, but on such a long timescale that it proved not to be a winning move. i didn't quite grasp ahead of time the compounding effect of being behind on military tech forcing diversions to stuff like rifles before biology and cannons before factories, such that we didn't have the space to multiply the econ techs ginger got ages ago by our greater land area until way way too late.

8. diplo positioning in the ultra-lategame. not joining the 3v1 quickly enough caused nauf to peace out 2t ahead of my estimated india attack timing, which ultimately led to concession, and even after that i probably should have just attacked nauf anyways and tried my best instead of warpeacing india lol. but by then i guess i was pretty tilted and already not in the greatest position long-term (obviously)

9. oh yeah bulbing math was wrong too i think but it was so long ago that i don't really remember what the alternatives were at the time.... but frankly even the academy plan i originally pitched would have worked way better IMO. in general this was, um.... really not the map for excessive bulbing and i think given the circumstances even 2 probably qualifies as "excessive"

10 (i actually got to 10?). spreading judaism around instead of self-founded taoism! not that i was ever going to shrine it (though perhaps i could have if not for the math bulb.....), but how much gold did this give mjmd on a silver platter in exchange for a handful of marginal promos on my greenline attack stack? sheesh, i really was in "game is about to end, no need thinking beyond the literal most immediate priorities" mode at that point and looking back i sort of struggle to comprehend why?? i mean the ginger snowball was dire but surely not THAT dire....

11. OH RIGHT not trying the impi + chariot rush vs the ottos on t55! man would THAT have made for a different game (although i'm guessing i learned more by playing it straight, and it seems evident to me that the picks worked out fine even though i ultimately passed on the rush possibility when it presented itself)

12. oh duh, obviously "not enough cats for aksum, and therefore not enough time to meaningfully 2v1 ginger with dreylin" should um probably make the list??? if not top it????

2 things that i stubbornly still think were not mistakes, but which i welcome others to dispute me on:

1. 4-worker opening

2. chichen itza

[Tarkeel]

#1: Something about armchair generals discusssing strategy while real ones discuss logistics.

#2: One of the good/bad things of AI-diplo is that everything has to be interpreted. I see you have adopted Mjmd's take that fish/fish is a 10 turn NAP, that interpretation is *not* universal.

#3/4: Mercantilism is very powerful, but also comes with some serious liabilities re: corps.

#5: Building the right infrastructure at the right time is *hard*, but also part of the power of INDustrious. Being able to 2-whip forges makes them something you build everywhere as soon as you get MC.

#7: I feel this one badly; this was our fate in PB66 as well. Being slightly behind on tech made us get weapon-techs to defend ourselves instead of focusing on the deeper techs that could give us an advantage

#12: I keep saying that catapults are the most overpowered unit available; it's very very hard to build too many of them.

I think you overdid the worker opening, and would probably have been better positioned with slightly tighter worker planning and an earlier settler. It was very interesting to watch though!

[civac2]

2. chichen itza

Making Chichen Itza is reasonable. Investing so much into it is not. You could have slowbuilt it in some decent city and gotten it regardless because noone else wants it.

There was probably an opening to rush us. Our copper position was a crime. Wtf at whoever made the map. 

Edit: Ginger was convinced that your early micro was terrible with cities having important resources second ring among other issues. ("This Ginger said" thing is very useful.)

[williams482]

i am still not sure i believe being pissed off it likely to factor into ginger's decision making at all 

Unfairly out of context, but this quote aged quite poorly.

[ljubljana]

Edit: Ginger was convinced that your early micro was terrible with cities having important resources second ring among other issues. ("This Ginger said" thing is very useful.)

yeah.... the main culprit there was mitakeumi i think, our second city that had 2 food second-ring and only a horse and cow (stolen from the capital) that it could work upon founding



as i recall my rationale for this was something along the lines of "i want to get every good tile online and worked as quickly as possible with the fewest number of settlers possible" - we could have settled with one of cow or wheat first-ring but that meant wasting the other until we could spare another settler for what would otherwise be a pretty terrible filler spot other than exactly the wheat or cow tile. at the time the borders popped we still needed settlers for the floodplains/gold spot in the south, 2 fish on the north coast, a pig in the west that we kinda meanly pinkdotted away from GT.... so at some point shorly after this shot, the mitakeumi spot did come out ahead of the alternatives in terms of total number of resource tiles worked. i never calculated exactly how many yields we lost in the meantime waiting on the monument + border pop though, so i'm not sure how confidently i can claim that it was the actually right decision

Unfairly out of context, but this quote aged quite poorly.

LOLLLL yeppp when was that from again? yeahh not exactly my best moment, but uh, lesson learned i guess

[Tarkeel]

yeah.... the main culprit there was mitakeumi i think, our second city that had 2 food second-ring and only a horse and cow (stolen from the capital) that it could work upon founding

To be fair, this was a start that was hard to dot-map, but I think I'd have sucked up the river penalty and settled on the plainshill N of the city.

Unfairly out of context, but this quote aged quite poorly.

LOLLLL yeppp when was that from again? yeahh not exactly my best moment, but uh, lesson learned i guess

One thing I learned way too recently: you can click the green arrow in the quote to jump directly to the post it's from.

[ljubljana]

#2: One of the good/bad things of AI-diplo is that everything has to be interpreted. I see you have adopted Mjmd's take that fish/fish is a 10 turn NAP, that interpretation is *not* universal.

wait, is it NOT?? who's out here sending fishes to each other while intending to attack inside of 10 turns? or do you just mean that for some it is considered a vaguer "no hostile intentions" kind of thing that includes, but is not limited to, a promise of 10t of peace?

for the purposes of creating a public record, my own diplo conventions this game were:

1. fish/fish with a gold amount attached indicated a NAP for that many turns, and no gold indicated a 10t duration. it represented no commitments beyond that (i did declare war or contemplate it a few times in the 15ish-turn range after such a deal) but i would have conceded the game before attacking someone within the stated duration of such a deal (assuming it was mirrored ofc)

2. lux and bonus resources in combination with one another were a reference to a specific city owned by a third party

3. strategics usually carried some kind of significance attached to what the strategic enables. copper/copper meant a nonspecific "i will provide/am asking for military aid", iron + horse referred to knights, iron + coal meant rails. a few times i sent folks iron + horse + a gold amount + a city, which was a warning that a specific number of knights were nearby that city. in the lategame i also sent uranium in exchange for a resource combination, which indicated a request to, um, apply uranium to a specific enemy city  and once or twice i offered one-sided iron + horse on my side in exchange for someone else's border cities to threaten an invasion (i think i sent this to greenline, and attentive readers will note that when it was ignored, i did indeed follow up shortly thereafter by actually invading )

4. attaching a gold amount to a peace deal was an attempt to indicate duration of the peace. i may not try to do this again, seeing as it is seems to be nonstandard, but future opponents are welcome to try it and this will be my first interpretation

5. attaching one or more of my/your cities, but fewer then all of your cities, typically meant just to please look at/think about this city in conjunction with the rest of the deal. i once used this to try to tell civac where mjmd's bombers were based, for instance, and also used it to tell mjmd to be wary of a naval attack from civac (offering to trade all my coastal cities for all of their coastal cities, in conjunction with horse + gold to indicate that i believed some number of seaborne cavs were on their way over)

6. attaching ALL of your cities was a rider to make sure the deal was not accepted, and carried no other meaning

[ljubljana]

To be fair, this was a start that was hard to dot-map, but I think I'd have sucked up the river penalty and settled on the plainshill N of the city.

right, another thing i was disproportionately obsessed with in the early-game was settling such that all my cities would eventually be levee-eligible where possible. in my defense though, that did actually matter! i think the difference between my 12ish domestic levee cities and dreylin's, i think, one or two was a pretty significant factor in our lategame MFG turnaround (at least vis a vis the ottomans), especially given that we ended up getting steam power (on the way to rails) just ages and ages before progressing on to assembly line. not that it would have justified more significant sacrifices, but in retrospect i think it proved to be non-insane as a tiebreaker between otherwise close-call spots like mitakeumi and the 1N hill