Confession of Unethical Play

[TheHumanHydra]

Hey, I posted this the other day in the PBEM 65 tech thread, but it doesn't look like anyone's seen it:

Hey, I feel I need to say that I received advice during this game from a lurker who said he suspected he might have seen the map. I am not sure at what point I was told this (whether I received further advice or not), and I can't find the message to check (I hope this doesn't mean that I deleted it purposefully). Now that I am thinking about it, I think I did receive further advice, the lurker saying he would restrict himself to non-map-dependant advice. If that is the case, I am sorry, and I am sorry that I did not announce this at the time.

Some of the advice I received was important to the game's outcome. I don't know that the most important advice benefitted from that map knowledge, but I shouldn't have received it in the first place. Please feel free to revise this game's entry in the spreadsheet of game results, and please accept again my apology.

[Alhazard]

hi THH i did read it but wasnt sure how to respond. its been such a while and it was my 1st civ4 MP game so I am kind of over it and I played horribly in retrospect and didnt feel like I deserved the win. Thank you for being honest.

[Krill]

...was it me?

[Fintourist]

Or me or OH? I remeber that we have chatted about your PBEM, but I can’t remember whether I have been spoiled at the time. In any case I can’t imagine that we would have given you any relevant spoiler info..

[TheHumanHydra]

I'm sorry, Fintourist; it was you, unless my memory is horribly mangled. I don't think you spoiled me on anything, and looking at it again, you didn't give me any advice after the point at which I had thought you told me you thought you might have seen the map during setup/mapmaking (this would have been March 9 or 10, 2015, between turns 70 and 72). (But it could have been earlier that you told me this.) But I had received some important advice - pick help (though the day before Commodore posted a map image), judgment on attacking a city, to keep the city, to build lighthouses (in chat), and a Golden Age plan that I followed (see posts 11, 116 and 121). I shouldn't have received that advice - for my part, especially if I already knew you had seen the map - and I should have told this to everyone in the tech thread.

Krill, I did receive advice from you that, while not spoiling anything, was too much, assuming you were spoiled (posts 122, 124, maybe 128, 156). I think we thought (I rationalized) that it was okay since it didn't give anything away, but our policy always was not to advise players, except sometimes when they were new, if we weren't dedlurking.

Alhazard, thanks; I appreciate your reply.

[Fintourist]

While it's honest of you to raise the issue THH, I think you are good and you should not discount your success at the PBEM at all. I'm pretty sure that I would remember if I had given you any spoiler info. The links you posted consist also for the most part of generic discussion and decisions not related to spoiler info / map knowledge (not sure if I even had any at the time).

I guess one can have the opinion that if lurker has seen any spoiler info one should not say anything, but I think it's okay to chat about "lighthouse vs. granary" or "will my 3 units beat his 2 units", etc. You surely received some help from me and OH in the chat, but I doubt that you received any info from me beyond what unspoiled dedlurker could provide.

[Krill]

Krill, I did receive advice from you that, while not spoiling anything, was too much, assuming you were spoiled (posts 122, 124, maybe 128, 156). I think we thought (I rationalized) that it was okay since it didn't give anything away, but our policy always was not to advise players, except sometimes when they were new, if we weren't dedlurking.

Alhazard, thanks; I appreciate your reply.

THH, thank you for linking the precise posts. I want to take this opportunity, if I may, to try and open a discussion about lurker conduct.

Below are the specific posts you mentioned:

That's essentially the same plan everyone should use for their first GA. It's the go-to tactic for building a mid game tech lead if you can get to Bureaucracy first (although usually doing it with the second GP is better, getting the early Academy with the first GS is often what gets a player into position to be the first to Bureaucracy).

Varies between different players and specific scenarios, but IIRC this game is base BtS where the extra early game production possible form slavery normally can open a window for an early library which is harder to get in RtR.

The most important thing to do is to come up with a plan to win which normally means figuring out how to kill someone (or preferably take all their land without fighting). Figure out how to do that and everything else is memorization. i.e. a good tech rate is only important if you need tech to accomplish a goal.

I think these three posts look significantly worse in isolation, for two reasons: The use of the word "Should", and missing the context that you asked a specific question which these posts answered.

I agree with Fintourist, that generic advice has be be considered acceptable within this community at this point. Granary v. Lighthouse is actually a quite advanced concept IMO, but these are the sort of issues that new players need to learn to understand quite quickly if they are taking part in MP games here. I am not interested in beating up newbies. I want new players to join, to play and learn about the basic decisions that aren't really decisions. This helps limit newbies from burning out, or being too intimidated to join what can be a pretty ruthless community. I would not have any issue if this advice was posted in a competitors thread in a game I was playing.

I do, however, have one specific issue with what I posted, which is language. I used the word "Should". I ought to have given more detail and said "Should have, until you think you have more pressing concerns". Using one of the first two great people for a golden age to revolt civics is the standard play. Newbies should be helped to understand why, and the point I made about "Building a mid game tech lead" is only part of the answer: the other parts are that it helps to keep up with a player who has built a tech lead, that it allows a quick swap into caste and pushes out most of the GPP for the next golden age, which gives flexibility to push to knights, or more generally in any arms race.

Newbies need to understand this, so they can make the complex decisions that do rely on spoiler knowledge. Those decisions are about when to vary from a standard plan, why a standard plan will not work, what the weaknesses are, and how to play alternative strategies. I failed to add these caveats into that post (for whatever reason). I think, though, that posts 124 and 128 go someway to moderating my views on this. I think, taken these three posts as a whole, I think this is acceptable.

You know, the more I think about this, the more I think this is actually an advantage for an attacker: if you can blitz through your opponent's mainland holdings quickly, it becomes equally difficult for your opponent to mount a counterattack as it would be for you to invade his home island. So you only have to take half your opponent's land to neutralize or at least greatly reduce them as a threat, instead of all of it (so long as you remain vigilant). Or am I smoke?

This is one of the interesting aspects of archipelago/island maps, and this is just another application of that.

Just remember culture rules for cities on different landmasses.

The thought has occurred to me ...

I think that's the win condition for this map.

I've added that I was replying to your quotes.

I think the last comment was both inappropriate, misses the point, ans is wrong.

I should not have replied to your comment. There was no reason to post it, and for that reason, I offer my apologies to the other players. I don't see how my comment had an effect on the game though.

The first bit though, I think was OK. It's a general comment about map types.

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Over all, you shouldn't denigrate the play in that game.

[TheHumanHydra]

Thanks, guys, for your kind and level-headed comments. I still think I should have acted differently, but I'm glad the situation isn't as serious as it seemed.

I agree it makes sense for teaching-style comments to be permissible; I guess it falls to the lurkers to see that each player is given an equitable amount of advice (taking reporting somewhat into account - can always prompt them on that).