Lizzy's rise to greatness

[Hercules]

On that last point. Is there any update on CFC progress in the war or their reaction to us taking the brunt of Aztec attacks.

[MJW]

MZ said that he had good relationship with CFC's diplomat so I guess the answer would be yes. You can forward the information if you want to be sure though. Just PM some active CFC-player in thread.

[mzprox]

Yeswe are talking frequently. Andcfc is doing their part. They are caotous, but fighting well.

[MJW]

This might be a good time to prod CivPlayers...

Edit: Before I forget--this game is a good illustration why RB banned diplo very quickly in their games after banning tech trading. You get teams that are reasonably strong but cannot win because they cannot keep up anymore. When that happens this becomes a Kingmaker situation game. It's much worse even than Diplomacy because their can only be one winner in this game and you cannot draw with a single "unit" in this game. This game becomes about trolling (ie when WPC through away their cities), vassalization and pushing buttons to get people on your side. This doesn't happen with tech trading because you can catch up by getting someone to gift tech to you. The first diplo game CivPlayers and RB declared war on everyone else and crippled them. After that those teams had the easy path of fighting RB and CivPlayers to the death so we didn't get this drama.

[Hercules]

Is it likely that civplayers, try out different strategies/tactics, battle order in an alternative ISDG world. A bit like what mzprox does. But of course in game the world is more random.

[MJW]

I think it's time to prod now.

I think when one side starts winning enough that they can eat a semi double-move (One side gets an extra production but not an extra move.) we should do that. Our sanity is more important than a little fairness.

[MJW]

Hmm... HRE logged-in and whipped three cities after ending their turn.

[MJW]

I don't think this will get better. If I were playing I would send the following ultimatum to CivPlayers.

1. Get a replacement player. or
2. Kill off Maya (and maybe HRE) and agree to a draw.

Ending the game through an agreement is not possible as Maya won't vote for suicide and CFC won't accept a five-way draw with Maya.

A third option would be to do nothing and allowing the game to die. Or bringing in the mod and allow them to inevitably go NMR.

[mzprox]

I'll try to talk to cfc and cp and find a solution.

[MJW]

Well my plan wouldn't work anyway because CivPlayers would have to get a sub anyway. And if you allow a sub you might as well just play on. If you check the CFC thread it looks like MZ's option 3 will win.

In my opinion replacement players are BS so the game really ended when Maya's turn-player got replaced. Now in diplomacy, when someone quits, the game ends in a draw for all remaining players unless an unanimous agreement is reached. Just dropping in a replacement-player just doesn't work as that's likely to screw over at least one team. A single unit can get a draw in a game of diplomacy but that isn't the case in Civ so you would have to make an arbitrary cut-off to when you don't get to share in the draw. Everyone was clearly above that cutoff expect HRE (maya forfeited when their civ got hijacked) and I'm not good enough at Civ4 to know if HRE stood a chance and there is not much difference between a three-way and a four-way draw anyway. So if the game were to end right now I would consider it a 3 and a half way draw where HRE gets a half-a-draw. The fact that Civplayers stopped submitting orders (even if was because they were losing and didn't want to play anymore) doesn't matter because the game was over before then.

Edit: If this game ends now, can you post the save from the final position MZ?

[mzprox]

I think only the admin has the game saves

[MJW]

Okay then,

So when this game is "officially" over I request you ask for the game save. It would be interesting to see exactly how we are doing.

[MJW]

Because I've got some time at work I will summarize this game.

Spanish Apolyton got dogpilled and killed. Civforum was winning the war against WPC until they got sucked-punched by RB (implicit NAP=lol) and got crushed easily. This, along with RB being a better team, allowed them to get a ridiculous lead. Then RB got dogpilled and died and this was no accident:

1. They were in the center not at the edge of the board which allowed them to be easily be attacked. Also they didn't have their bad start in the first game were it delayed the crisis to when people were dropping out of the game and not playing their best. They also had Civplayers to distract other teams unlike here.
2. CFC was willing to eat it and whip their civ into the ground. Now usually players who do this are not good enough at the game to make that count and make mistakes that allow you to beat them anyway (splitting stacks) even though you shouldn't. However, they got the great mackoti to back them up so they had the skill. It wouldn't surprise me if whipping their civ into the ground was the only decision that was done that mackoti didn't agree with.
3. RB researching non-military techs and making that tactical blunder that allowed Civplayer's cavalry raid to win. At this point they were a free city-dispenser. Not making those errors would allow them to live longer and perhaps cracks in the alliance would form and they could try to help it along by spinning their wheels in diplomacy.
4. Dogpiles are hard to make it work because when a civ collapses everyone gets about the same reward. This is because you can take only so many cities a turn and they have no units anywhere anyway. The defenders 2x movement bonus means you have to kill everything before you make real progress. In this case it was easy because people didn't like RB (elitism and sucker-punching inca) and CFC eating it and therefore setting a high-standard for others to contribute. The central location again didn't help because they had many more plausible attackers (attackers that don't boarder you are not plausible because they cannot get rewarded by capturing cities).

After RB died there were effectively five teams. WPC was still around but they were weak and got killed by maya. They tried to throw their cities to everyone else (we declined) which was perfectly rational because they couldn't win. Then CFC attacked maya. At that point maya realized they couldn't win and vassalized to Civplayers which was the best way to make CFC pay.

At this point Civplayers had an important choice. They could kill maya with CFC or accept maya's offer. They accepted maya's offer which would assure an Apolyton+CFC counter-alliance to form otherwise (with HRE being neutral) Civplayers would win in a cakewalk. Civplayers trick of burning Aurora to the ground was not enough to turn the tide (they were willing to resign to us). I feel they not accepting responsibility for this...

If the game were to continue CFC+Apolyton would probably win. Apolyton had a lead caused by CFC whipping their civ into the ground earlier (the reason why good players don't do that) but that's not clear anymore because Aurora got burned to the ground. However, with mackoti gone, I think CFC would be outplayed. However, that is not important. At some point winning the game could no longer be a real goal for Maya+Aztec and all that they could do is chose who wins by defending against one team but not the other. If they defend against us CFC wins. If they defend against CFC we win unless CFC gets HRE on their side in which case CFC probably wins.

Even though this doesn't matter because the game ended before this happened and Civplayers will deny this: I'm sure they would find time to play if they think they were winning this war.

Lastly, this game is more illustrative of what happens with no tech-trading and full diplo than the first game where Civplayers and RB were able to take on everyone and win. It shows that civs that cannot win anymore will set other objectives and use their civ as a tool and that having your civ being slowly burned to the ground is very painful to play. Even RB mailed it in when they started losing.

[MJW]

I suggest you say something like "if nothing happens by 24th* we will consider this game to be over and open our forums"

*I choose this because it's a week from the 17th.

For those just joining the thread--the main problem in ending this game, even though all the teams wanted it, was that CFC couldn't accept a draw with Maya and Maya won't vote for suicide. So you would have to use my gimmick where everyone kills maya (Civplayers would still be able to play because they could spend much less time killing Maya), abandon the game or go 25 more turns (not possible in the end).

Caledorn is active at RB so he's not posting on purpose.

There's a 95%+ chance nothing will happen unless someone pushes like crazy for a sub for civplayers. So people should post their final thoughts about this game now.

I don't consider myself a real team member for joining so late but it was fun anyway. I enjoyed the drama and coming up with my gimmick. I also liked how this game is a mirror of the first demo-game that RB played in.

[Hercules]

Thanks for your review and summary to date.

Re current situation. Just adhere to Caledorn's solution. No undue pausing. 2 -3 days is ok, as the turns can be complicated and take time. But after that Caledorn should give a days notice if necessary and then let the game continue. If there is no player available or no indication of one being available within a set period, so be it.

Remember what Ozzy wrote in the ISDG thread. Not playing or having no player available reflects on the team strength.