Teach me!

[vondrack]

To be honest, I am not exactly keen to spend my third night in a row playing CIV... and we're heading there. Even if proviisori popped up shortly and played his turn, cutting a little bit off of 1844AD, it would still be a late night show for me and Nolan again.

As Nolan will be unable to play her turns this weekend (having an art show) and we've got a break scheduled starting tomorrow anyway, I'd appreciate if Alex could bring the game down perhaps even before 1844AD rolls into 1846AD - to be resumed once he comes back (Nov 25/26, right?).

[condor223]

Yes please, the time since the pause has given our turns very bad scheduling. Thanks.

[alexman]

Game stopped with 3 hours left on the timer.
Will start it up again on Nov 25

[vondrack]

Thanks.

[Beta]

Hello folks. I am back and waiting for the 25th like everyone else.

A big thanks to proviisori for looking after mother Russia while I was away for a couple of weeks, and keeping her safe from Blake Woolrich of Celtia.

btw Blake - this would be a good time for me to say that regardless of how this game turns out, congrats on a wonderfully played game.

Now, enough kissy-faced stuff ... lock and load ....

[proviisori]

It was my pleasure.

I took the liberty of naming one of your newly built units as 'Proviisori'

[alexman]

Sorry, I did not get to work tonight as I had planned, so the game will be up in about 8 hours.

[Beta]

I saw that provi.

I ended the last turn. New turn is up. Over to Blake and his Celtic masses.

[proviisori]

Originally posted by Beta
I saw that provi.

I ended the last turn. New turn is up. Over to Blake and his Celtic masses.

I hope it will do some heroic things in the future.

...and no, it is not a worker.

[Blake]

Celtia Disarms, Dons Robes.

Message to Celtia from the Bastion of Hope

Attention people of Celtia.

As you are aware, the enemies of Celtia are finally making a move, bringing their armies into territory where we can righteously destroy them.

In the year 3600BC a wise man called the Buddha founded a philosophy of peace, this has prospered within the borders of Celtia.

It has always been difficult to reconcile Celtia's wars of aggression with our religion of peace, but we have taken solace in the fact that all people who live under the banner of Celtia - be they Celts, Carthaginians, vikings - even many of the Mongols, have truly prospered under our enlightened guidance.

But there is a critical difference. Those wars, were relatively bloodless. The armies which faced us, saw the slendour of our civilization and their soldiers practically surrendered. The Mali army even deserted their post and entered Celtic territory to proactively surrender.

But this coming war, is to be anything but bloodless. A thousand times as many will die, the world will be littered with the corpses of men and women and the wreckages of their machines. Even more deadly weapons are on the horizon. This war will reduce the world to smoking ruins and leave a billion of our children dead.

Celts, this is what you must do. Lay down your weapons. Do not kill even a single intruding enemy soldier. Do not fear, even if they should conquer all of Celtia, far fewer will die than would in world war and our ways will always endure.

Across Celtia, there is a tremendous clatter as the soldiers drop their guns and the tanks and copters are disabled. Only a few Celts, the mightiest warriors of the raging military arm of Celtia, refuse to lower their weapons.

[Blake]

OOC:

Yes, I have deleted nearly every Celtic unit.

Why I have decided to stop playing:

It's mainly because I can't justify the time expenditure. I personally don't mind playing just 30 minutes a day or so, but even if you guys WANT to play for much longer, I don't want you to :P. Tough cookies.

It's also true that I don't actually play computer games anymore, I haven't for quite a while. This one just goes so long. I don't play games anymore because I really don't care for winning.

Also the game isn't actually that much fun. Modern warfare is very lame because it's all about those 12 move gunships, they kill everything. I wasn't fazed at all by the tech disparity, smack a stack with some Barrage III artillery and Combat III gunships will eat it alive, doesn't matter what it is.

Truthfully, I also like diplomacy. It's very boring not having anyone to talk to.


The Game's Outcome:

If it wasn't obvious, the reason I wasn't fighting back was reasons of war-weariness. It's simply impossible to wage a "grinder" style war, the only way to win is to wait for the enemy to expose enough of their force then quickly rush in and sweep it all up with gunships, then take the offense, with much less military in their territory to deal with (it's fighting in other peoples territory which sucks of course).


I did of course have a plan to win, I'm not sure if it would have worked or not, these things are always contigent on enemies making some mistakes. By this stage, the game is almost decided. The game is generally determined by who players side with - that makes the largest difference. So from this point on, no large changes are going to happen. Either a plan will work or it wont, it's almost deterministic. That's boring.

Best Plan:
Win by space.

Engaging in a space race would have been very interesting. The main interesting part, is spies. If your objective became stopping me winning by space, all you would've needed to do is arrange for about 20 spies to flood my territory. Obviously 4 spies can't compete with 20 spies when it comes to sabotaging stuff (Fortunately there were Aluminum and Uranium deposits I could found cities on to protect from spies).

I would of course done some tricksie things, like configuring multiple cities to be able to power out a SS part very quickly and then keep shifting around where I'm building the critical pieces. If I had 4 such cities and put one of my spies in each, I may have got lucky and finished the SS, especially since it would take quite a while for the spies to get to my deepest cities.

True comittment to a SS race would probably mean fighting a losing war but with nearly every city still available for pumping out gunships, it's a war I would have lost very, very slowly. The question for the other players then, is whether to race me into space, or just try to destroy me. Trying to destroy me would be foolhardy, if I want you to, you're allowed to keep cities, but you can only inch forward very slowly, and I could easily pack 2-3000 beakers a turn and had a good head start on Fusion. The spy-stalling game could have gone for a long time, but EVENTUALLY I'd get lucky and finish the last part I need to launch.
It may have been more reliable to have Alexman spacerace me. That I would think should introduce a moral delima for at least one player, who would have to completely abandon his own ambitions for victory and instead implicitly support another players victory - instead of trying to ward off another's victory. Would the big alliance have broken down? I don't know.

If the alliance did break down because people were unwilling to implicitly support another's victory, I would've won for sure. Mass spies would be the only things which could have slowed my launch enough.


Win by Domination:

This would have been a lot more tricky and iffy. Offensive wars are plain difficult. This would have been contingent on waiting for enough units to expose themselves (meaning be in territory which is culturally celtic), then sweep forward with lots of workers and ~100 gunships and scourge them from the planet. I'd also need to be able to wipe out some bomber stacks in such a surge. Note that through the miracle of GG's, I could have got my 3 nifty Commando Cavalry up to 15 moves on enemy railroad, that would allow them to move forward 7 spaces and then retreat 7 spaces. That's further than a gunship can go! So those commandos, especially once promoted with +1 movement by a GG, would have been an invaluable trump card.

The most compelling reason NOT to engage in this strategy: TIME! It takes so much real-time long to wage war.


Win by Cheating:

As you know, the game has been good mannered and I've always been honest. At any time I could've decided to cash in that honesty and cheat. One example would be this.
I build the Manhattan project and announce that Celtia will use nukes only to defend her borders, a credible claim given that nukes are the only effective way to destroy ship stacks. I proceed to do just that, wiping out the pesky colony sitting offshore from BoH and I then sit on my rapidly growing nuclear stockpile.
The moment I complete SDI (and I'd do that the fastest, having the best cities), I nuke the living daylights out of anything I can. While some nukes would come back, they'd have to face my SDI. Furthermore anyone who is slow getting their SDI up would continued to be nuked. With a good nuclear first strike I could have taken out a lot of units and destroyed some good cities, paving the way for a domination victory.

This was obviously unacceptable to me, since I don't actually build trust just to expend it when convenient.

I could of course have used Nukes without cheating, but the way nukes are implemented in CIV is lame, there's no benefit to whoever actually gets them first. Of course I was going to build Manhattan anyway, just to force everyone to invest in SDI and waste more hammers than I need to.


The Conclusion of the game:

I honestly don't care. You can call it a draw. You can say that Alexman wins. You can break the alliance and fight it out, with or without assimilating Celtia's abandoned cities. You can even reload the game from last turn and get a substitute player to fight it out as Celtia (but I'd rather you not!).

Thanks sincerely for the game,
Blake.

[Blake]

The statistics page from right before I went on a joyous deleting spree:



It would have been nice to go up to a nice round number of 100 Gunships, and train some Buddhist monks, but I was lazy .

A not so random collection of cool units :P. Most of those are still alive on the map.



















Note that, in the spirit of the "Teach Alexman" game, I do plan to do some strategy writeups on the game. Now I've stopped playing, I can do that . Yay .

[Wittlich]

Well, I for one have to say:

Congrats Blake to a game that you clearly won!

Of course, with myself having only having 3 cities to my name and a vessel of Alexman...I won't even have been a speed-bump for you Blake if I was located close to your borders!

[Beta]

I am not sure what to say, Blake. A number of people have invested time in playing the game to this point, because it was fun and challenging. I for one, am sorry to see this outcome.

I said my congrats earlier - and I will say 'congrats' again - as I was and am duly impressed by your ability to do battle with 5 civilizations. Wished the fun and the challenge for you had been sufficient to keep you playing.

The remaining players will have to give some thought as to where we go from here - if anywhere.

One option which comes to mind is to reload to a previous turn - come up with a new player for one half of Celtia, gift the other half to Witt, declare 10 turns of universal peace - and go from there. I'm afraid this may be anti-climatic after the Great Celtic War.

So - again -

[Blake]

Simple. The game is not called "Win" .

I do not play to win. I play to play well. My objective throughout most of the game, was to play so well, that everyone would be forced to declare war on me.

I succeeded. As a bonus I got several players to compromise their principles.

Regardless, with me in control, there will never be a "Great War", there would be a slow grind-fest :P. Celtia's armies would be as slippery as an eel.

Modern age warfare, is, in a word, horrible. First you need to scan everything at least 10 plots deep to check what cities are threatened, you need to check bombing patterns and see what is in range of enemy bombers. And then there's a whole lot of general bullsh*t, like how the move order determines what players can do. Players who move first, can bomb invading armies, can set fighters to intercept after using/moving them last turn. Players who move last can have their fighters both intercept and bomb, but can't set moved fighters to intercept. They can rebuild/rerush anything which was sabotaged (why do you think I whine so much about spies being an unfun prospect). If a city is trading hands, they always end the turn with the city in their hands, which gives their empire the benefit of any wonders. None of that is really an issue in the earlier game.

I REALLY wanted to either win or lose before it came down to modern age warfare, but no-one would have it.

Ultimately what I think, is that win or lose, it would be bitter.

If you'd beat me, I'd hope you'd feel ashamed of the "victory" :P.
And if I actually won, hahahah! But I'd have been pissed off that you'd made me work so hard after I'd clearly won already.


I may actually have stuck it out if you'd all played as individual players rather than a legion. I'm quite earnest when I say I can't stand the idea of people wasting that kind of time and energy on a game. But people do what they feel compelled to do and that's that.

Look at it this way; I was not prepared to spend more than about 30-40 minutes a day playing. That to me, seems kind of insulting, to put such little effort in when other players as spending around 8-10 hours cumulative against me.


If you want to reload the last turn, hand England to the AI and give Witt control of Celtia and slug it out, then feel free . You probably wouldn't be compelled to put such effort in when it's not me driving Celtia's armies.


Don't get me wrong. I do take obligations very seriously, but I've changed since we started this game like a year ago. I can not derive any satisfaction at all from playing such a game anymore. It's not as if playing it made me miserable, but even were I to continue to play, I'd just be "Going through the motions" - again, I consider it insulting to play in such a way.


Anyway, I'm very happy with how the game went.

I killed Carthage (with a little help from Alexman and Gyathaar, they traded me CS and Machinery) and no-one seemed to notice.

Then I wiped out the Vikings with some shameless help from Vondrack (he forwarded me Military Tradition ROFL).

Then I annihilated Mongolia WHILE being pressed by Alexman, Nolan and Vondrack.

Once everyone had declared war on me, I proceeded to assimilate Mali for good measure.

It's not like I feel any need to prove myself, LOL.


Sadly, the game was going to go out with a whimper. It was going to be anticlimactic regardless. Either a pitiful launch, plagued by spies, after such glorious wars - that would have been a sad ending. Or maybe even more pitiful, Celtia very slowly dying, with her armies slippery as eels and refusing to get pinned down, just fighting a permanent losing battle while spies wreck havoc. With the Bastion relocated to Carthage and a good 20 tiles deep of pure Celtic territory in all directions, endless war with no war-weariness for me.

Or worst of all, a domination victory, which would have taken like 2 hours a day for me to play and by employing nukes forcing everyone to split up their stacks to a ludicrous extent making it downright painful to micro.

Let me spell something out:
I do NOT like playing that hard. It is very boring to move around so many units and do so much micro, every single day for day after day after day after day... what's more there are LEGITIMATELY better things I can do with my time.

The war would have gone until February :P.

If you want to reload last turn and do something with Celtia, like giving Witt control of it and giving England to the AI and just slugging it out however you darn well please, then feel free. I'll give the password, hell, I'll just give it out right now:
"So long and thanks for all the ____"
(fill in the gap)

Yeah yeah not so secure but it's the password I used all game :P.