After action report "The Great Bobian War"

[Panzer32]

btw, thanks to Aggie for the excellent screenshots from when he was emperor. BTW, if any GoW member thinks we shouldn't be giving this away please tell me in the PF and I'll take them off... but I don't think it should be too much of a problem. I imagine it will help greatly outside observers to see what was going on

[Master Zen]

No way Panzer, those were excellent screenshots which I'm happy you shared

As for me and UnO, yes it would be hard to find such a pair on the same team. However, this is not saying that different people from different teams cannot work together. And the best example of this is the ISDG, where I have shared most diplomatic duty with three RPers: Togas, WhiteBandit and Arnelos. And believe it or not, this motley crew of warmongers and roleplayers has hardly disagreed during the past year of this game. Kudos to you all.

-MZ

[Aeson]

This is rather interesting and I've heard it from practically every GS and RP member, that we've practically handed out victory to Lego. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

I was in favor of fighting to keep Bob from being a 2 civ continent because I truely believed that if that happened, everyone else was playing for second place. One of the Bob civs would win, unless both screwed up.

The fact is that ND gave GoW Iron for Riders to cross their territory... Which to me says ND and GoW are in some sort of agreement about finishing everyone else off, then deciding the game between themselves. No other way I would ever give my Chinese neighbor Iron at that juncture... unless it was for Horses perhaps.

This is why Lego's siding with ND and GoW comes as such a suprise. I thought they were in much the same boat as GS. Keep Bob balanced with at least 3 civs present, or lose. Sure they could wait till they saw a side losing, thanks to GS making it somewhat even, but eventually they needed to side against the winners (before it became too lopsided).

8) And yes... at a certain moment, it became obvious that GoW/ND were clearly winning and RP/GS had very little to no hope of turning the tide (with no saltpeter).

It was pretty clear GS would miss out on some future resources because of tile distribution. Saltpeter and Oil seemed like the most likely for GS to get, because of the Deserts and Plains.

We certainly didn't have any friends that we would count on trading us a military resource, and that was one of the overwhelming factors on needing to get to some sort of tile parity.

(oh and Trip didn't help much, gloating in the ISDG about how mighty and efficient GS was)

This is very sad, and wasn't unforseen at all. I'm not blaming Trip, because no one could be expected to keep quiet about what they saw for so long. A few times in chats and in GS' forum I picked up hints about things from comments made by Trip.

Giving someone involved in any meaningful way access to all the forums while the game was running was a very bad idea. A couple times I had to bite my tongue trying not to take advantage of what Trip hinted at either in chats or in our forum.

When GS accepted RP's alliance, accepted cities, and attempted to goad GoW into attacking, did anyone in the GS forum speak up and say that it possibly broke the GS-GoW NAP ?

I think one or two GS members voiced their opinion that it was breaking the NAP. I could see how it was breaking the NAP from a certain perspective, but the problem remained that the wording of the NAP was such that almost any action could be perceived that way.

In the GoW forum, we saw it as a blatant break of our NAP.
We could see, that within the Civ programming rules, a NAP was not broken because GS did not do the first attack. But this was one of the reasons for our claim that "you are treating us like AI".

The problem with the NAP was the wording, which allowed basically anything either team wanted to accomplish would qualify as breaking the NAP. GoW or GS could both be said to have broken the spirit of that agreement the moment it was signed. GoW wanted to sign that agreement to keep GS out of things on Bob (or at least on their side, temperarily on Bob), while that was adverse to GS' plans (take some of Bob), which certainly was adverse to GoW plans. It was a stupid phrase that hopefully no one will ever put in an agreement again.

That's why I felt nothing wrong with our use of the NAP in a purely technical application of not attacking GoW. To worry about honoring 'the spirit' of the agreement would have relegated both sides to impotence for the duration. I felt if GS invaded ND from the E, GoW would use the NAP to block the invasion, rendering it a death march. In such a case, roles would have been reversed, but not the blame... it would be on both sides. Just a matter of perspective.

There was a very hasty attempt at revoking the NAP completely before in-game hostilities broke out, so neither side, from any perspective, would have to deal with the claims of being a treaty breaker. The diplomatic hostilities between the teams was such that the wording of those attempts and rejections could all be seen as breaking the NAP anyways.

The moral is never trust "spirit of the agreement" when it isn't spelled out... cause both sides will spell it out after the fact in the manner that suits them best.

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by Arnelos

It did not take all that long, however, before the weight of evidence eventually had us convinced that Legoland was supporting Glory of War and ND. First, there was Master Zen. We spent enough time around him that we noticed the sea change in his attitude and his level of confidence about events that were unfolding. Over time, it became more and more apparent that MZ had some great coup he'd managed diplomatically that he could hardly contain himself from revealing. Given what else was going on, we already suspected what it was, which caused us to redouble our efforts to convince Legoland to switch sides.

Boy did I fool you again...

That "great coup" was not Lego. It was GS. We had successfully managed to get GS out of its reclusive shell and begin to have actually long-term discussions, we managed to do the unthinkable: get their map, and get a NAP from them which was all but against their original foreign policy.

Negotiations with Lego only began AFTER we saw that GS had in fact switched towards the RP camp. Of course, it was far easier since what we wanted from Lego was IN their interests, contrary to GS which was against them. Our pre-war relations with Lego were very good, but mostly limited to tech stuff, we hadn't really discussed the coming war with them since we knew from ND that Lego had hardly any offensive forces (that coming from the scare of ND's landing of a swordsman scout) and thus could not really threaten us. Plus, any Lego attempt to invade us would have given us ample warning due to the distance and due to my Castle of Evilâ„¢ at Zenophobia having a very nice lookout tower

Thus, we assumed that Lego would be responsive to our cause or at the very least strictly neutral, I was confidend that the odds of Lego turning against us was too negligible to even be considered.

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by Aeson
This is very sad, and wasn't unforseen at all. I'm not blaming Trip, because no one could be expected to keep quiet about what they saw for so long. A few times in chats and in GS' forum I picked up hints about things from comments made by Trip.

Perhaps the most memorable of his quotes:

"After watching Nathan in action in the GA against Vox... I became a man!"

-Trip

but I honestly don't blame him. It did not take an idiot to see GS's map, see the F11 screen and realize that there was a monstrous efficiency behind GS. Plus, given that most of your reputations preceded you we knew that going up against GS was akin to going up against Tiger Woods in a round of golf. Not impossible to beat, but forcing you to play an almost flawless game yourself.

[Aeson]

It's funny that only GS membership and 'right now' situation was seemingly taken into account by so many. It was very clear to me that GS would lose if it stayed on Estonia/Stormia.

[Darekill]

Concerning the Scouting incident on Legos...
It was part of clearing the relations to Legoland in the preperation of the war indeed.
I was pretty sure that our scout would be seen quickly. I made sure that it was a scout not some armed force however small that landed on Legoland.
I knew they wouldn't allow us any scouting on their Land so it was clear that he had to go soon.
All we wanted was to make sure that Legos stayed clearly off of Borconia which was achieved. This scouting mission payed off more than it's production costs indeed. Not by scouting but by giving the negotiations the push we wanted to have....

[Arnelos]

Originally posted by UnOrthOdOx
RP: WHY NO KNIGHTS?

Or rather, have any of your members changed their opinion on the value of Med Inf vs Knights?

It wasn't so much an issue of the value of med inf versus knights, it was that no-one, not even GS, would sell us Chivalry!

So the reason we had no knights at the start of the war was because EVERYONE refused to sell it to us. That's how we knew the hammer was coming, more than anything else.

[Arnelos]

Originally posted by Hot_Enamel
But also do not forget the "exploring warrior incident" GoW had with RP.
I know you were not around during that time, but from the GoW PoV, RP screwed us over after we thought we had a tech deal.

Actually, I *WAS* around for that, that's when I was still active on RP. As I've mentioned probably too many times out here, Togas was quite nearly deposed by RP Team for that diplomatic debacle. A number of people were upset at him for, in our opinions, messing that up by getting into that (as Unorothodox called it) pissing match with GhengisFarb.

In the end, Togas decided that he would not conduct negotiations with Glory of War personally any longer, adaMada would be our representative, and when the fact that Ninot had been plotting to overthrow Togas was revealed and we had a show trial of Ninot, people rallied back around Togas again.

Point is, I'd say that most of RP Team knew the stupid warrior incident was a huge mistake at the time it was made and said as much. Ninot was, as I recall, particularly harsh on the issue. He was also right.

[notyoueither]

re the GoW NAP. I did not regard us as breaking the NAP. The phrase 'take what you can get' was used in negotiations. It just so happened that the cards fell very favourably for us and we got a lot more than the people who said that, or even ourselves, ever expected we could.

re the battles, and the failure of GS. It falls on me, I am afraid. I mistook instructions, and even though I was uneasy about how things were stacked up, I left our forces split the turn that the settler/scout was exposed. When next we looked, half was missing.

The reason GoW may have been concerned that we knew where the SP was, was that that line of hills with a fortress on the Western end of it would have been the key to Southern Spain for us. Giving up that ground was the same as giving up the war in Spain.

[Arnelos]

Originally posted by Master Zen
Boy did I fool you again...

That "great coup" was not Lego. It was GS. We had successfully managed to get GS out of its reclusive shell and begin to have actually long-term discussions, we managed to do the unthinkable: get their map, and get a NAP from them which was all but against their original foreign policy.

Negotiations with Lego only began AFTER we saw that GS had in fact switched towards the RP camp. Of course, it was far easier since what we wanted from Lego was IN their interests, contrary to GS which was against them. Our pre-war relations with Lego were very good, but mostly limited to tech stuff, we hadn't really discussed the coming war with them since we knew from ND that Lego had hardly any offensive forces (that coming from the scare of ND's landing of a swordsman scout) and thus could not really threaten us. Plus, any Lego attempt to invade us would have given us ample warning due to the distance and due to my Castle of Evilâ„¢ at Zenophobia having a very nice lookout tower

Thus, we assumed that Lego would be responsive to our cause or at the very least strictly neutral, I was confidend that the odds of Lego turning against us was too negligible to even be considered.

I'm talking about later. The point where we noticed the sea change in your disposition was from the point where you were worried about GS (because GS was already allied to us and you had sacked Bilbao) to the point where SOMETHING went very very right for you. Since we figured you must have been worried about GS's entrance into the war, it was reasonable to conclude that you just might have found a way to feel more comfortable about your chances for countering GS. Of course, we had no idea for sure at THAT point what it could be, though Legoland was a very prominent theory that some immediately raised and defended and some of us were slow to accept. That was our first clue, one of many we willfully ignored for a while before fitting them together to figure out what we then suspected was really going on (and later confirmed).

FURTHER EDIT:

Over time, statements you made about Legoland and about their "neutrality" and their sitting out the war when we came to strongly believe otherwise were also seen with a good deal of suspicion. Perhaps it was simply that we ALREADY suspected Legoland's involvement and had growing bits of evidence from a multitude of sources suggesting that, but every time in #isdgfam you'd make a comment about Legoland building away not doing anything in the conflict, it came across with that "I know something you don't" vibe. Hell, you even told us, straight out, that there were things you WANTED us to be able to figure out really really badly, but you had to prevent yourself from telling us.

Thing is... by that point, we already thought we knew what it was.

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by Arnelos

I'm talking about later. The point where we noticed the sea change in your disposition was from the point where you were worried about GS (because GS was already allied to us and you had sacked Bilbao) to the point where SOMETHING went very very right for you. Since we figured you must have been worried about GS's entrance into the war, it was reasonable to conclude that you just might have found a way to feel more comfortable about your chances for countering GS. Of course, we had no idea for sure at THAT point what it could be, though Legoland was a very prominent theory that some immediately raised and defended an some of us were slow to accept. That was our first clue, one of many we willfully ignored for a while before fitting them together to figure out what we then suspected was really going on (and later confirmed).

Nope. At that time we had only begun to talk to Lego about joining our side and I believe their strongly-worded letter warning GS not to get too ambitious on bob was sent shortly after sacking Bilbao or shortly before (don't remember), but the fact is that we had no real guarantee of active Lego support until a few turns after when plans for a formal alliance began to be drawn up.

To be honest, I had no hopes of truly beating GS until the first major battle (Alamo East). Also, by then we had no official negotiations with RP so it rather surprises me that you sensed an "assertivness" on my part other than the not-to-be-taken-seriously trash talking that went on occasionally in the ISDG chat. Hell, even our attempt at getting you to backstab GS, which happened some time later was a desperate attempt at turning the tide, proving that we weren't really confident of winning until much later.

[Arnelos]

MZ, I edited my last post while you posted yours... don't know if that's a "crosspost" or what to call it.

[Arnelos]

I will say this, MZ. Your statements about Legoland were only things which, to be honest, seemed like pieces of the puzzle that confirmed what we already suspected. You did not, alone, provide evidence which convinced us of what Legoland was doing.

Talking to ONE person will rarely ever allow you to figure something like that out. But when you talk to a bunch of different people in a variety of contexts, all of which might know about something you want to find out about, your chances of piecing it all together and figuring out the "big picture" rise dramatically.

Once we got past our own unwillingness to BELEIVE that Legoland would even consent to help GoW and ND (we were in denial for a bit), it wasn't hard to piece it all together. Talking with you, talking with ZargonX, talking with Kloreep, talking with Sharpe, what little contact we had with vondrack, what contact we knew Gathering Storm had with Legoland. It just pieced together.

No one person, yourself or otherwise, could have realistically stopped anyone from figuring it out. The very nature of the PTWDG and that so many players from so many teams converse and chat with each other outside of the game in other settings makes it virtually impossible to hide or especially to keep your opponents from suspecting the types of things that might really be at work.

We certainly had enough experience on RP Team with teh same problem. Just as with every team in the PTWDG other than ND, we had problems keeping information secret because no matter what you did, all someone really had to do was talk to 10 different RP members and ask them the same question. Knowing all 10 of them pretty well and how they behave in similar situations, you can probably based purely on instinct figure out if they're all trying to hide something and you might even get lucky in determining what it is they're trying to hide.

There are some ways you can try to combat that, but really the only surefire way to kill it is to just not have your members socialize with the members of any other team... this, in my opinion, gave ND an advantage. They could actually keep nearly everything secret and leave only the imaginations of their opponents to figure out what they might really be up to.

[vondrack]

Just a few more comments and clarifications from me... and let me express my pleasure to see this thread so civil and informative. to everybody involved.

Originally posted by Arrian
GS never had any doubt about Lego's motivations, and hold no personal grudges or any silliness like that. You're out to win, as everyone is, and you gotta do what you gotta do.

I *do* think you guys overestimated us, perhaps by a large margin.

As I have admitted, we might have considered the threat bigger than it actually was... but from how the game developed up until the war, it was obvious that GS was to be the top contender builder-wise to us, given land enough. After acquiring your map, it was obvious that the lack of land was your Achilles' heel. The easiest way to limit your competitiveness was to deny (or help someone to deny) it to you.

Originally posted by Arnelos

Originally posted by vondrack
At this moment, I would like to note that we did not want to get involved in the destruction of RP, at least not directly.

Ah, but you did get involved in the destruction of RP.

[...]

So every time I tried to convince my team that we should try to repair relations with you guys and that getting you guys to side with us was the key to turning the tide and winning rather than losing in the long-run, the response I was continuously met with was "Why should we trust them? They betrayed us.", etc. Over time, the resentment on RP Team toward Legoland just grew and grew... by the midpoint of the war (not even when I switched to being blunt when talking with people from Legoland about what we knew was really going on) it would be safe to say that Legoland was probably despised even more than Glory of War...

The problem, as we saw it, was that Legoland's leadership seemed to have gone into tunnel-vision concerning the wisdom of allowing GoW and ND to take over all of Bob.

Well, I said we did not want to get involved in your destruction, not that we did not... we were aware of getting indirectly involved in your defeat. The problem was we could not have pursued the strategic goal set at that time (preventing GoW & ND from losing to you & GS) without doing so.

BTW, helping you against ND by accepting the cities or sending units to defend you would involve breaking a treaty, too. The only thing we were "legally" allowed to do was to stay neutral, maybe supporting you with gold & techs. And that was exactly what we considered before the GS got so heavily (from our PoV) involved.

While rejecting your city gift, we offered a gold for future lux deal. You did not accept it right away, asking for more gold... we internally discussed it and sort of felt you were in no position to haggle over it, so we did not really care to push it - just restated our initial offer and waited for you to get back to us. And then... almost a fortnight (just checked that) passed before we received another communication from you. A fortnight that saw GS getting your eastern cities one by one, sorta forcing us to react. When you finally got back to us, the "ball" was already rolling in the other direction. I believe this delay was crucial - no bonds beyond the unfortunate "NAP" treaty were created and we're left with almost no information about what was going on (other than GS telling us they were going to accept some of your cities and help you... which left much to be guessed about).

Originally posted by Arnelos
See, this is precisely the problem from the PoV of many on RP Team. Legoland had a non-aggression pact with Roleplay Team (in fact, technically that non-aggression pact is STILL active, I believe). Furthermore, Legoland and Roleplay Team in earlier years had had quite a cooperative relationship which only later broke down over (I believe) a poorly written treaty. When it became apparent that Legoland was the one supporting GoW/ND in their war to destroy RP, violating every bit of spirit left in the Legoland-RP treaty, that backstab was taken far more harshly by many on RP Team than the Glory of War one was. Afteralll, the entire team had expected Glory of War to behave that way.

Here is a very important thing to realize. Almost nothing of that treaty ever happened... that treaty was signed with the hope that our teams would cooperate for the mutual protection and success (that is a quotation from the treaty text). Alas, I could name a number of occasions where Lego felt RP did not treat us in this spirit (unfortunately that will have to wait for the end of the game, I think... some of it may still be classified). This actually lead us to consider the treaty pretty much void, eventually deciding to value our strategic goals and other treaties over this one.

Originally posted by Aeson
It's funny that only GS membership and 'right now' situation was seemingly taken into account by so many. It was very clear to me that GS would lose if it stayed on Estonia/Stormia.

Well, yes, it was clear to everybody, I think (after you distributed your map). But I believe it was quite logical that other teams tried to help their chances to win the game by denying GS more land.

As for your remark about Lego being in the same boat as GS... that was only half true. We had a rather good starting position long-term. Lots of land in the end, though the very location we started in was not stellar. We needed time to get us rolling, but knew that if we'd manage to colonize the whole of our landmass, we'd have a fairly good chance to stay competitive without having to expand overseas... unless, of course, another team grew significantly bigger than us elsewhere in the world.

Our involvement in The Great Bobian War was driven by exactly this in mind - to prevent someone from getting too big. GS needed more land to stay competitive in the long run. But even with land parity, GS would still be at a disadvantage vs. Lego, because of having to fight two or three wars to gain that land (while Lego might have stayed out of them completely). This reasoning made us believe you would rather attempt a domination victory through conquering Bob than trying to outbuild everyone else after getting even in land.

Originally posted by Darekill
Concerning the Scouting incident on Legos...
It was part of clearing the relations to Legoland in the preperation of the war indeed.
I was pretty sure that our scout would be seen quickly. I made sure that it was a scout not some armed force however small that landed on Legoland.
I knew they wouldn't allow us any scouting on their Land so it was clear that he had to go soon.
All we wanted was to make sure that Legos stayed clearly off of Borconia which was achieved. This scouting mission payed off more than it's production costs indeed. Not by scouting but by giving the negotiations the push we wanted to have....

As I said, if this was a plan rather than something that "simply happened", it was very, very smart of ND. We did exactly what ND needed, while feeling it's rather natural for both teams to do it (you would not bug us here, we would not bug you there). From our PoV, we sorta neutralized one of the teams that might consider invading us. RP was unlikely to invade, as they had room enough to expand on Bob, and as for GoW... with ND neutral, we believed we could handle a 1-on-1 war against an invader from overseas. Besides, we got something out of that treaty with ND that was also rather important for us.

And the very last thing... Arnelos is right stressing how difficult it is to keep something secret in this game. It is because of this that I was surprised to see GS surprised by our reaction to their landing on Eastern Bob. I quite honestly considered our two-wording "stern warning" (that's how we internally called it) only a formal thing allowing us to get involved in fighting without blatantly stabbing GS in their back (we had a lux deal preventing us from hitting their units without a warning). So I was quite surprised to see GS hesitate... and lose the crucial two or three turns we used to get LEF into the position (we did not have RoPs with GoW/ND for the most of the war, trying to make it difficult to guess we had units on Bob). It's quite true that our units there were not what decided the war... GoW would be able to defend there well. But the fact that our units showed up made it clear that we meant our words... so, while LEF was far from having any impact on the final outcome of the war, it might have affected how quickly it ended afterwards.