The Hanging Gardens: public posting.

[UnOrthOdOx]

You were away for a while, that's what happened?

Oh, I'm still away. My other hobby has totally replaced Civ (and all gaming, really) with reguards to my free time for the time being. Were con not spamming my email with PM notifications I wouldn't be here now.

Death threats, eh?

I'm having a hard time imagining any of the mods making a real, actual, death threat that was not some kind of joke...

[sooooo]

Seems Rabbit have quit; but there is not really much more they can do, they are facing macemen with axmen - No matter who plays the save (AI or human), will be wiped out in 8 turns or so.

What happened to this claim, PAL?



Did those wabbits escape?

[mostly-harmless]

*giggle*
For each one you skin, three more pop up.

[RobWorham]

PAL

[Zoid]

What happened to this claim, PAL?



Did those wabbits escape?

I can just see PAL's giant banner of "Mission Accomplished" flapping forgotten in the wind...

[conmcb25]

Oh, I'm still away. My other hobby has totally replaced Civ (and all gaming, really) with reguards to my free time for the time being. Were con not spamming my email with PM notifications I wouldn't be here now.

Death threats, eh?

I'm having a hard time imagining any of the mods making a real, actual, death threat that was not some kind of joke...

I guess Ill have to spam your PM's more then

[sooooo]

You guys give up? Or are ya thirsty for more?

[sooooo]

With tony (from PAL), donovan (from banana) and darrell posting their review of the game (in the disputes thread), I thought I'd post mine since I was an early turnplayer from RB and followed the game all the way through. I'm posting it here because the other thread got clogged up with forum privacy issues.

PAL: To be honest, from very early on I was almost certain that PAL would win the game. Firstly they seemed to be well commanded and their diplomacy was to-the-point and relatively friendly. They did trick us into supplying horses to them, we naively believed their "barb problems" when in fact they went into war chariots to kill rabbits. That I thought was a big mistake from us (in hindsight of course; at the time I was for it) and I believed it would allow PAL to conquer their whole continent. Then they expanded very quickly and built the great lighthouse to supercharge their economy (all routes counted as intercontinental on this map). Their starting position was good in that they could make early contact with all the civs and could control the contact of banana and rabbits. It was supposed to be limited by having to defend 2 fronts, but banana's inaction and then getting a 50-turn nap with their replacement donovan allowed them to attack rabbits without worry. Then they build some nice wonders, lots of cottages and oxford university. In my opinion their mistakes were (a) allowing us and in fact helping us to make contact with banana, (b) not conquering rabbits with overwhelming force, allowing them to get bogged down and (c) defending their coastal capital with a lone spear. But overall I think they played very well.

Templars: Well, they attacked us so our viewpoint is going to be negative on the templars I'm afraid. They wanted a border agreement with us from very early on, but this seemed unfair. They wanted an equal share of the continent without making the effort to produce settlers quickly. They hoped they could mess around with wonders and religion and still get a good share of land. Well, that wasn't going to happen. One of our team likened their approach to Italy arriving in the new world in 1800AD, demanding an equal share of the continent. I'm sorry, but if you want land you have to work for it. Templars then suffered techwise from not building workers and settlers and were forced to teaming up with Imperio to attack us. It was a good decision to do this, probably their best hope, if a little too late. However, their pact with Imperio seemed to break down and Imperio came to us saying they'll turn on the templars if we share out the land. My final templar fact is that we conquered jerusalem very late on in the game and were shocked that their 3 sugars at that city were unimproved. Then we realised that they did not research calendar. Overall, I think the templars played poorly.

Imperio: Had the best start in my opinion, with double gold and floodplains in their capital. Were the tech leaders at the start and landed stonehenge and the oracle. However, they suffered too from a lack of land, having expanded too slowly in my opinion. Eventually, our production and GNP overtook them through sheer number of cities. They declared war on us which was the correct decision but they did it too late. If they had attacked us with elephants and longbows when we still had classical troops and were building the great library they would have probably won the game. Later on they offered peace with us despite never having sent a proper stack, promising to backstab the templars. We got peace but then backstabbed them in return when they didn't supply a promised tech, demolishing their army with siege weapons and razing their capital the turn after. We felt guilty to their latest turnplayer Naldorinho, who we liked. But the actions of those who played for that team before made it a necessity.

Rabbits: We didn't know that it was they who attacked PAL, not the otherway round. That made us slightly less guilty for supplying the horses to PAL, but we're still sorry about that. Did very well later in the game to stubbornly deny PAL iron for so long.

Banana: Finally we found banana. They were in a tough starting position, entirely at the whim of PAL of whether they could contact the civs on our continent. Turns out that PAL eventually allowed that contact and it became a fruitful tech partnership for RB. However, the original banana team must have been very inattentive to allow PAL to settle their sixth city of Pi-Ramesses. That sealed banana's doom, but it should have led them to attack PAL. Instead they stopped playing the turns and spoiled the game somewhat.

Us: We made quite a few mistakes, like leaving just 2 tiles fogged for a long time which turned out to have horses and copper. And giving horses to PAL. Our first city of Pink Dot was probably too ambitious and should have been punished by Templars. Fortunately it was not. We felt pretty screwed by the mapmaker when it came to metals and horses but just about managed to hold on to the copper and horses by founding a city very close to Imperio which they did not appreciate. But it was either settle that city (Cape Town) or just concede right there. We only beat them to the spot by 1 turn, pretty lucky really. We were helped by PAL, who gave us ivory and some valuable techs like CS for our great library techs+HBR. We expanded fairly quickly and were helped by the GLib, then swiping the HG, the colossus and the Taj from under PAL's nose. Just as we managed to get the heroic epic and a decent army into play we were attacked, which wasn't the worst timing. If the attack came 20 turns earlier we were doomed. We held off the double-team, and as soon as that team split we easily conquered the lands of templars and imperio sequentially. The prisoner's dilemma right there. We managed to draft over 30 oromos and probably forced PAL into a concession through sheer number of cities.

Sullla is working on a much more detailed history of this game from RB's perspective, complete with many screenshots and forum quotes. I've seen the first few chapters and it's a great read. He'll post it publicly later I presume.

[mostly-harmless]

Just been through the Banana forums:
A bit funny how a 2man team runs polls with like 10 options.
Bad luck with the Fishing from the hut and the loss of warriors to animals (although nice to have that confirmed).

There decision for the second city would have been totally different if they had run a C&D department. PAL would have nothing to prevent them from settling their proposed border city far in the north. What a different game that would have been.

Pretty sad state the Banana forums are in.

mh

[Sullla]

Sullla is working on a much more detailed history of this game from RB's perspective, complete with many screenshots and forum quotes. I've seen the first few chapters and it's a great read. He'll post it publicly later I presume.

Since the forums have been opened, I'll go ahead and post the link here for all to read:

Realms Beyond's History of the Demogame

I have six parts finished so far, and probably about as many more yet to come. Some of the content is highly critical, and I make no bones about that. This is a history written from the perspective of our team, Realms Beyond, and specifically from the perspective of myself, a very active player in that group. I would not be writing an accurate history if I did not point out the serious errors in organizing this game, or the questionable strategies pursued by other teams.

I'd also like to welcome the other teams to our forums, and express my thanks to the Rabbits for letting us view their internal discussions.

[MyOtherCar]

So far I only read a bit of the Rabbits' forum and it seems to me they had good fun during the game, even if didn't manage to do as well in the game. Fun read, so thanks for opening them up, Rabbits.

Oh and Sullla write-up is highly recommended if you're interested in RB's gameplay.

[Iamjohn]

For those interested in looking in on Imperio's view of the game here's a link to a google translation of imperio's forum.

[Sullla]

Had a chance to look at Rabbits' forum this morning. I might be inclined to do a short writeup later on what specifically went wrong for this team, which had a pretty awesome starting position but wasn't able to capitalize on it. I took some notes which I'll post here if the Rabbits (or other teams) would like to discuss them with us:

Rabbit Mistakes

- Deliberately not settling their capital in a location with 5 resources, giving up a wheat and whales resource for no reason whatsoever.

- Researching Masonry before Animal Husbandry, despite having a plains cow at the start.

- Researching The Wheel before Animal Husbandry, despite having a plains cow at the start.

- Building a settler at size 2, instead of growing to size 3 and then working another plains hill (with Imperialistic bonus).

- Building a stone quarry over a cattle pasture with the initial worker.

- Repeatedly wasting time working a 2/0/2 lake tile at the capital when there were much better options available (commerce is vastly less important than food and production in the early game).

- Moving the starting worker out into the fog, and then having it killed by a wolf!!!

- Founding city #2 in a position where pigs were outside the starting borders, and then slow-building a monument to get the pigs inside those borders.

- Not getting the cattle tile at the start pastured until T48, despite starting with Hunting tech.

- Playing the game as though it were Civ3 and there was no overflow of research, production, etc. Constant swapping of tiles for micro benefit ("growth in 2t either way!") instead of simply working the best tiles regardless and getting the max overflow. Especially egregious case of running 10% espionage slider "since we could finish our research in 1t either way."

- Building the Great Wall!!! (A terrible waste of production for virtually no payback at all. Just because one can build a wonder, doesn't mean one should.)

- Continuing to run 10% on the Espionage slider just to see PAL's research.

- Moving to settle directly into the teeth of PAL, ignoring good city locations near the capital, with no road network, a mere two workers, and an army consisting of three warriors.

- This sentence from GeoModder: "Main reason is that growing Caerbannog without a garrison in it will cause [unhappiness], so there's no point in letting the city grow."

- Misreading PAL's min science research ("400 turns to Alphabet") and not understanding that this was a binary science tactic. ("What do ya know, PAL is seriously researching Alphabet now. 10 turns before it finishes.")

- Not having Agriculture researched 70+ turns into the game!!! (Thus being unable to improve rice at new city.)

- Swapping back and forth between Iron Working, Monarchy, and Pottery, finishing reasearch on none of these techs while still lacking critical basic worker ones.

- Sitting in dead last in GNP the entire game and never doing anything to improve the research rate. 14 beakers/turn 80 turns into the game... (This would have spelled doom even if an attack on PAL had succeeded.)

- Capital sitting with an unhappy citizen at size 5 for lack of garrison, when a warrior could be built in 2t.

- Double-whipping a chariot in the capital (at the swapping penalty!) when the unit could be built in 3t naturally and there was no military need for the unit.

- Making it exceedingly obvious that an attack was coming against PAL... Honestly, walking a bunch of axes around the borders of PAL's cities tipped them off in plenty of time to counter. Fighting humans is nothing like fighting AIs; you either need surprise or a massive edge in units to prevail. Neither was the case here, and with PAL's edge in number of cities, a war of attrition was impossible to win. Military tactics were not good.

- Thinking that four axes and two chariots would be enough to damage or cripple PAL (clearly not understanding just how many units can be built in a hurry by using the whip aggressively). I think we all saw the result of that.

From that point on, the game was effectively over, and it was nothing more than holding on and trying to survive. (And Rabbits needs to be commended for staying with the game and working so hard! ) In Rabbits' defense, the layout of the eastern continent was absolutely awful, making it extremely difficult for Rabbits to contact Banana, and the terrible play of the initial Banana players made diplomacy pretty rough. The fact that there was no real way to contact the civs on the western continent was also a horrendous error on the map creator's part. And yet, most of the errors here were self-inflicted. Unorthodox made some great suggestions... which largely went unfollowed.


I would also like to know why PAL, Rabbits, and Banana all had a plains hill stone in the starting radius of their capital, yet our stone resource was seven tiles away, in the middle of the tundra...

[Zoid]

Well, when you say it like that we look like absolute tw@ts...

[sooooo]

Heh, don't sweat it. One could write a similarly sized list for RB's mistakes too. Perhaps someone from outside our team with an outside point of view could do so. It would be informative.