Disputes Thread

[conmcb25]

WOW!!!
1. Private forums are private, to open them you need conscent from EVERY member of a team (not just a majority IMO). The role of the historian is to write a summary of the game and it is tottaly different than opening the forums. If we knew that that was Krill's intension when he asked for access to PAL private forum we would have never given access!
That is very naughty at the very least from you Krill!

Having played with you guys in a Civ III Intersite Demogame, and being pretty good friends with Fried Psitalon, I was actually quite shocked when Krill posted that you guys would open your forums.

Thanks for confirming my doubts.

[T-hawk]

Banana had five seafood resources (where they settled, not where the started). That's too many to use unfortunately, it wasn't a great capital.

"Too many seafood to use"? No such concept. Keep whipping; the most efficient way is to triple-whip settlers and other big items like the library. If growth still even outpaces the whip anger clock, build workers to pause growth. When you run out of settling space and have enough workers, let the city over-grow into unhappiness then whip buildings or a wonder (if not a great wonder, Moai or National Epic.) Whipping a wonder roughly converts a 6-food fish into a 6-hammer tile which is certainly better than skipping the fish in favor of another tile.

This message brought to you by the Realms Beyond Micromanagement Dept.

[sooooo]

"Your capital was better than ours".
"No your capital was better".
"No, you hang up"
"No, you hang up

....

"But you didn't hang up either!"

Indiansmoke, you're completely wrong about grass river forest and a cow being better than quadruple flood plains and a fish. But you're right about it being tricky to be in the middle of two civs expanding towards you. Which makes it nice and convenient that banana lost their players and missed 5 turns in a row.

[darrelljs]

Thanks for confirming my doubts.

Why are you so happy you can't read PAL's forum ?

@T-Hawk...yeah five seafood is way too much micromanagement for me. I pretty which whip when happiness anger wears off, with some minor queue manipulation to get larger whips.

@Indiansmoke - sooooo sums up my take pretty much. You guys had a fine capital, but having two fronts to defend is certainly challenging. TBH, when I found out the NAP terms you had with Banana I thought you had solved that problem, but then you couldn't finish off Rabbits. Was it a simple underestimation of their tenacity, or did you not see it is a priority?

Darrell

[Sullla]

Food is overwhelmingly the most important thing for any capital city, so without going into detail I will say that I completely disagree with Indiansmoke's assessment of his capital, which could easily reach a +8 food surplus while working multiple floodplains cottages. I would have happily traded starting locations with PAL in an instant. (I noticed that Indiansmoke didn't mention his team's monopoly on the world's supply of ivory right next to their capital!)

Anyway, I think that PAL played a great game, but to suggest that Realms Beyond had the second best start is completely absurd. A single, weakish food bonus doesn't provide much assistance. Definitely not compared to the orgy of whipping that PAL was (correctly!) doing at The Warning throughout the game.

I'd also like to refute Indiansmoke's claims about the CivFanatics Demogame map, but I can't say much about a game that is still ongoing. I will state here that it is my firm opinion that his team (Kazakhstan) has simply been outplayed by their opponent (SANCTA), and that their current situation is their own fault. The map itself is not the problem, and their team had every opportunity to be successful. If you want more details, then send me a Private Message and I can explain further.

[Indiansmoke]

Regarding capitals, I already said that our capital was better to start with but much worst in the long run as the only usefull tiles were 3 floodplains, 1 fish, 2 hiils and 3 non river grassland. That is a total of 8 usefull tiles. Realms had 16 usefull tiles to work with and the forests more than made up for the luck of early slaving potential. After a while we were slaving the capital because there were no more tiles to work basically!

In any case it was not an overpowered start for Realms by any means, as it was not for us. It was for Imperio but they did not do much with it.

Regarding the ivory, it is true that having the monopoly is an overpowering thing, but when you face protective archers maces are better than elephants anyway, so elephants did not have any use for us in this game unfortunatelly.


To answer Darrel's question, I think it was a combination of things. First we did not want to slave all our cities just to take out rabbits, as we wanted to built an economy as well. Then we thought maces would be enough against archers, but we lost the first 3 75% battles when we attacked their city (after bombing with catas), and decided to not continue and wait for cannons. Rabbits did nothing but slave archers and axes and tech 0 for most of the game so it was not easy, and losing 75% attacks, did not help at all.

@ Sulla regarding the other game, there are a few things to say about the map, publicly I will say only that us having to make 6 cities to get metal, while Sancta has it in capital is not exactly what I call balanced! And after seeing you here complain about the distribution of strategic resources makes me wonder what were you thinking when you made the other map!

[mostly-harmless]

It should be noted that RB, Banana, Imperio and Rabbits all moved their initial settler. Just for the record.

mh

[Sullla]

Regarding the ivory, it is true that having the monopoly is an overpowering thing, but when you face protective archers maces are better than elephants anyway, so elephants did not have any use for us in this game unfortunatelly.

But elephants are cheaper than maces (60 vs. 70 shields) and Rabbits had lots of chariots running around, including a Great General chariot. Not building a more mixed balanced of units seems a bit shortsighted.

To answer Darrel's question, I think it was a combination of things. First we did not want to slave all our cities just to take out rabbits, as we wanted to built an economy as well. Then we thought maces would be enough against archers, but we lost the first 3 75% battles when we attacked their city (after bombing with catas), and decided to not continue and wait for cannons. Rabbits did nothing but slave archers and axes and tech 0 for most of the game so it was not easy, and losing 75% attacks, did not help at all.

I was looking at the PAL/Rabbits conflict in the latter's forum yesterday, and the PAL tactics were not very good. On T122, the Rabbits were down to their final two cities, no resources left, and PAL was attacking at Digger's Burrow. The standoff looked like this:



Rabbits
4 axes
3 chariots
4 spears
4 archers

PAL
5 maces
4 catapults
2 war chariots
2 axes
1 spear

The defenses had already been bombed down to 0%, and the PAL maces had huge odds on everything in that city. Furthermore there was nothing beyond Digger's Burrow - the Rabbits had no units left in their capital, and it would have been a fairly easy process to eliminate their civ afterwards. The Rabbit survival was a mixture of some major luck... and very poor tactical play.

PAL attacked with their top mace (82.5%) against an archer and lost. Then they attacked with their second mace (65.1%) and lost that encounter too. PAL did not attack further, and turned around and left without suffering any more losses. Unlucky, yes, but still a shocking defeat.

What PAL should have done was attack with their catapults first!!! This is such basic tactics that I was very surprised to see such a mistake. There were only three units in the city that were dangerous, three CGII archers. Two or three suicide cats would cripple them and hit every other unit with collateral damage, getting the maces into the 95%+ range for attacks. The maces could win, gain experience, promote on the next turn, and then attack again. There really is no reason why this attack should have failed... Realms Beyond is of course glad that it did!

[Indiansmoke]

You are right Sulla, we should have waited another turn and attack with catas first...basic stuff that we missed... Reason being overconfidence that the 65-85% would win anyway...just silly!

This point and the point were we lost the first city to Bannana were the turning points in this game for us. Strategically we did not play a bad game, but tactically we made (I made) 3-4 big mistakes that cost us the game at the end.

[joncnunn]

This was noted by us (Templar) at the time (not the teams but that so many civs hadn't been founded yet) and it did encourage us to go for the 2 religion capital.

It should be noted that RB, Banana, Imperio and Rabbits all moved their initial settler. Just for the record.

mh

[joncnunn]

War Elephants are major cost savings if your opponent is building sufficient horse units that without that ability you would be being Pikes (or Spears).

[thekaje]

Posted this in the RB subforum, but I'll re-post in this thread:

Mostly-neutral observer partial to the RB team here. (Big fan of and lots of respect for all the work you guys do; love Sirian and Sullla's sites.)

I really enjoyed this game! Well-played by RB. Mind-blowing how deep you guys dug.

You definitely didn't have the moral high ground with the Imperio thing, though. Sorry. That was two-faced, slimy, and low. (I read the original diplomacy thread, too -- pretty clear what your intentions were, even as you deluded yourselves as to what was ethical and who was "in the right".)

As many said, it would have been strategically stupid to reveal to Imperio that you were not happy with the peace deal or believed it to be invalid because you didn't get Gunpowder. However, it would have been the stand-up thing to do to let them know that the treaty was not in effect. What you did might have won you the game, it's true, but you did it in a cheap and slimy way.

There is no way to justify what you did ethically, and I think you should just own up to that like big boys. Especially because I'm not sure how much it matters -- you're by far the better players and good bunch of folks.

[sooooo]

I don't think anyone denied that it was a backstab, that it was morally dubious and that we didn't feel bad for their current turnplayer naldo. We never deluded ourselves that we were "in the right". The "justification" reasons were that Imperio had it coming by their earlier actions. Which they did. They were the one that broke both of the treaties.

[thekaje]

Fair enough. The fallout from the situation was mixed, though, so I thought somebody external to the game should call you on it.

Sunrise said this in the original thread:

The reason I favor giving Imperio a chance, is because I don't understand why they would sign peace and then not honor the agreement. Having peace for 10 turns and then being free of the rest of the agreement is probably the best possible outcome for us, why would they sign peace and then give us a reason to ignore it? It just doesn't make sense to me, it seems like they shouldn't have signed peace with us after they screwed us over.

Frankly it doesn't matter why they wouldn't honor it, they didn't. Unless they change course and gift us Gunpowder this turn they are in breach. I don't think there is any point of further discussion, but just to reiterate this will be a situation where we keep the moral high ground AND get what we want.

The general tenor was similar, and it was all and all pretty dishonest and gross, looking for (as somebody said) "the flimsiest of pretexts" to stab these guys in the back. But it's definitely not something unheard of in the annals of diplomacy or whatever. Plus, it was a tiny bit awesome.

And Sullla said this on his website:

Although the attack by Realms Beyond was certainly "dastardly", it was no less so than Imperio's own attack against us some 30 turns earlier, or Imperio's decision to sell out the Templars as soon as they saw personal advantage in doing so.

Good stuff that Sullla said RB was dastardly, but IIRC Imperio didn't break a NAP in either of those situations. They were jerks, but there was definitely no sneak-attack one-turn-coup backstab on a city with a single longbow in it, which was really what made RB's move here so cheezy and unfair.

[sooooo]

OK, but that's selective quoting. That was one argument but there were more important ones that you didn't quote. They broke a NAP when they sabotaged our metal BTW. The main difference, which I assume is your point, is that when we did our backstab we anihilated their civilisation. When they broke their treaties it was only minor inconveniences (not having metal, not having gunpowder). Ah well - if there's a lesson it's if you're going to be sneaky then make sure your sneakiness has a permanent effect