Turn 29, 2880BC

[Arrian]

Spiney is already Woody I, right? So clearly we go Woody II.

Play on, yeah. And to NYE's plan.

-Arrian

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by notyoueither
If we're feeling nervous, we could do a single turn of max hammers (6) and then back to max food. That would delay us to size 4 by a turn (and perhaps to BW) but would give us the comfort of being able to have a skirm out in 3 by switching to max hammers if Fido shows up to play. With vision from borders, we could have the skirm out before the warrior can reach EotS.

[Hot Mustard]

Turn 29, 2880BC

Units
Grog: 2/2, 1/2 Exp. Moved 9, nothing but uninteresting flat land
Spinebreaker: 2/2 7/5 Exp (W1). Moved 1, popped hut and received experience
Thug: 2/2, 0/2 Exp. Fort in EotS

Worker: Moved 8,7 to sheep hill - will start mine next turn

Science
Current: Archery completed, started Bronze Working (13 turns)
Polytheism 134/143


Cities

Eye of the Storm (Size 3) WF (87,4,36) for 1 turn of 6 hammers
Growth: 3/26, paused for 1 turn of max hammers
Production: Worker completed, started Skirmisher (5 turns)

Diplomacy
None

Other
None

See shots above.

[Mudhut]

Excellent. Everything seems to be coming along nicely. We should know next turn if the Vox warrior is coming directly towards us -> will appear at edge of vision. If he's not here in (say) the next two turns, we can pretty safely assume that Vox have sent him to explore, gambling on:
1) Meeting somebody else on this continent to ally with and go 2v1 against us
2) Really good hut luck -> I mean, what would they have to get to get on top of us? Two warriors? I can't see how any tech could really help them...

Sweet.

[vmxa1]

Why would you gamble that someone will join you, if you are Vox? You have nothing much to offer, won't be able to do much in the war and the other guy buys into facing Skrims?

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by vmxa1
Why would you gamble that someone will join you, if you are Vox? You have nothing much to offer, won't be able to do much in the war and the other guy buys into facing Skrims?

And, if there was someone on the other side, it would make more sense to team up with us to create more contiguous space for both of us, rather than siding with Vox to win terrain the other side of Vox.

Also, Vox don't have Beta running his demonise-GS propaganda campaigns this time. Which is nice.

[Mudhut]

Yeah, I agree with your concerns about "why would anyone ally with Vox" -> it would be hard to convince to go to their side rather than ours. Perhaps with a variety of propaganda ("evil GS attacked us for no reason") and misinformation, they could achieve it - but I agree its unlikely.

But Vox might just be grabbing at straws by now - depending upon how accurately they analyse the situation, they may figure that a 10% chance of drawing an ally in on their side was better than a 1% chance of beating us 1 on 1. Or something like that.

[Krill]

Has anyone here filled in any of the new members of GS with what happened last time Vox and GS shared an island in detail?

[Mudhut]

...but I'd like to know. Anybody like to fill me in?

[notyoueither]

This was written a long time ago.

The short course...

We started well, but quickly found ourselves in a confined area of what turned out to be a large island (Stormia). When we contacted our neighbours the Voxians (historic home in Estonia, [North Stormia]) our fears were confirmed; 2 civs sharing a land mass that turned out to be about one-third the size of the large continent to our west (Bob).

Along the way during the early years, we picked up a free settler from our one and only hut :Yay: and got disease three times in the capital (took away 5 pop total) :Blah:

We focused on REX and did this well, using forests to speed graneries along, and taking maximum advantage of the few blessings the terrain bestowed upon us. Unfortunately, the hawks among us were unsuccessful in raising the alarm that we were falling too far behind in our military. We did not have a barracks city devoted to vet troops until our 4th or 5th city.

The free settler became Hurricane. Hurricane built a barracks and then was diverted to the Pyramids.

Diplomatically we were fairly isolated. We had freindly terms with Vox, and an agreement for peace and the sharing of tech. Then 2 fateful things happened. Vox landed on Bob in the area of an extinct civ (Lux Invicta)and was greeted with universal hostility by all the civs of Bob. We had encouraged them to go there, but their requests for assistance from us had to be rejected due to the fact we had very little military ourselves. The effect was that they were driven off of Bob.

The other faitful thing that occured was that many on Gathering Storm questioned the value of the tech sharing arrangement with Vox. We put it to Vox that soon that arrangement would have to be revisited. The effect was most unfortunate. We had benefitted greatly from the tech that Vox had obtained through trades. They had benefitted from the tech that we were able to research. We shared a small landmass (relatively) but we had proven that we could cooperate with them and they had every reason to wait for us to prepare and then for us to jointly go to Bob.

When we opened that deal up, we ensured the marching south of the immortals, and march they did; fattened up by the bank account of a civ that had made great profits in tech trading and barely ever researched anything themselves. When we told them that the tech deal no longer was good for us, there was nothing holding back the immortals from their logical target, that being the civ who was weak militarily and who shared the same land mass with them. They would not care that we also had a non-aggression pact with them.

The first skirmish occured on a mountain way to the North, very near the Vox core. We had a warrior stationed there by the name of Grog. Grog was stout, and pure of heart, however his primitive weapons were no match for the onslaught of immortals that engulfed him. The war was on, but Grog had bought us that one thing which we needed most, time. Time for the cities of great potential that we had sacrificed so much for to retool from peace to war, and to assemble a force capable of defending ourselves from what we calculated must have been at least 25 immortals.

Luck played into our hands, and we benefitted from the fruits of past decisions.

Vox landed immortals by boat on the grasslands north of the Great Waste (the desert just north of Eye of the Storm) We were able to get a war chariot into position on the second turn of the war to kill one of those immortals and thus trigger our golden age. Thus the barracks were completed quickly and the cities of Eye of the Storm, Bolderberg, Tempest, Arashi, and soon Hurricane, were mass producing stout infantry and swift chariots sped by gold. The lesser centres built cats.

Just as the war started, we had discovered Feudalism. The pikes went a long way towards causing Vox much hesitation. That hesitation, combined with the cats, prevented them from capturing anything of significance and ensured their eventual destruction as they camped out in mountains as if waiting for something.

It also helped a great deal that when they attacked, they lacked a map of our core. We had refused all requests, and some demands that we trade our map. Some of us had managed to hold out and prevent that from happening on the strength of the argument that no one could conquer us if they did not know where to attack. I am positive that it has caused great anguish to many on Vox, and other teams, when they bacame aware that 5 vox immortals camped out most of the war a scant 2 tiles from Hurricane. Hurricane had completed the Great Lighthouse after Lego beat us to the Pyramids by 1 turn very near the start of the war. Although they could not see it and the fact that it was size 12 and spitting out pikes like watermellon seeds, they knew it was a great city capable of producing wonders of the world. Later after we traded our map and they did see it, and where it was, I would dearly have loved to be a fly on the wall of some of the chat rooms.

Thus ran much of the war. We sat on blocking mountains, or in hillside cities bristling with pikes behind walls, lobbing cat fire at immortals starving in the mountains. When they did break from the mountains on one occassion and ventured onto the grass near Arashi, the Med Inf and War Chariots were quick in slaughtering them. During that engagement, that very same chariot who had started our Golden Age and had been promoted for its trouble, produced a Great Leader. That GL rushed the completion of Sun Tsu's in one of our key agrarian cities, Cyclone *snerk*. The immortals stayed in the mountains after that.

The grind went very slowly. We had stopped them, and we were slowly whittling them down, but that would not end the war. The end of the war came surprisingly swiftly due to a plan originated by General Arrian.

We had the Great Lighthouse, we were producing galleys in quantity. We formulated a plan to use them. Arrian originally proposed a landing at 'Inchon', very close to the bottleneck of the island to threaten the Vox core. To this as added a landing at 'Inchoff' to capture the only source of iron for Vox. The landings were accompanied by settlers. We landed. Vox had very little to directly attack us with. We built the cities and landed more troops and dug in. Vox went at Inchon with an immortal assault with some success, but lacked the numbers in the area at the time to push us off. Then we zigged... Instead of landing the next wave at Inchon, we landed in the Vox core, beside cities with almost no defence (all of the immortals being on our side of the bottleneck, and cut off from home by the new fortress of Inchon). We captured Elipolis and Vox sued for peace.

There were several points of great acrimony during the war and at the end. It seems that many of the people involved from other teams think the best parts of the game are the insults traded and the twisting of events to make black seem white, and white to be grey. They have great fun with it. Many members of Gathering Storm have withdrawn into seclusion rather than participate in the **** storms on the public forum. I can't blame them. The worst example of this was the Vox plea for peace thread.

Vox had run the idea by all of the important people on all of the other teams. Then they posted in the public forum as if they were an injured party. The fact that they had started the war, and that they had broken a non-aggression pact were trivial. They cried uncle and looked for support from others from the attentions of our armies. They received support. All of the rest of the leaders of the other teams voiced how bad GS was being with Vox, and other such nonsense.

What it boiled down to was that we held the keys to life or death for Vox. We had agreed among ourselves that we would let Vox live if we controlled the choke point at Elipolis. Vox thought that, together with all the rest of the teams, e could be pressured into giving them better terms.

During the course of that thread it came out that all of the other teams had been aware of the effort beforehand, and that they were contributing on behalf of Vox to the public scourging that we were receiving. Most of GS was enraged. Some quit. The end result was that for peace, Vox had to leave Stormia entirely. No trace of them would remain. We granted them this harsh peace because we benefitted by the acquition of all of their cities, with improvements intact, as well as receiving technology (Engineering and Monotheism) that we would otherwise have had a difficult time obtaining.

Thus peace returned to Stormia. The Voxodus ensued whereby all of the people and forces of Vox journeyed to the lands of Legos to where they currently dwell. The people of the Storm went forth into a new world. A world where we were suddenly very close to Bob. A world where schemes were afoot, and where peace was not destined to last

The end of the beginning.

[vmxa1]

The nasty behind the back dealings from some of the other teams makes this story seem quite friendly. The bottom line was that with the worst of the land holdings, they still feared GS.

What was Lego compared to our holdings, they could have put us in thier land and hardly noticed. At least Bob required some fighting of other civs to gain all their land.

Of course that fighting was not hard as I believe the had conspired from jump street to work jointly. This is one of the great weakness of this type of game. If 2 or more teams agree to work in concert and know they can trust each other, it spells big trouble for the rest.

[Krill]

DeepO said that we can't be so nice as to grant Vox life if the same situation came up in another game. Personally, I think that we should do just as he said, and as many said at the start of the first Voxian War.

Kill 'em.

[vmxa1]

That is always a good policy in my book. I figure you should only fight someone once.

[Mudhut]

Hmmm. This is very interesting.

One thing that interests me [obviously, this is my first ever demo game] is the impact of propaganda and public opinion. How exactly did Vox go about currying this favour? I presume they just started threads in the public forum that said "GS are evil" or similar? I don't see why you would believe this sort of message if you were on a third team. Surely you'd expect that people would lie to support their point of view? But I guess Vox just kept repeating it over and over again until people believed them?

Second thing is the carryover of emotions from one game to the next. I know there have been lots of demogames before this one -> many including GS, yes? Is the reason GS was feared (despite having the worst land) because they had performed particularly well in the previous games?

[Krill]

GS formed at the start of the PTWDG from the majority of the strategy forum vets. All were known as brilliant players, and very talented. The rest of the teams effectively took who ever applied to join their teams.

One team, or rather members of one team, GoW, kicked up a fuss, and were joined by many other players, claiming that such a team was "unfair" and that ome players, like Theseus who is quite the warmonger in Civ3, ought to join the warmonger team. GS disagreed, and this was the start of the GS versus the World mentality, as well as the fear and respect that GS now has.

Vox, led by their One Voice(TM), Beta, used this to their advantage, and managed to get some of the teams to act against GS in game, like Lego gifting enough gold to upgrade the majority of thei Immortals, and GoW, who gave GS false infomation about the strength and position of Voxian forces. And he got all of the to act against GS in the public threads. And he got them to do it in private channels, without GS ever finding out until after the Voxian War. It was this effort that made GS decide that Vox was to be removed to Legos Minor, and Northern Sormia was to be given to GS minus, some population.

GS was feared at the beginning. After the Voxian War, GS was feared so much it was gangbanged.