No SOI Challenge: Game 3 (now with no Coups!)

Stalker0

Baller Magnus
Joined
Dec 31, 2005
Messages
10,598
So after my successes in the first 2 games, I decided to take it up a notch.

This time I'm playing Portugal (who doesn't get as many CS bonuses as Siam or Germany). But the big change....I am not doing any spy work in CS. No rigging, no coups. I want to see if the reason I am finding the challenge pretty easy so far is not the power of the strat, but rather the raw power of coups.

People complained a bit earlier that I was winning the games "too easily". To me you feel better, I actually had 2 games right before this one that I just got crushed pretty early, so didn't even talk about them.


This game is not going all that well. Its one of those games were everything is just a LIIITTLE too slow. I'm missing wonders by 1 turn, I'm missing getting an embassy by 1, that kind of thing. Just not getting into the slipstream this game, I've been pretty far behind for the majority of this game.

This has been a game of Proxy Warfare. Siam built up a massive network of CS early, and then used them to go to work on me. Ultimately I held, but its turned into a warfest, and I'm getting jumped from multiple sides. Now I could have played this better, with Portugal's glut of G generals I certaintly could have built better defenses, so that's on me, I just got complacenet. I will say the CS front has been challenging. Siam and I just went back and forth on 2 key CS that were kicking my butt in the last big war. I've managed to grab a hold of them....for now. The biggest boon for me was a number of Nau gift missions, and so I could just purchase a nau, send it to my neighbor CS to recoup my cash, and then gift it on. That helped quite a bit in getting some cheap influence, for while I've had a good amount of money this game, I haven't had the "stupid" money, and buying a lot of envoys gets very expensive very fast.

Meanwhile the WC has been loving Open doors this game, and I haven't had the votes to stop it (that and they keep wanting to sanction me). I have managed to hold on to about 3 CS, but getting towards a large number seems a very difficult task right now. I'm debating whether to keep pushing this game, I think the top runners are hitting their snowball and these wars are going so badly its put me on a poor footing, but might be worth it to see how it goes. We will see.
Spoiler :


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On the spy front, let me just say. Coups are so stupidly amazingly good, or else everything else spy wise just completely sucks in comparison. Coups are fast, coups are powerful. Spy missions take forever and a day and are dinky. Even when I consider the spy deaths I get with coups and the time to replace them, I STILL feel like I'm doing more with my spies than when my spy just sits in a city for 20 turns waiting for my little science trickle.
 
Interesting. I imagine Rome would be easy to bribe into attacking Siam since he doesn't have any other neighbor, but he's hostile to you ?
And yes coup is too good and too boring to play with/annoying to play against. Even the old coup mechanic (based on influence) was still better the current flat 75% success chance.
Probably worth a proposal next season, if we can't have a more interactive system (investing more gold/resource to increase or reduce the coup chance) we could still ask for the old influence-based system instead (now that we no longer have the issue with influence stacking to ridiculous amount anymore)
 
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