SGOTM3 Rome - Team Smackster

[mad-bax]

.... i still think people lurk and spy on others threads, it's just too easy to do it undetected ...

Not true. The people I have sent snotty e-mails to bear testimony to that, even those that try "invisible mode".

 

[smackster]

@Team....
I think the next game we should use a little new strategy... Even if we finish much earlier we must not upload our save file until our main competitors do..
Although, i still think people lurk and spy on others threads, it's just too easy to do it undetected.

You know that I disagree, I think we should play our best game, and post our final save when we finish. If somebody else finishes first then that gives us a target. For the good of this SG, it adds a competitive element to the game, and increases the enjoyment overall. There is no doubt that we would have beaten Xteam if they hadn't known our finish date, but that does not matter, giving everyone a target added a lot to this SG, IMHO.

Smackster

 

[Wotan]

The game was basically lost when we did not press home a victory after landing on the other continent. Aggressive settler placement would have helped here. Also 7 tiles to go on next to last turn cost us the turn we lost by, had the settler intended for the "northern corner" on Hadrians been sent there and the coastal tiles been left to the settlers on ships off the coast this would have been won at least one turn earlier. OTOH, many a small mistake adds up to this result, but overall we played a great game and I am more impressed with the "small" difference between us and the non-variant leader. Had we continued to play for points we might have beaten them, that would have been something. Better score than the non-variant winner (if they win)

We will just have to win the laurel in the next game...

 

[smackster]

Another key mistake we made, and its easy for me to say this in hindsight, but its worth looking at.

We should have held the choke point between India and Aztec with an army in a city. Instead we went south of the choke point and had to use all our armies (plus many Cavalry) to hold those cities. With an army at that choke point the Aztec/Iro Cavalry would have had to wander past, now we could have bombarded them with our cannons and killed them with the army. Of course we disbanded our cannons

Now the rest of our armies and Cavalry would have wiped out India/Japan in no time.

edit: one day I'll set this up and play it, but I'm so far behind in the current GOTM's, I wonder if I'll ever catch up

 

[AdrianE]

You guys played a great game. You also played honourably and didn't use any of the 'exploits' that we did. I put 'exploits' in quotation marks because the tactics we used are exploits as far as I'm concerned but my team mates and the GOTM rules say otherwise.

Basically we took advantage of the remote palace corruption bug. We palace jumped and then only had cities at RCP=6 from the new palace allowing about a dozen cities at RCP of 6 or less to our FP to have rank 1 corruption. That essentially boosted our old core's production. We only partially developed a 2nd core.

We used the resource cutting exploit to disconnect saltpeter and build 30S, 50G cavalry. A leader gave us Leo's so it allowed the cheap upgrading of horsemen. Without Leo's the tactic is not so effective as cash is an issue.

We used the ship chaining exploit to surge our cavs on the other continent to hasten the end.

All that BS and we still only beat you by 1 turn. You certainly won the moral victory in my opinion. This is one SG that I'm certainly not proud of.

Nicely played team smackster.

Adrian

 

[Tarkeel]

I'd love to play with the team on the next one I might have an interesting proposition for us

 

[Wotan]

Another key mistake we made, and its easy for me to say this in hindsight, but its worth looking at.

We should have held the choke point between India and Aztec with an army in a city. Instead we went south of the choke point and had to use all our armies (plus many Cavalry) to hold those cities. With an army at that choke point the Aztec/Iro Cavalry would have had to wander past, now we could have bombarded them with our cannons and killed them with the army. Of course we disbanded our cannons

Now the rest of our armies and Cavalry would have wiped out India/Japan in no time.

edit: one day I'll set this up and play it, but I'm so far behind in the current GOTM's, I wonder if I'll ever catch up

I agree with you, this was probably the most costly mistake. Not thinking about this was a bit shortsighted of us. I guess we all thought the game was "over" and lost the touch. We used the enemy unit "channeling" to good effect in the opening phases of the campaigns vs. the northern tribes on our starting continent. Chosing where to fight was essential to the low casualties we sustained then and should have been repeated later in the game...

 

[Wotan]

I'd love to play with the team on the next one I might have an interesting proposition for us

Something you want to discuss through PM's? What could that be, we have no clue as to what the game is about yet???

 

[smackster]

You guys played a great game. You also played honourably and didn't use any of the 'exploits' that we did. I put 'exploits' in quotation marks because the tactics we used are exploits as far as I'm concerned but my team mates and the GOTM rules say otherwise.

Basically we took advantage of the remote palace corruption bug. We palace jumped and then only had cities at RCP=6 from the new palace allowing about a dozen cities at RCP of 6 or less to our FP to have rank 1 corruption. That essentially boosted our old core's production. We only partially developed a 2nd core.

I didn't realise you did that, I just read the thread when you did.

I'm confused as this looks clearly like the use of a banned exploit. It seemed to be justified as there was a cow near that new palace location.

I've re-read the thread on how this exploit is banned and by the exact wording I think you are ok, but the use here is clear intent to make a gain through the the rank corruption exploit, which is clearly banned from my perspective. The palace was relocated to an area and no cities were built within 6 squares, making many cities around the FP rank 1. If this bug did not exist then obviously you would not have done that and to me that is the intent of the ban, forget the exact wording.

Maybe we need a black laurel, for the team with the best use of exploits.

smackster

 

[klarius]

I didn't realise you did that, I just read the thread when you did.

I'm confused as this looks clearly like the use of a banned exploit. It seemed to be justified as there was a cow near that new palace location.

I've re-read the thread on how this exploit is banned and by the exact wording I think you are ok, but the use here is clear intent to make a gain through the the rank corruption exploit, which is clearly banned from my perspective. The palace was relocated to an area and no cities were built within 6 squares, making many cities around the FP rank 1. If this bug did not exist then obviously you would not have done that and to me that is the intent of the ban, forget the exact wording.

Maybe we need a black laurel, for the team with the best use of exploits.

smackster

As I stated already in our thread, I have a different opinion.
Everybody is exploiting the rank corruption bug, by using RCP at all, or building tight cores around the FP.
Or in normal games by jumping the palace into a loose build AI settlement.
The location of the palace was justified, especially in the variant with us not having the power to produce enough settlers, while still having enough military. It was also the only safe location at this time and not having two cores as early as possible is just bad play in Vanilla/PtW.
I would have liked more cities on the middle continent for our new core, but as the events progressed there was no time for that.
Edit:
I just looked in a save again. We had six cities on our first ring around the capital. Other locations in Greece, which was the only sound place at that time, would have supported much less cities on a tighter first ring (3-4 cities), due to the many mountains around.
This would have resulted also in quite low corruption on the now rank 4-5 instead of rank 1 cities around the FP (BTW we are talking here of 4 cities, which had a profit). At the same time cities farther from the FP would get a little lower corruption. The net result on the FP core would be quite low, but we would have forfeited several good city locations around the new capital.

 

[smackster]

Right, but RCP is not banned, and exploiting rank corruption is. Don't take this the wrong way, I don't really care about your use of that, and I don't mind about your victory, however close to the edge of exploitation it was I'm more interested in our team having a good time, and we certainly did for much of this.

Tactically we had some good play, but also made some major blunders (if only I could count to 20), and didn't even know the scoring system (well that's me, I was playing for Jason score for most of the game). I was actually hoping we could beat the Jason score of the non-variants, and I still think that was within our grasp.

 

[dmanakho]

As a team we should be proud of our game.

as for the end result...
I don't care about palace jumps, our core cities did a good job as it was but
if we only knew/used the trick with resource disconnection.... We would definetely 1000% absolutely positive finished this game many many turns earlier.... Personally I never knew about this technique, although so obvious and simple it was never described in War Academy. (at least i never found it)

I think this trick is so powerful it could be (and may be should be) added in the list of banned exploits for the same reason rank corruption is banned.
AI will never use this trick and it gives a human player just too much of advantage over AIs.
M-B should probably rule on this for the next SGOTM.

One thing for sure whether it is banned or not, X-Team won't be able to use all these tricks just by themselves next time. :devil2:

@M-B: Do you think you could pressure other teams to hurry up with this game... It's getting boring and I'd rather not have delays with the next SGOTM.

 

[Mauer]

As a team we should be proud of our game.

as for the end result...
I don't care about palace jumps, our core cities did a good job as it was but
if we only knew/used the trick with resource disconnection.... We would definetely 1000% absolutely positive finished this game many many turns earlier.... Personally I never knew about this technique, although so obvious and simple it was never described in War Academy. (at least i never found it)

I'm glad I read your post. I stated in Team Mauer's spoiler that we used this for knight/cav upgrades. Reading your comment made me rethink, and then I finally realised we didn't use it for this. I went back and checked our thread just to make sure. We used this in prep for legions though.

but overall we played a great game and I am more impressed with the "small" difference between us and the non-variant leader.

Indeed it is a small difference, and something definatley to be proud of . I know the variant teams aren't really considering the non variant teams, but I am also proud of our teams finish. Considering we had 4 relative beginners, and 1 deity level. But I think there is no way we could have come close to your score had we opted for the variant. Maybe somebody can invent the "Variant Jason Calculator"!

 

[Wotan]

our core cities did a good job as it was but
if we only knew/used the trick with resource disconnection.... We would definetely 1000% absolutely positive finished this game many many turns earlier....

It was known by our team, I have used it in several GOTM's in the past. I thought about it in this game but believed we needed the gold for culture rushing in new cities rather than upgrading units. Maybe a mistake? but since we went for domination I thought the units we got from normal production would be enough to secure the territory. Had we gone for conquest we would probably have done it too.

 

[Wotan]

I had a look at the Xteam thread after the discussion above. I see no real exploiting done by them, OTOH I have never done a palace jump in any game and will probably never do one since I believe this to be an exploit in "my own book". But it is not considered to be a complete exploit only partially so, if done in a really abusive way. This might be something to reconsider for GOTM's in the future, having levels of allowed abuse might be wrong either the technique is banned or it is allowed. Not as it is now with a vague distance rule. Since there are players that will read and play games from a perspective of what is explicitely disallowed and everything else goes.

As an example, no critisism intended on Xteam who used the argument in their thread, but on the phenomenon created by vague rules. It saddens me deeply when you have such a low opinion of the CFC collective so you have to play the game to the limit of what is not disallowed because you argue that everyone else does it. I surely hope this is not the case and that you are in a minority with this view of everyone bending the rules to the utmost. If not I have surely lost a lot of my entusiasm for CFC and the GOTM's. This vague fingerpointing is, in my book, the worst possible excuse for behaving in a certain way. Blaming others in uncertain terms for having to do something is no excuse just a poor way out of something you really feel is wrong but need to rationalise your way out of. Like an athlete getting caught for using performance enhancing drugs and blaming it on "everyone else use them so I had to..."

 

[smackster]

I had a look at the Xteam thread after the discussion above. I see no real exploiting done by them, OTOH I have never done a palace jump in any game and will probably never do one since I believe this to be an exploit in "my own book". But it is not considered to be a complete exploit only partially so, if done in a really abusive way. This might be something to reconsider for GOTM's in the future, having levels of allowed abuse might be wrong either the technique is banned or it is allowed. Not as it is now with a vague distance rule. Since there are players that will read and play games from a perspective of what is explicitely disallowed and everything else goes.

I think that the thread for rank corruption argued about this, but as there are some good tactical reasons for the palace jump found that banning that will remove a tactical element from the game. This leads onto my next comment below.

As an example, no critisism intended on Xteam who used the argument in their thread, but on the phenomenon created by vague rules. It saddens me deeply when you have such a low opinion of the CFC collective so you have to play the game to the limit of what is not disallowed because you argue that everyone else does it. I surely hope this is not the case and that you are in a minority with this view of everyone bending the rules to the utmost. If not I have surely lost a lot of my entusiasm for CFC and the GOTM's. This vague fingerpointing is, in my book, the worst possible excuse for behaving in a certain way. Blaming others in uncertain terms for having to do something is no excuse just a poor way out of something you really feel is wrong but need to rationalise your way out of. Like an athlete getting caught for using performance enhancing drugs and blaming it on "everyone else use them so I had to..."

I certainly agree with this part of your post, but the bottom line to me is that we can't get wrapped around winning too much. There is no doubt if we had not posted our score they would not have beaten us, or if they had posted their end date before us, we would have beaten it. If we were ultimately competitive then we'd stop posting the scores and have password linked threads, with digitally certified self destructing saves (now there's an idea), but as I've said many times, this is about enjoying our game, and I think we will regardless.

Maybe our team can create a charter and stick to it.

 

[Wotan]

No, do not misunderstand me now. I do not feel Xteam violated any rules they beat us fairly. The red flag for me was the "everybody else does it, so I have to do it too" argument. That is something that does put me in overdrive. I just hate it in RL as well as in games. That is just another way of saying, "I know it is wrong, but I still do it because..." Is there anything more reprehensible than hiding behind such an argument. I would find a way to sack an employee that used that argument to justify his actions. I know there are companies that condone such behavior but they would probably condone insider trading too.

 

[Tarkeel]

It was concluded that the only way to avoid the palace rank exploit, was to ban the forbidden palace.

 

[Wotan]

@Trakeel: What was your proposition by the way? The illusive comment you made in your post intrigues me...

 

[smackster]

No, do not misunderstand me now. I do not feel Xteam violated any rules they beat us fairly. The red flag for me was the "everybody else does it, so I have to do it too" argument. That is something that does put me in overdrive. I just hate it in RL as well as in games. That is just another way of saying, "I know it is wrong, but I still do it because..." Is there anything more reprehensible than hiding behind such an argument. I would find a way to sack an employee that used that argument to justify his actions. I know there are companies that condone such bahavior but they would probably condone insider trading too.

Yes, I see, but everyone else didn't do it , only they. Well I'm sure we will stay above that kind of attitude.

I agree that that GOTM rules needed to be in such a way as it can't be policed, but really the intent to abuse the corruption exploit is there in their spoiler. It wasn't a mistake, that was the plan.

Anyway, its not problem, lets get over it and move on. Sorry for going on about it.