Vox Public Announcement

[DeepO]

Beta, I'm not going to comment on your questions (I'll leave it to our generals to decide if we want to give that much away, as they are indeed critical questions on this war), but one side-note: little happens in GS without a backup plan.

DeepO

[Beta]

Well - the first two are ancient history. And the third seems somewhat irrelevant now. But if Arrian would prefer to answer it when Vox is completely gone, I undersatnd,

[Arrian]

Beta,

1) Hmm... well, without feudalism I'm not sure we could have held. You guys had Immortals, for chrissakes, and a LOT of them. I think we got feudalism right around the beginning of the war, so if you would have hit us a few turns earlier, that might have been enough.

2) The GA timing was pretty crucial, yeah. Thanks for leaving that immortal out there. If it's any consolation, he took down a War Chariot and beat the 2nd one up. Then again, the 2nd one went elite, and later on he, well, he did good things.

I don't know if that cost you the war, but it did hurt you.

3) Elipolis landing... well, our landing was a last-minute "why not try" sorta thing. It wasn't really part of the original plan. But with our 4-move galleys, I think we could have landed and struck at your core cities before you could have gotten enough troops back to have much effect. But you might've made things a bit bloodier for us.

So 1 & 2 were big deals. 3, I wouldn't worry you rookie head about.

-Arrian

[Dis]

When did you guys get the lighthouse? you didn't have it at the begninning of the war did you?

I was away from the game for about a month, so I missed the beginning of the war. Actually I pretty much missed the whole thing I haven't been as active the past 2 or 3 months.

[Arrian]

Diss,

We got the Lighthouse the turn after triggering our GA, I think. The turn after Lego built the Pyramids (they beat us by a slim margin).

-Arrian

[Dis]

Okay, I didn't think you had it before the war. My main concern before going in was getting a lot done before pikeman came around. Though I would have preferred not to have to fight a war.

[Beta]

Originally posted by Arrian
Beta,

1) Hmm... well, without feudalism I'm not sure we could have held. You guys had Immortals, for chrissakes, and a LOT of them. I think we got feudalism right around the beginning of the war, so if you would have hit us a few turns earlier, that might have been enough.

-Arrian

C'est la vie. C'est l'amour. C'est la guerre.

But all the same - RATS!!!!

[Theseus]

Speaking as Defender of the People of the Storm, I must yet still extend my admiration...

And I have said this to all of GS: Vox has been unorthodox, and brilliant. Would GS have done the same? No, and there-in lies the brilliance... 'Do not, think not, as your enemy.'

Kudos, and Te salutant.

[nbarclay]

If Vox had avoided giving our WCs a shot at them until they hit Arashi (and assuming they went straight in for it), they would almost certainly have hurt us badly at the very least, and might possibly have won. We never thought to calculate how many immortals Vox might have if they could get enough gold, and we almost paid a far higher price for that miscalculation than we actually did. My in-game persona is completely outraged at the deception involved (and my real-life self isn't fond of multiplayer games where lies play such a major role in general), but I have to hand it to Vox for coming so close to success against a vastly larger civ. It was probably Vox's only realistic chance of winning the game, and it's scary how close it came to working.

One point of strategy that Arrian left out: once we started hitting their immortals hard with catapults (the infamous "food poisoning" incident ), Vox decided to pull their immortals back. By that time, we had enough pikes to block them and defend Arashi both, so Vox's only paths home for seven immortals were either through pikes on a mountain or across flatlands where our forces would tear them apart. They probably should have attacked either the mountain or the city anyhow at that point, even though the odds were seriously against them. At least they might have taken out one or two of our pikes with lucky shots.

Through most of the war, Vox had five of their immortals (landed by galley) sitting on a mountain threatening our core. Due to the local geography, we had to tie up twice as many units defending to use mountains to block their progress. So leaving the troops there worked well for Vox for a long time; an unsuccessful attack would have freed up a lot of our forces for use elsewhere. But after our cats finished the western force, we landed pikes on a mountain behind those immortals. The next turn, the borders of a seemingly small, insignificant desert town expanded, placing the Voxian forces within our borders where they could not heal, and at the same time, we hit them with our cats. So thanks to our blocking moves and catapults, coupled with Vox's unwillingness to attack against horrible odds when their units were doomed anyhow, we killed a total of a dozen immortals quite easily.

Regarding what would have happened if Vox had blocked the Elipolis landing and continued to withdraw instead of losing Elipolis and spending a large portion of its offensive forces against Inchon, our production advantage and our favorable kill/loss ratio in previous action combined to give us too big an edge for them to have any significant chance of holding us off. It would have been bloody, but without outside iron and serious outside financing for upgrades, the RNG would almost have had to turn into a RMG (Random Miracle Generator) for Vox to have held.

By the way, Beta, thanks for the apology and so forth. As I've said before, don't expect GS to turn our backs on Vox any time soon (say, in the next 2400 years or so ). But I liked it before when our civs got along well, and I hope cooperation in an evacuation project can help restore at least a portion of that friendship. And as people say from time to time, "It's just a game, folks!" I certianly bear no grudges and hold no ill feelings in the real world about any of this.

Nathan

[Aeson]

My take is a bit different on it.

I think other than moving the Immortals onto the flats to threaten a couple inconsequential cities, Vox did about as much to hurt us as possible given their troop numbers. An attack on Arashi would have been a close thing either way, but honestly, would have sped up the war for GS, even if we did happen to lose it (we had more units in there than Vox did outside IIRC, so it would have taken at least two turns of attacks). By splitting our cities, we had to tie up 2x the troops to cover them, and in the E Vox did the same thing. If Vox had just attacked, we would have lost units, maybe Arashi (the second turn) and then had more free units to use earlier than we did. From there it's hard to tell what would have happend though, as the situation was much different on the sea.

Given the numbers we ran, I think it was 80% that Arashi would hold against the full stack. That's still a pretty big risk, and the RNG can be unkind... but almost surely Arashi would have eaten up enough of the Immortals to stop the threat.

In the E, it was about the same odds, but a bit more dangerous for us. Again, even 'losing' (as long as it's not tank losing to spearman bad) would have freed up more units to retaliate with sooner though.

------------

The GA helped us, as we were planning on it to trigger with the Pyramids (like was said, it was very close with Lego) and so had things set up to take advantage of it. Feudalism helped us, but only because we also were able to get enough gold to still do necessary upgrades. Without both of them, we probably would have lost Arashi, but again, it might have sped up the war a little due to having fewer Immortals in our territory to contend with.

It was making a play for those Pyramids turned things in our favor us IMO, along with the geography. If we hadn't have been building the Pyramids, we might have been in big trouble. Our cities wouldn't have been being optimized for our GA, and our production capacity only about half of what it turned out to be. The Lighthouse turned out to be more useful to use short term probably, and was worth the extra shields we payed for it.

Geographically, Vox needed to come down off the mountains sooner or later to beat us, and then our WC's could play their part. That would have been bloody as all hell.. (for both sides, basically 50/50)

---------------

Overall, it's mainly starting location that sealed it. Vox did well, just we're playing with loaded dice in that regard.

[vulture]

I've just checked the old turn threads, and Vox never had as good as an 80% chance against our cities. The first turn they arrived next to Arashi (with 11 immortals and 2 spearmen) they had no chance, since we had more units in the town than that. If they'd attacked, they'd have lost (on average) 5.8 immortals - about half their force.

Comparing our expected losses in Arashi to the no. of reinforcements that were available next turn, our forces would have remained constant (more or less) while Vox's would have been halved. So there was never a real threat of taking Arashi.

IIRC the best chance they had was a 0.3% chance of taking Tempest, and the 80% figure Aeson might have come from a statement that there was about an 80% chance that they'd have 0-2 surviving immortals if they attacked with the whole stack.

OTOH if Vox hadn't split the main stack (4 of the immortals left the main stack, and got wiped out on the plains IIRC), they'd have had a reasonable chance against Arashi or Tempest.

[Arrian]

OTOH if Vox hadn't split the main stack (4 of the immortals left the main stack, and got wiped out on the plains IIRC), they'd have had a reasonable chance against Arashi or Tempest.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of when I said I didn't know if we'd hold Arashi. Then they moved some forces out onto the flats, which helped us quite a bit.

Good point about GA-optimization, Aeson. We were setting ourselves up for our GA, so though we did have to blow it on our military, at least we got a lot of military out of it.

I still would rather have gotten the Pyramids and had a peaceful GA, though.

-Arrian

[Eli]

OTOH if Vox hadn't split the main stack (4 of the immortals left the main stack, and got wiped out on the plains IIRC), they'd have had a reasonable chance against Arashi or Tempest.

That was my idea.

[Beta]

I thought it was my idea.

Besides - we both know what prompted the move.

[Arrian]

Besides - we both know what prompted the move

Oh, do tell.

-Arrian

[Beta]

Originally posted by Arrian


Oh, do tell.

-Arrian

Remember that book that is due out in some 2000 years - well chapter 4, page 89, tells all.

[Master Zen]

Once again, another great post by Beta, and congrats to both Vox and GS for the sportsmanship they have showed in this thread.

I would like to know if perhaps Trip or some guys from your civs would make some kind of "almanac" of maps and unit orbats and stuff, to show the world after the game is over and all this info is "declassified". It would be cool for archival purposes.

[E_T]

That's about as good of an AAR that we will get before the end of the game.

E_T

[alva]

Remember that book that is due out in some 2000 years - well chapter 4, page 89, tells all.

auh, c'mmon, give us a clue....puhlease...

[Aeson]

I have a pretty good idea of what it was... (and if I don't, none of you will know I'm wrong for 2000 years right? )

[Arrian]

Oh, come one Beta! We answered your questions.

What made you guys move out onto the flats?

-Arrian

[DeepO]

Well, I have to agree with Aeson, we kind of knew at the time what triggered the move off the mountains with half their force (those were 6 or 7 immortals we killed, not 4).

As to pikes getting later in the war: I'm certain we could have held, our production was simply too big to counter, certainly in our GA. At the first sign of war, general feeling was that we could lose 2 or 3 fringe cities if things went badly, but no way Vox could get to our capital. It turned out that they never attacked any of our cities directly (except Inchon, in which they had about as much luck against our units as possible, and we still held), but we were anticipating some losses.

Blocking the Inchon landing site would have been best, however we had a couple of options left. One was moving Inchon a bit, into a less desirable position. The other was going for Vox's core immediately, instead of blocking off most of their army. Both options would have been bloodier for us, but with the same result. And as long as Inchoff got settled and no outside iron was traded to Vox, there was hardly any strategy that could have saved Vox.

I don't think it took us long to have a fairly accurate estimate on the number of immortals we faced, but indeed, we were wrong in not doing the analysis before the war broke out. But, it wasn't really needed to have anything other then a rough guess at that time, Grog was watching over us. If I have to pick one thing that saved us, and ultimately led to victory, it was one (1) bold regular warrior, alone on his mountain. If you really wanted any chance of actually winning, you had to find some way of circumventing him or removing him peacefully, instead of attacking him directly.

Re: Elipolis: it was a "why not try" thing, but only after we saw the odds were good. It's not that we risked too much in getting it, and there were still a lot of things we could have done with those forces. My guess is that it would have taken us about 8-9 turns to get your core completely without Elipolis, 6-7 with. But that depends on the amount of forces defending, it might have been faster then that.

Last point: I never commented on the apology, because I was not certain on how things would progress. Now that it seems peace will be reached (after some negotations), I still want to get a late comment in.

Personally, I don't care for breaking a treaty, trying to bend a situation in which we grew bigger and bigger as opposed to you. I don't think an apology is needed for that, it's not because we will never break a treaty that we have to expect others do the same thing. Nothing wrong happened, in Civ it's perfectly legal to backstab someone.

What I do feel strongly about (and kudos to Beta for posting that as well) is how unfriendly communication became on the public forum, most likely fueled with private communication to other teams (which we did not have, for almost the entireity of this war). I'm one of the GS members who were seriously considering resignation, It became much too grim, and a kind of personal All-teams-against-GS thing, it was far from fun. Most likely most of the statements were not intended as personal attacks, however on our side they were felt like that, and offended me greatly. In return, it lead to outcries on this forum from us (well, from me at least) that only added to the grim atmosphere. I'm very sorry about not having more restraint, however still consider it bad taste to drive someone up to the point were he'd rather just left Apolyton then to continue to get batterred upon. I really hope it is the last time this happens, and I certainly have learned my lesson when it comes to me commenting on other members or teams, no way would I willingly do that to someone else. So in case I get out of line, please bring back memories of this situtation, and I certainly will back down or try to rephrase something that got misunderstood.

DeepO

[GhengisFarb™]

Originally posted by DeepO
What I do feel strongly about (and kudos to Beta for posting that as well) is how unfriendly communication became on the public forum, most likely fueled with private communication to other teams (which we did not have, for almost the entireity of this war). I'm one of the GS members who were seriously considering resignation, It became much too grim, and a kind of personal All-teams-against-GS thing, it was far from fun. Most likely most of the statements were not intended as personal attacks, however on our side they were felt like that, and offended me greatly. In return, it lead to outcries on this forum from us (well, from me at least) that only added to the grim atmosphere. I'm very sorry about not having more restraint, however still consider it bad taste to drive someone up to the point were he'd rather just left Apolyton then to continue to get batterred upon. I really hope it is the last time this happens, and I certainly have learned my lesson when it comes to me commenting on other members or teams, no way would I willingly do that to someone else. So in case I get out of line, please bring back memories of this situtation, and I certainly will back down or try to rephrase something that got misunderstood.

DeepO

But that is exactly the most important dynamic of an inter-team game. The ability of other teams to manipulate the decisions of the another team through words and propaganda alone.

Has Roleplay actually fought anyone? They have done all their world shaping though correspondence and postings. Lego had made everyone back off their continent by very clear postings of threats to those who might even consider it.

These are aspects the AI simply can't perform. Members should not see these as personal attacks on themselves, although it can be entertaining to take them as attacks on the team. I am still waiting for a team to declare war based on the postings of another team and see what the world reaction to that will be like.

[DeepO]

GF, I'm not saying I would like all inter-team communication to stop, I'm saying the slander (is this the right term? always mix them up) was too much, and way too personal.

It's not that Vox should not have tried to gain support, and it is our own fault (well, more precisely our own bad analysis of the situation, were we thought secrecy was the best way of winning the war) we didn't get support from other teams. But the way it was performed we had only one way of perceiving it: as offensive, and as a direct personal attack.

I'm serious when I say I was a few posts away of never returning to 'poly, and believe it or not, but that had nothing to do by being outclassed in a certain aspect of the game. On the contrary, I respect other's skills, in all areas, not just in the things I'm good at myself.

DeepO

[Arrian]

I am still waiting for a team to declare war based on the postings of another team and see what the world reaction to that will be like.

The StormHawk Party is right up your alley then, GF.

-Arrian

[GhengisFarb™]

Originally posted by Arrian


The StormHawk Party is right up your alley then, GF.

-Arrian

I thought I was already a member of the StormHowk Party, only the Drizzle Hawk Faction.

Althought the Drizzle Hawk Faction is feeling like changing its name to the Hurricane of Pain Faction.

[Theseus]

I very much feel the pain...

On the one hand, inter-team interaction became, uh, distasteful and just on the edge of unacceptable... thus, especially, some of GS getting way turned off.

On the other hand (and I might be a little bit alone on this, especially in GS), I give two to Vox and Beta.

In the context of every bit of politico-military reading I've ever seen, these guys performed like champs...

Let me say it plainly: Us Strat guys are supposed to be 'the best.' F*ck that... Vox almost NAILED us, TWICE, and for that, they get my highest regard.

[vondrack]

Theseus, !

[Hot_Enamel]

Ditto

Nice post Theseus

[Beta]

*Beta bows.

Thank you Theseus. We appreciate your comments.