Be cool Honey Bunny.
This is exactly what doesn’t need to be happening.
Unfortunately, I am the worst ever at diplo because I don’t do a good job of sandbagging my position. This is worsened by my playstyle, but I’ll try…
Let’s examine what happened here:
Shin sends me a PM about three turns ago after I have consolidated some guys in the fort I took from Pan wanting me to clarify that they aren’t about to move after Shin. I confirm that they are not and that they are about to move out, which they do on the next turn.
The following turn, Shin attacks one of our border provinces that I have lightly defended because Pan can’t reach it at that moment and I wasn’t worried about Shin because… you know… I just got that PM from them making sure we’re not looking to attack them. As I said… I’m bad at diplo and so failed to interpret this as “I want to make sure your guys are gone so when I attack it’s cool for me”.
As I am completely unprepared for this attack, the next turn I can’t do much except pull forces away from an already rallying Pan and get into a position to deal with Shin. Meanwhile Shin is consolidating a huge stack of doom.
So last turn I am ready and launch a lot of raids into Shin’s territories.
The net result of that was that I gained some ground on Shin (while losing lots to Pan who, despite the sandbagging here is doing just fine).
Outside of the provinces themselves, Shin’s total losses were 1PD in each province and 1 Scout. There was nothing especially troublesome with my raids… hell, if anything it was overkill given the 1 PD everywhere…
Meanwhile Shin has finished assembling his stack of doom which I have no answer for while he is running away with research.
But suddenly I’m supposed to be the bad guy here? I can’t compete with stack of doom tactics… smashing our armies together is suicide for me… doubly so given his research… Raiding is all I really can do…
And again… I didn’t want this fight
My reaction was really the only option I had other than letting Shin just roll me.
And it’s not like these provinces are defensible. Meanwhile Pan is retaking their provinces and have an enormous army too…
So…
Pan has an enormous army and is rallying…
Shin has a stack of doom I can’t handle, an enormous research lead…
Vanheim has a handful of indefensible provinces…
Why would I be a target?
Caelum has an enormous army with crazy mobility about to take a cap. Once that is done, one more cap and they win and there are some very vulnerable caps they can land on in 1-2 turns.
This is what I was saying about the graphs being misleading. There is no way that I am about to win this thing. I have a bunch of provinces that I can’t hold from raiding and that’s about it.
Honestly, I’m sort of hoping that I can negotiate peace with Shin, but I knew I couldn’t do that when he had taken one of my provinces and was assembling a stack of doom, so I counter-attacked to show that maybe war with me isn’t the super-easy pickin’s that might have been the impression.
Along those lines, I’m sending Nate a PM to see if something can be worked out, because just as I didn’t want this war to begin with, I still don’t really want it… we can see what Nate thinks, but don’t misunderstand that this whole mess was none of my doing.
Now I’m happy to address any questions… :)
