There was an awful lot of passive aggression in this game, not least of all by me. Some of it is the nature of the game to be sure, but I’m working on it :) There were a few comments that I stayed away from because wasn’t sure how to respond to them without perpetuating the tone. I want to address a few of them now and just be frank. After the games are over, it’s usually possible to look at things a little more objetively.
I am going to address the meat of this, even though it feels like a bad idea.
Somewhere along the line (maybe when Scribble and Nate collided, maybe after Scribble’s SCs bloodied some noses) there was a real change in tone. It went form being a good cooperative effort to becoming fairly shitty. I think now that it’s just the nature of things… no one likes to lose, and no one likes to feel like they’re at fault for the loss.
In any case, early on, folks were supportive of my nations’s strategic position (if not the way I handled it on the forums) in dealing with my war with Nate. A couple turns before Nate and Scribble collided, I sent this PM to the others (Sorry for the shitty parts re: Nate, but I didn’t want to seem like I was editing to make myself seem better than I am):
I honestly believed what I wrote there. The very next turn though, Nate changed his strategy for the worse (for him) and by 3 turns later, I was liking my chances of winning that war. Albeit in a very long, protracted fashion. Then Nate and Scribble blew each other up. Then it was clear I would win.
I think it’s at this point that the others started to have some setbacks with Scribble and started losing patience with me leading to comments like: “your strategy was to force everyone else in the game to fight Scribble while you gobbled up Mictlan.”
The thing is I never felt like I was “mopping up” Nate. After he and Scribble’s incident, I still didn’t have anything near the troops necessary to take him out. I had some devils that I was raiding with in smallish numbers, but nothing resembling the masses necessary to take out his cap or main stacks. I was pushing everything I could up from my forts, but my best units are all very gold/resource intensive makinng them hard to mass. Making it worse, they are Map Move 1, so even if I ever had a mass of them (I didn’t) it would still take 6-7 turns to get them near his Cap.
In those provinces that were originally Nate’s, at the end, I had most of them, but had a reatively small number of devils (about 30) that were keeping it that way while I was tried to move up more troops (just two turns ago I think, one of Nate’s smaller army took out my 2nd largest collection of nationals).
I think I could have combined my devils and my biggeest stack of nationals and taken him out, yes. But I also think that it would have taken another 10 turns of dedicated effort on my part to do so unless Nate made a major error. (Like losing a “Break Siege” to cut down the siege time’s dramatically.)
I bring all this up just to clarify where my head was on the war with Nate. It also brings a point of conversation that I sort of want to have with Nate maybe via PM later regarding his tactics (he and I seem to be on speaking terms for the moment :P )
I’m not bringing all this up to claim I’m right. Just explaining where my head was. In fact, I realize that there is very little chance that anyone in the game is going to agree with me on much.
I think I’m losing my main point though.
My main point here is that while other felt I was “mopping up”, I felt like I was nowhere near that. By the same token, it’s easy for me to feel like they aren’t doing what they should have been.
This snippet from a PM was actually my favorite thing to come from this game:
First, real quick… just to clear up… I had no access to stealthy thugs. I have no idea where that part of the PM came from… but that’s why I wasn’t raiding him with stealthy thugs…
To the meat of it the PM… Having played a few games now, I think there is a “grass is always greener” sort of mentality shared by almost everyone. Even the winning player often feels like his position is not so great. And if he does like it, he certainly can’t express it. I’ve been in a couple games like this now where everyone seems to basically throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do while being frustrated that the others in their greener pastures aren’t doing more.
In this case, it was:
Me: “I’m fighting Mictlan with an army with Map Move 1 and don’t have a border with Scribble… there’s nothing I can do.” Others: “He has two SCs that I can’t stop… there’s nothing I can do.”
If I’m oversimplifying the position of others, I apologize… I’m not intending to do that… it was what I understood to be the crux of the problem. The point I’m really trying to make is that it’s easy to find reasons why you can’t do anything.
OK… too much on that topic… moving on…
I think a lot of it boiled down to the position that a lot of folks seemed to feel like they were in after Scribbled knocked out DFS… either stand by and let Scribble win or attack him and let me win. I don’t really see how a defeat for Scribble would have directly translated as a win for me, but folks clearly felt that way. In hindsight, it makes it much easier to understand why things played out the way they did. If you feel you can’t win anyway, inertia prob. takes hold.
Obviously I didn’t think this was the case. I was actually worried that if a successful war on Scribble was conducted that I would fall behind due to lack of provinces while others made gains on Scribble. I know others don’t think that would have been a problem for me.
I also received some feedback that my position much earlier that Nate attacking Scribble effectively gave the game to Scribble and I think I stand by that statement. Hindsight is awesome and whatnot. It rally does seem fairly unlikely that there would have been any other outcome to the game at that point. It’s sort of an odd spot in that the game is so early on, but so close to 100% over at that point.
I know Scribble was pretty much required by Dominions law to state at the time that his position wasn’t that overpowering, but I’m curious whether he really believed that. As I said before, I think he was pretty much free to win that game at any point it suited him after that.
Last thing re: me and Nate’s war… recently he said:
This is odd to me in a lot of ways. I mostly won that war, but I certainly wasn’t in first place. Not sure how it would have put him in first place.
Not trying to re-open old wounds… this just seems patently false, but it came way after the point when it seems like Nate would have needed to be posturing.
The funny part of all this is that there was all the hand-wringing and it’s likely that there was simply nothing to be done by the time it started. Scribble played masterfully and quickly turned an early game advantage into a position that was essentially unbeatable before the end of year two. I think that may be the most dominant performance I have seen in a game to date. Well played! :)
