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Arnelos
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of the Free World
Sep 2002
time: 00:33
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Well, from what I understand, GoW at the time was still assuming that the unit warp was of GS' entire army from their north to their south. The reality is that the only units warped were one Roleplay Horseman and a few catapults. 
Questionable tactic, to be sure, but it wasn't at all what you guys thought it was. The fact that GS' army was ALREADY in the south when the war started wasn't even something Roleplay Team had entirely expected, either.
I imagine that GS moved the bulk of their army south when Glory of War alerted them to the plans of a joint invasion of RP. How much faster would RP have fallen if GS' army really was still in the north?
Though, I suppose if GS' army were to have been in the north, they could have just launched an invasion of GoW straight-off. Sure, RP Team would have ended up a burning wreck in no time without GS' help in the south, but how much damage could GS have done in the GoW north before ND and GoW could run all the way back home?
One one hand, it's an interesting hypothetical. On the other hand, it's really immaterial: that's not what people did.
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vulture
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Leeds, UK
Jun 2001
time: 05:33
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If our army had been waiting in the north with enough galleys, then I suspect we'd have invaded GoW to trash their cities and try to cut a deal with ND where we let them overrun RP, while we took and kept GoW territory. That would have been my personal preference anyway. No idea whether ND would have gone for it, and I'm pretty sure Lego would have kept out of the RP-ND side of things and just gone up against us (probably by researching Navigation and gambling on whacking Estonia while our forces were on Bob).
I seemed to be the only one one our team paranoid about Lego's ability to invade from our east; everyone else seemed to thing that they wouldn't do it since they were a bunch of builders (Hah!) or that it was a gamble we had to take anyway (possibly true).
I still think our big mistake of the war (apart from letting GoW into the south at the start) was not keeping all our units in a huge stack. ND / GoW were able to make good use of the stack combat effect to wipe out stacks of knights on hills (4 attack vs 6 defence), which despite appearances ends up with fewer losses for the attacker than the defender. Any time they could bring a 2:1 advantage to bear (and with 9 moves on roads, it's not that hard), we suffered disproportionate losses and their relative advantage increased - magnified by GA production and cheap upgrading of course.
If the south hadn't fallen, RPs pike production would have kept up with losses and we could have fought everything to a standstill, which was the best we could have hoped for I think. Eventually ND / GoW would have to give it up as counterproductive (or find some good alternaive strategies, which they no doubt would have), and we'd get to keep about 1/3 of RPs territory in return for our help, which would have been enough to keep us competitive.
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Cort Haus
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London
Apr 2002
time: 05:33
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We would have certainly noticed the double-worker move had it happened on our retreat. We spent hours planning that retreat - pillaging the road to the hill outside Barca, and you couldn't have touched us on the next turn. Our best move of the previous dozen possibly! If we'd been smacked up that turn then we would have known about the double-worker shuffle, alright.
We agreed the cease fire around the next turn, ISTR. Had you chased us down, we'd have got most of our Knights off that next turn, and the turn after, when you could have hit us, I think we'd have got all the pikes/MI/cats on the hill by Sirocco for a farewell show down, leaving a few loose units coming back from Toledo & Pamplona for easy pickings. I doubted you'd hit the stack, thinking you wouldn't want to risk losing even a few units in a war that was already over.
It all ended sweetly though, with all the units now home, retired and relaxing on the beaches of Stormia for an era ...
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Cort Haus
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London
Apr 2002
time: 05:33
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I was surprised you didn't stroll round Pamplona towards New Madrid. Perhaps our Knights between Alamo and Pamplona we deterring that, as they were deterring the attack on Pamplona.
We wanted to build up strength around that Saltpeter (not that we knew it was there - we just liked the hills) and build a city there, but ended up diverting forces to the Pamplona/Alamo stack, and we didn't have the right amount near Barca to be able to push the settler forward and found it.
Thing is, if we'd held back those forces in the SW for the 'Barcelona Barricade', Pamplona would have been taken sooner and the front line would have gone anyway. The feeling was that we had to try and defend Pamplona, and we didn't have enough to do anything else. We did, but they were coming south from the GoW landings (there were more troops than you saw in the north, btw  ).
Despite damning myself for the atrociously stupid and incompetent move that lead to our final defeat at Pamplona, (for which my soul will burn for eternity), the facts remain that we could never, ever have defeated 3 civs with superior units and with us missing an essential resource and facing naval logistics requirements - to gain a permenant, viable ecomonic base on Bob.
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notyoueither
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of naught
Aug 2001
time: 22:33
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vmxa1,
The warp is putting units in a city and then gifting that city to another civ. The units in the city are then transported to the owner's capital. GS did do this to both send a couple of RP horse back to Pamplona when they were on a boat near on our coast and to lend some assistance with some cats that were left out for the horse to capture and take back with them. The horse were landed, then next turn they DoWed, captured the city, captured the cats and moved them into the city with the capturing horse. Peace with us and the city was then sent accepted. When we accepted the peace on our turn, the horse and the cats went immediately to Pamplona. I don't blame GoW (or ND) for being choked about it from the POV of now, after lengthy discussions of what are and are not exploits. At the time it was more in the spirit of 'you know, we could do this' with not a lot of thought about the implications.
Double worker duty would be if civ a moved the workers into a tile, using their movement, and then civ b comes along and 'captures' them upon which they can then have the workers build a road. If civ a moves before civ b in the order towards civ c, then those workers can have two turns of actions before civ c can react. Given how things had gone, if ND and GoW had done that, I really can't say that I would have criticised them for it.
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Hot_Enamel
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Melbourne, Australia
Aug 2002
time: 14:33
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GS/RP warp...
Rp had 1/2 horsemen in Stormia
GS allowed RP to capture a number of GS catapults
GS gifted a Stormia city to RP.
RP moved the horsmen & catapults into the city, and gifted it back to GS
On RP's next turn, the Horsemen & Catapults were "warped" back to RP's capital, which was very close to ND's front line at the time.
Only RP/GS know how many catapults, and if it effected the war.
GOW's double duty workers.....
This would only work, because GoW follows ND in the turn order.
ND moves some workers to an unroaded tile.
On GoW's turn, we "captured" the workers, and roaded the tile.
Thus, the workers moved on ND's turn, and roaded on our turn.
This extra tile of road, would of allowed our Riders to move in and cause quite a bit of damage to GS.
So incensed was GoW that GS/RP used the "warp" exploit, that the worker double duty ....came close to getting the vote...but didnt pass.
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DeepO
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supporting Candle'Bre
Jan 2002
time: 06:33
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What I always thought was strange about the unit-warping, was that GS organized a unit-warp for Vox, and nobody complained. That warp was much more involved, warping all their remaining forces and 5-6 settlers IIRC, but it wasn't seen as an exploit to anyone. After all, the only reasonable alternative was for them to rush some galleys, disband half their forces, and only get 2-3 settlers with them, instead of everything we let them have.
Don't forget the cat-warp was only a couple of turns after we gave Vox the plan to do their warping. Those cats were retreating from the Vox front, and just passed that city when we thought of it. IIRC, I was largely responsible for the cat-gift idea, and there was no discussion whatsoever on the exploit-level of the cat-warp... we simply didn't consider that anyone would mind.
And as I'm commenting on the war, let me state what I think was the main reason why GS did so poorly in this war: our team was totally burnt out, there was no leadership during the war. While others poured all their energy in planning the war, we were messing about, doing turn-to-turn orders. Nearly all the mistakes we made (Toledo-2, the 'worker'-settler group disaster, focusssing on Alamo at the wrong time, etc.) came from people playing the turn because otherwise we would have gone too much over the 24h period, while those who handled it previously were not ready. In the first 10 turns of the war, we maybe had 5 players, none of which had clear orders what to do. It's only after Cort toke over, that we got our focus back, just in time to do a clean retreat...
There were a couple of other things that went wrong. For instance, we did had a long-term plan to invade GoW massively once the war was in full swing. But... due to burn-out of most members supporting it, it never went beyond the planning stage. It would have required leaving RP on their own for a while, with only the support we had given it in the first 5 turns (which were still a decent amount of units), rushing all of our production to the North. However, a large part of our gold was used somewhere in the middle of the plan to upgrade WCs to knights, and help RP immediately, instead of using that money to upgrade our invasion forces. So... about the time we now 'invaded' GoW, we only had that minimal force ready, instead of the massive force we initially planned for.
I think the war would have gone a lot differently if we kept our focus on that plan. RP would have been destroyed anyway, but the GoW core would have been gone as well, and most likely ND would have been damaged before the forces of the South, or Lego could have reacted. However, that's a lot of ifs, and given our activity not possible at all... this war came at a very bad timing for us, if it had been around the time the Vox war started, we would have done it a lot differently. Or perhaps if it happened now, it would be differently, with our new player dedicated to the job...
No, the one thing I learned is that you need a strong leadership, a strong player to play a demo game. I'm glad that Nathan (which did a superb task) got a worthy replacement with Cort Haus, I'm not so happy that in the time of the transition, we lost a war, and had to retreat our allies to former Vox territory.
DeepO
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WhiteBandit
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Southern California
Jul 2002
time: 21:33
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One interesting thing to note, I remember participating in some diplomatic discussions with GoW before the war broke out. Our first sense that something fishy was in the air was when MZ kept stonewalling us and stalling on trying to get a tech trade with RP. I believe we needed Chivalry and MZ kept coming up with all sorts of excuses.
It was at this point we knew something was up. We figured an attack was imminent and immediately setup plans to prepare. We figured we had anywhere from 5 - 10 turns before an attack began. (In reality it was somewhere around 12 turns before we were attacked).
Our entire civilization went into military building mode. However, this wouldn't make a difference. We had mostly peaceful intentions, so our army was never too large. Plus, we were in the middle of a full on REX of the southern part of the continent, so GoW basically caught us with our pants down. Our production never had a chance to produce what we needed.
The other factor that convinced us we were sure of GoW attacking us was looking at ND's strength relative to us. They went from something like being weak to us, to being strong to us in a matter of 5 turns. All the while, MZ was still putting up a smoke screen by saying how they were thinking of attacking ND soon.
Noble intentions, but the fact that it was obvious GoW was stonewalling us in regards to techs (as well as EVERY other civilization kept saying strange excuses), we knew a reaming was imminent and we could only prepare the best we could. We figured we had a chance against GoW. Once we saw NDs strength increase drastically though, the picture became clear and we knew our chances of survival were slim.
It was then we started negotions with GS in earnest.
How long were you guys planning the war against us for if I may ask? We had roughly a 12 turn heads-up which isn't too shabby in my opinion. But 12 turns doesn't makeup for 40 - 50 turns of planning or more.
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30-01-2004 13:58
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