You're falling into the trap of thinking of the image as the map, not the graph of province nodes. Your "neighborless borders" aren't borders, they're the innermost part of your nation (as in, the nodes in the subgraph you control that are furthest from subgraphs you don't control). Again: I could map Valanis's graph nodes onto a different (and "wraparound") map image, and it wouldn't change anything except perhaps the player's psychological reaction to the graph's (aesthetic) topography. Given how many (and how strongly) people seem to react to the aesthetics, though, that probably would matter, even if it shouldn't.
Right, I think I'm getting what you're saying and it's hurting my head a little bit to try to think of the map as a series of nodes and connections and how that would look warped to wrap around but it makes more sense what you're saying and I was mistaken in my understanding before. I'm not actually sure if it's true. This is really in the "That doesn't seem right but I don't have the wherewithal to disagree" territory so I'll just agree with you with a note that the edge, whether it's an edge on a non wrapping map or a section of map with low connectivity to other specific sections (IE: We could say the C'tis section has distant connectivity to the Phlegra section) is a problem (imo and feel this game demonstrated it) and the reason why it exists is because when the node connections were laid out they were laid out for a non wrapping map, you just don't get such distance in wrapping maps, if it's possible or not (obviously would be with work) it's not how people intuitively connect nodes in a wrapping map but is how they do so in a non wrapping one. Which is why non wrapping maps have problems. Obfuscating it via saying it's not necessarily a property of wrap vs non wrap is just ignoring how it's how pretty much all non wrap maps are made and not how pretty much all wrap maps are made.
This is graph theory, not geography.
Your theory falls apart when it meets Geography
. I mean, you are right, and I was wrong, conquering a full wrap isn't the only way to not increase frontage. But a conquest in dominions isn't a single straightforward taking of a single entity on a grid, it's taking multiple connected entities in one primary direction, this will cause a bulge unless you're so significantly larger then who you're conquering that you border them on two sides (which realistically requires you be about 3 times larger then them.) So, yeah, in a wrapping map you don't HAVE to increase frontage if you've already eaten 2 other players and then eat a third small player. Although that's not a super realistic scenario a lot of the time, and even when it happens it often means you've loosing a fairly safe flank vs a weak enemy for a tougher flank against what's likely one or more stronger enemies.
(as with Mictlan, I think - did they ever even attack you? They claimed they were going to when Abysia and I did but it didn't seem like they did)
(As a side note that means very little: it's weird how the above-quoted comment suggests you don't know the layout of the other side of the map given the public discussions of how Ind & Agartha were at war. Phlegra was on the north shore and Ind was on the south.)
Mictlan did attack me! They launched a number of ritual summon and mages flying in attacks on my provinces, pretty much all of which splattered against 6pd because they were sending in the mages to support the ritual summons but the summons died in the magic phase and the mages died in the normal battle phase. They also did a little bit of a more surviving attack if I recall after I gave them a little bit of advice on how the different battle phases work, but that died to Malikah retaliation. Then they sent their god in, took a province, and offered peace in exchange for that province and a mutual war against you (to ensure that we stayed at peace).
And my scouting was embarrassingly bad this game! Despite having recruit anywhere scouts! The way I had very fine control with my expenses between being able to make literally as many desert warriors as I want per turn and have many lab provinces that I can fine tune mage production with by turning hermit production on and off made me not want to have excess money and scout spending always felt like a bit of a waste. Not to mention the theoretical capacity to pump out a huge number of scouts instantly meant it felt like I didn't NEED to make scouts, I could get them when I need them, in theory, but since the far side of the map was so far away that meant I didn't have a steady stream of scouts heading there... Then you combine that with the fact that both Abyssia and Phlegra did a LOT of patrolling in various random provinces and you end up with a situation where I made few scouts and many of the ones I did made died.
Still, I did get some scouts out east, I wasn't that clueless. It's not trivially easy to conceptualize how the map would look if it was made to wrap because of the underground, basically can't do it with the underground how it is really probably since it takes up so much space for so few provinces, but in general the idea is that Phlegra is to the north east, thus I can get to them via going south west (and I'm in the south west so I'd be near them) Ind is in the East so I can get to them via going west (and I'm the west so I'm near them)
It's terribly made but you can see in this imagination I'd have a large border with Phlegra and Ind. Not really sure how it'd possibly work out in practice. Certainly I'd have more of a border with more people though in a traditional wrapping map. C'tis lack of a border with Phlegra is sorta like how the US is actually mostly south of most of Europe, C'tis is actually more southern then you'd think!
My excuse? I've played exactly 1 MP game of Dom5 and it's been like 36mo - maybe 42. I'm bad with elf nations and have never played one competitively. So I was playing a nation of a type I'm bad with, that I didn't know how to play, outside my comfort zone, when I was very out-of-practice.
...
You, OTOH, were punching down on a bunch of people who spent the pre-game talking about how infrequently they play and how they were unsure of their nations. If you didn't know we're out-of-practice amateur Dominions players, it's hard not to conclude it wasn't b/c you didn't want to know. It's quite rich for you to invoke hypocrisy here - and that's even without considering the insinuated aspersions you've been casting at me this whole game while complaining I was being uncivil and snide.
And yet you played a lot better then some of the other players in this game. There was a little bit of talk of being bad or rusty, especially from C'tis and Abysia, but many of you seemed quite confident in your public and (early game) private diplomacy/chat. To be frank, if you were a representation of everyone in this game I would have been quite happy to play Na'ba to the best of my ability. Of course, you aren't, and ultimately I wasn't really that happy with that aspect of the game. But how should I make that determination? And also, you and Phlegra both played okay it seemed, I don't have any regrets about my choices when it comes to you two. And I think if I didn't kill some people in this game very easily, they would have died just as easily to one of you two too be honest. Frankly, that's what happened to Mictlan.
As I said repeatedly, you dropped a lot of hypotheticals about this being Ys's game to lose, but you were always talking about someone else playing a different game even as you insisted you were talking about me. Which, I'll add, you're still doing. It's weird: you persistently insult me, insinuate I'm dishonest & duplicitous, and say I was incompetent, foolish, and hopelessly doomed, but also can't help but then pivot and talk about how powerful my situation was and how I could have easily countered your offensives with my OP nation. I'm at once both very weak and very strong, depending on which would make you look better in that particular sentence. Funny, that.
I'm not trying to insult you, although I probably am managing to do so, I find discussion with you pretty frustrating and maddening at times, so it wouldn't surprise me if I'm be somewhat caustic at times. I'll try to slow it down, but at the same time I think you're reading a lot more into what I'm saying then I am saying, and you're conflating my opinion of your opportunities and the game state during the fog of war of the game vs this post game dissection. Obviously in game I'm going to assume the worst, and post game I'm going to defend those assumptions, but post game I can also make statements on where I think my enemies messed up, which would be hilariously arrogant and asking to get my ass kicked in game if I made such statements during the game.
So, to go down the list. Dishonest and Duplicitous? Yes. Your statements at the start of our war about... many topics I could count as both of those. You outright called me a liar about a topic (my size) that I was demonstrably (and did demonstrate) not lying about. I essentially stopped replying to that discussion because I felt like it had devolved into you basically throwing out nonsense and it had (privately) become clear it wasn't working for you and it didn't matter. This isn't necessarily an insult, many people conduct diplomacy via dishonesty. I think it's an accurate label for how you handled diplomacy in some cases in this game.
Incompetent, Foolish, and Hopelessly Doomed? I don't think I was that harsh. Do you want me to attempt to point out what I see as your mistakes? Or leave you to wallow in self pity for not taking a stat resists bless? If you want my specific thoughts on how you could have better conducted this thug war, I can work on putting them together. My intentions weren't to insult you here, but point out genuine flaws in your approach, or at least point out they exist when you seemed to miss them (and thus have no chance to learn from them.) I have no doubt that in giving advice I can give it insultingly at times, but that's not my intention.
How powerful your situation was, and how you could have countered my offenses with your op nation (to be clear, Na'ba is an op nation as well. I don't know which one is MORE op, but on this map I think Ys has a pretty hefty geographical advantage.) Well. That's true too, I think you had a great situation early on and yes you could have stopped my offense. The fact that you didn't is because of what I think are some flaws in your gameplay (At least, stopping the offense, I don't know your situation THAT well to tell if you really squandered your capability to beat me in war.) I don't see the contradiction between these two ideas.
We were at war for 23 turns IIRC. For probably 21 or 22 of those, you attacked 2-5 of my border provinces (i.e., most or all of them) with random basic commanders who immediately retreated, à la Dom3 scouting. And every time any army or raider showed its face, you tailored a thug or SC with specific gear to neutralize whatever they faced but then stealth away w/o facing retaliation. Don't tell me you weren't trying to play optimally, and certainly don't tell me that extremely successfully adapting to face new threats proves you weren't. I haven't played a game that felt like this in at least 12y, maybe more. It felt like a CBM game, in the worst possible way.
I'm not sure if this is an insult or a complement but I'll say thank you either way. But I'll reiterate, the way I played sub optimally this game was in deciding to fight Ys. That doesn't mean that the way I conducted that war was an attempt to play sub optimally.
I'd also add that you were VERY capable of stepping up your conquest. All you'd've had to do was deploy 3-5 thugs or 2-3 SCs at once instead of counting coup by killing off armies with single unsupported mages (this self-imposed handicap seemed odd, but makes more sense since you've now stated you wanted to use this game as thugging practice). You also could have engaged in any sort of raiding or other warfare short of conquest to cripple my economy, yet you didn't - you sat back and turtled until you could curbstomp me at no risk to yourself.
I made the determination that sending out heavily geared extremely expensive thugs to far away lands where they were liable to be slain to temporarily raid provinces that I didn't have the capability to keep to not be worthwhile. The end of the war between us would be when I knocked over your capital, raiding your provinces really wouldn't speed that process up, and it was a slow enough process that I didn't want to get in a raiding war in your lands. If you were a land nation I think I would have raided you much more extensively, but as it was it just really wasn't worthwhile for me to do much raiding. You might have noticed how I had a Sahir die a really ignoble death underwater at one point, which was one of the few provinces of yours I tried to raid underwater.
Again: it's hard to conclude you weren't toying with us, and that you weren't doing so very knowingly and intentionally - especially since you're also insisting that you were playing sub-optimally. Those two claims are at odds with each other. It looks A LOT like you imposed a specific handicap on yourself, and then min-maxed to a T within the constraint that all heavy lifting would be done by thugs.
Well, yes, I played to the best of my abilities within the constraint of fighting you. The constraint wasn't to use thugs though (although I did enjoy using them). It's simply that no one offered situations where other solutions were required. You only attacked me with thugs of your own that were easy to counter thug, and the "armies" that attacked me... Well, from you they only consisted of a pile of mercenaries with no mage support, essentially no different then a mobile pd dump, of course I killed them with the equivalent of a pd raider. If you had supported them with mages that could have stopped a thug from killing them, I would have used something else. Same story with Abysia (harder for him since he was so fire magic focused of course which isn't great vs thugs made of magical fire.)
Further: Ys would have been FAR easier to counter than Na'Ba. Na'Ba has out-of-the-box ethereal glamoured flying stealthy MR18 shock/fire-res F3A3E1?1 full-slot giants (which I feel comfortable calling supercombatants in the old sense of the word), and recruit-anywhere glamoured stealthy MR17 fire-res F2A2E1?1 full-slot giants. The only weakness Na'Ba has is that its elites have iron and/or salt vulnerability, and that's not much of a vulnerability. Ys has shortcomings galore: ridiculously cap-centric, with much weaker mages who cost roughly as much (plus a lot of resources underwater and no stealth + low magic paths on cav), low magic diversity, outright bad outlying forts, mediocre nat'l troops that cost a lot of resources for EA-tech gear in MA (but can only be found UW or on coasts), spellsong to slow down their best mages, etc. It's also notable that Ys cannot cloud trapeze out of its capital or any of its UW forts, which would make the kind of instant-retaliation shenanigans you used to flatten every army you faced (and almost every raider) significantly more difficult to do turn after turn after turn. Not impossible, ofc, but far more difficult.
And that's not even the strong part of Na'ba! What about high magic diversity via summons and a decent path for blood boot strapping leading to a super broken blood summon (even by the standards of national blood summons)!
But really, yes, you can talk about Na'bas strength and Ys weaknesses. I'd disagree on some points (Well, I don't know what you mean by "the old sense" of supercombatants, but I wouldn't say they are good ones. And I think spell singer is generally a positive trait.). And I could do the reverse. But let me ask you seriously, do you not think that Ys is a top tier nation? At or near the same level as Na'ba? People aren't going to agree on everything, and that's fine, but I do think that is the case. If you disagree that's fine, but I don't think I'm going to agree with you, so sorta a pointless conversation, and probably makes all the other conversations key'd off it pointless as well. Like my opinion on your situation, my opinion on your early diplomacy, my opinion on the hypocrisy of calling someone out for playing a strong nation when you're playing Ys on Valanis. All these thoughts that I've said on these topics only make sense if you think of Ys as a very strong nation, if you don't, and we can't agree on that, then we'll never agree on those areas.
Edit: It's late and this took me a long time to make, so I might have missed stuff, if there's something you wanted me to reply too or acknowledge but I didn't feel free to point it out.
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Topic: Dominions 5 Round 05 - Finished, Na'Ba victorious (Read 26519 times)