Figure this deserves its own thread.
- Jerks warred AMA, lost, it was a fun good war. At the end, we did a "max gain" wave with +4 hits from 6 or 7 of our big provinces, which was worth about 2400 acres total. The +4 hours added roughly 400 acres.
- Cello seemed very upset about this, claiming that it's poor sportsmanship and bad manners. I apologized for the +4 (if it's truly BM) but I didn't apologize for the max gain wave, because, as far as I understand, it's fairly routine for most kingdoms to phase into max gain hits in the last wave of war. He claimed this wasn't the case. What are people's thoughts on this?
- Personally, I think we timed it well and were able to withdraw one tick before their elves got home. It was the correct strategic play. Cello claimed they would have CFed us but for this final wave.
- Just before withdrawal there were some CF discussions between me and Cello/Elit. Their demands were initially 3k cow/calf acres and 5k core acres for an eoacf, with no restrictions on hits. We negotiated for like an hour and a half but clearly we needed goodz' mediation services because we were unable to reach a deal. My final offer (I think) was 2.5k cow acres with one hit max on our biggest prov, and 3.5k core acres.
- Cello ran the gamut of impressive psychological tactics on me in his efforts to make me give more land. For example: "This will just create more bad blood between our kds," "I'll lose any respect for you I had," "To fight us is a suicide mission don't throw your age away," and finally even a role reversal where he got upset at ME when I wouldn't CF, as if it was wrong for me to force them to take the land the hard way. Honestly I believe Cello is probably a pretty nice guy and these were just methods of land extraction, so I don't hold it against him. And the truth is that I think everyone respects an opponent who fights back more than one who lays down.
- Elit's diplo was a lot different, his was more like, "We didn't get enough acres," including some weird logic involving them having 50mil fools golded by a ghetto a few days before war. (This is why they didn't get enough acres or something. I responded by saying that had nothing to do with our war and was an outside factor and it didn't follow that Jerks should have to give more land just because they failed to take enough in war.)
- I think it's a little lame that AMA forced a second conflict on us right away. We lost 6.5k acres total (from war and hostile) and they were up from the war win bonus (15k?), which I also consider acres they "gained" from us. Especially considering Pew gave them a CF for free earlier this age after their war, I really hoped they would pay it forward. Mean play is bad for the game, nice play is good for the game. (If our positions were reversed, there's no question - I would have just CFed them. But maybe I have a loser's attitude.)
- The free CF requested wasn't EOA, it could have just been a couple weeks or something; generally I would say that winning a war and forcing a b2b conflict is pretty callous. That said, AMA did have a previous grudge with jerks that remained unsettled, and we did fireball Elit in the first week or so of the age, so perhaps they had their reasons.
- With our position in the charts post-war, it was pretty obvious we had no shot of crowning. AMA was in third place with around the same pool as us I assume, so would start suffering pool decay right away. We didn't have much reason to give acres for a CF, and it seems to me that my player base much prefers to fight over acres in general than to give them up, so I decided we'd take our chances with a hostile. I think it's still the case that this isn't worth it for them overall, but having come on so strong with the diplo and threats, I suppose they needed to follow through or they'd lose face.
- I try not to take all this too personally, because it's just a game. Some of our players are a little more hot-headed than me, but I guess the drama element is what makes it fun for some people.
- Anyways, we've exchanged a fair number of hits. Here's a mini summary. It's so one-sided because the meter is 28-69.
** The kingdom of 2:26 **
Total land exchanged: -3,346
- Due to my players being kinda newb and a human core overtraining elites, apparently we didn't have enough gold for a dragon out of eowcf. I think it hurt that we initially thought we would get a CF, since people rebuilt into 50% guilds and stuff and so rebuilding was expensive in a short amount of time, but still, they could have just trained a lot of defspecs. In retrospect, I probably should have ran a dwarf core this age, because it's just a lot easier with our activity, level of micromanagement, and is more forgiving when mistakes are made. But anyways, now we've slain two dragons from AMA and we haven't even sent one of our own, which is embarrassing, but we soldier on. I haven't even hit yet.
- Sorry for the wall of text it's just been a while since I posted since I've been busy (school started early for me) so I like to really jam it in (that's what he said ROFL).