"A Song of Ice and Fire", veterans-only game, MA. In progress, midgame...

[Corwin]

All right Dimaz, thank you for letting us know.

On an unrelated note - the Empire of Pythium would like to aquire some death gems - 10-15. We can offer you any other gem type except earth in return.

[Executor]

errr, shiny AI?

[Baalz]

Yeah, something about the 4th nation piling on in year 2 kinda destroys my motivation to fight much of a drawn out defense.

[Lingchih]

4th nation? You don't mean me, do you? I just took a water prov next to you. No harm done.

[Squirrelloid]

I think he's referring to Machaka

[Corwin]

Originally Posted by Baalz

Yeah, something about the 4th nation piling on in year 2 kinda destroys my motivation to fight much of a drawn out defense.

I have to say that this is quite shocking Baalz. What Fakey did with Abyssia was bad, but I really didn't expect it from you - your nation is the leader in research, has strong army and has twice as many provinces as Abyssia did when they went AI. And you are one of the very experienced veteran players, whom I remember from several of my previous games. And you did it without even courtesy of letting me or anybody else know that you are switching to AI.


What has happened to your own "Baalz Good Player Pledge" ?!?

" If real life prevents me from doing this (emergencies, lack of internet access, etc) I will at the very least try to contact the game administrator and ask him to do it – realizing this is an imposition that should be reserved for things other than lack of interest. I will not set my nation to AI until 1) No substitute is able to be found after a couple days or 2) My capital has fallen (feel free to play through this if you like).
I’ll do my best to at least put up a token defense with the last of my forces when defeat is all but certain – this doesn’t take much time and makes the game much better for everyone else."

Yes, getting dogpiled always sucks, especially by 4 nations. But you are screwing everybody by going AI in this manner. All these good words about respect to other players time investment you have written in your pledge?...

[Baalz]

I can't express how bloody frustrating it is that 6 out of the last 10 games I've been in have resulted in 3+ (usually 4+) dogpiles on me before the end game, usually before the end of my first war. 2 were anonymous, and 1 is in progress and early enough that's still a possibility - which means I pretty much can't play non anonymous games. Justified however you want to, lopsided dogpiles are bloody miserable with neither attackers nor defender getting a good game. There's no strategy, no skill, I basically got voted out the game before the first blow was struck. I've got the research and skill to inflict a bit of damage and draw it out, but having intimate experience with this what usually happens is everybody knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have no chance and thus nobody is super motivated to actually pay in blood to finish me off once I'm good and crippled by storming castles, etc. Putting up a defense will likely result in me limping along for some time in a hopeless situation. Why would I do that (yet again) when a significant portion of the players of the game just let me know they're not interested in having a good game? Every one of my neighbors was attacking me last turn (sounds like TC gained a token border...though he did let me know that he'd attack me if it looked like I couldn't hold off the dogpile), so I don't even feel any guilt for unbalancing the game with a power void since half the bloody game should more or less get an even piece of my corpse. I do apologize to you specifically Corwin, but I can't in good conscience stick a sub into this miserable situation - they're too hard to come by for even viable positions. My own frustration aside, it's best hat Shin just implodes evenly at this point.

[DrPraetorious]

Oh, come on.

You were in the middle - which I'll allow, is unfair - and then you proceeded to spread out over the sealanes expanding as fast as you could. I did measurements, for each and every one of your neighbors, you were closer to their capital than to your own. You take a strategy that enables you to grab all that territory - okay - and then you complain because not one neighbor will just let you have it?


I agree that it's no fun to get dogpiled, but you also didn't engage in any diplomacy that I could detect. I, for example, was entirely bribeable!

You're right that if you want to expand as fast as you can and never talk to your neighbors, you can only play in Anonymous games. Expect to get dogpiled anyway.

[Baalz]

This is kind of a silly argument, but you'll have a hard time making the point that I was overly aggressive this game, at no point was I more than 10% bigger than the smallest player (excepting when Aby folded), never remotely a leader in anything other than research. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded and could have pushed the diplo front more, but at the point a couple NAPs have been rejected and nation 3 is piling on, and there are indications that even more have signed onto the dogpile it's a bit late to start trying to desperately bribe people off. Meh, I really don't feel the need to justify my playstyle to you but the picture you paint isn't very accurate.

[Meursy]

I would have subbed for Baalz.

Apologies for jumping into a game thread like this, but I've come back to Dom 3 recently after a single MP game in 2008, which included Baalz, as well as Jazzepi.

As well as being a lot of fun, the game was a good lesson on what constitutes taking a dogpiling well, and badly. I'm happy to say Baalz was a very good sport on both ends of the hurled bratwurst.

So to see him setting AI here is surprising for me as well as others, but anyone who's read anything he's written here, or played with him, knows that he wouldn't be doing such a thing unless his frustration was well-founded and vast.

I can also attest to the mentality that causes less reputed players to want to step up and take a (well-supported) swing: throughout the time I was playing in that aforementioned MP game, whether I was sitting on the bus, walking through the park, or perhaps spending some quality time with loved ones....no matter what was going on around me, from time to time a dark cloud would cross my features and in some weird Dom 3 Tourette's syndrome kind of way spit out "Dogpile Baalz!", for no reason, before calmly returning to whatever it was I was doing. It was uncanny.

It is a very unfortunate side effect of posting so many awesome strat posts methinks: he's painted a huge target on his forehead. So many more players have heard about him as a result of the guides, and they just assume he's gonna mangle their elite sacred squad with a single monkey if don't combine to take him down. It happened in our game, and I have no doubt it happened in the other games he mentioned.

Obviously there are plenty of other good players out there that people should be similarly scared of, but simply aren't because they aren't so publicly visible. These players might even post in his guide threads, but no one remembers them so much.

Just give it a thought before you judge too harshly

Ok, end thread invasion. But seriously, I have some time the next month or two, so if you need some hopeless positions subbed in this or other games, drop me a PM, and I'll probably give it a go.