A high stake gamble in a championship game to stay competitive.
Thank you for the great interest in my position in The Cancer War.
Now that the game is over for me I will reveal what happened and why my way of playing the position will always be the most correct given similar circumstances.
I find some of the comments very emotional and lacking rationale and logic. Of course, some players had some very qualified comments, but no need to mention any names as they will know anyway.
I trust that most of you will be able to follow the logic that was dictated by the Robots situation at turn ~60, but probably one or two will decide to reject the logic simply because they feel committed by their original comment.
I will skip most of the game history and jump directly to the situation around turn 60, except for a few comments:
1) Great play by DiG and Wmerkel who probably very early decided to continue their successful cooperation from the Endonians Sector. The fact that they play the two strongest races and start next to each probably just makes their plan easier to accomplish.
2) Only Birdmen and Rebel responded positively to the diplomatic envoys sent very early by the Robots to all the other races, except Cyborg and Crystal. Strangely enough all the players bordering Cyborg or Crystal refused any real cooperation with Robots and so far no race has made any real attack on either Cyborg or Crystal that is worth mentioning. No need to go into details about what this means. People will find out themselves.
3) The Birdmen and Colonies of Man are dead, and Robots/Rebel are being attacked by Lizard/Fascists/Cyborg/Crystal/EE where Lizards has been given control of Biocides, Crystal Thunders, a Gorbie, Glory devices, a captured Rush and some captured Resolutes in addition to his own fleet. In addition to this Crystal has arrived with ships to lay webmines en masse.
4) Two Robotic fleets with the capacity to sweep a total of approximately 30,000 webmines at two positions, low on fuel, and often not enough to prevent the fleets from being covered by webmines, held the enemies at bay. Certainly not enough fuel to risk a retreat. All high tech beams are on ships with mass below 200
5) An ion-storm approaches from the east with a path that will take it directly across the two robotic fleets. The ion-storm is the weakest in the game.
6) Given the above circumstances it will be clear to some that the Robotic position is a dead man walking. However, some options are still possible:
a) Fight viciously with the net effect that the ships gets captured.
b) Stop playing and just let Lizards/Crystal capture the fleet.
c) Self destruct to minimize the amount of ships captured by Lizard/Crystal.
d) Drop and allow a replacement player to decide from option a to d.
e) Offer yourself as vassal for a (stronger) position.
Only option c would be considered by me. Option e) would also be very difficult as there was not really any position to become a vassal to.
But let’s not forget that the Cancer War is a championship game where only winning counts and all of the above solutions means defeat, so when there is another option where there is a chance to stay competitive you are almost compelled to try that one. That final option involves an ultimatum to the player that it will be most useful to remove from the battle and who is in a winning position.
Consequently I formulated an ultimatum to the Crystal commander demanding his withdrawal from any former and current Birdmen/Robotic/Rebel territory.
The only problem is that since the position is basically dead you have your planets and ships to bargain with, but if you give them away you have gained very little.
Dictated by logic crystal was offered that in case of withdrawal all Robotic ships and planets would NOT be given to Cyborg,the only real competitor of the Crystals. Offering the planets and ships to anyone else will simply be meaningless and just delay their capture a bit and not really help that player.
Giving an ultimatum without being ready to accept a rejection would be frivolous so when Crystal rejected the ultimatum, there was not really much else to do than contact the Cyborg commander and tell him about the predicament and ask if he would accept the gift.
Please note that if Crystal had accepted the ultimatum the game would have become much more difficult for Cyborg. Since they risked a much worse position had Crystal accepted the ultimatum, why should the Cyborg commander not accept the gifts now that the ultimatum was rejected?
This was a fairly short description of what happened just prior to the transfer of ships and planets to Cyborg.
I will expect that we will see such ultimatums much more often in championship games with serious players as it will often be the only way to counter the increasing tendency of webmines being everywhere in championship and other games with a high difficulty modifier.
This was just a brief explanation to what happened. Because the game is still ongoing I have tried to avoid giving too many details while describing the situation as accurate as possible.
Regards,
JoeSnoffy
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