Boudica

It's making me sad that my fact checking of DoctorOrgans claims is viewed as taking part in the flame war. This reminds me of the saying "If you argue with an idiot for more than five minutes, there are two idiots arguing", yet still one thing is arguing and the other is refusing to accept that there are lies being said about you. Perhaps a better solution would be to request to ban him from the forums. I can't really even remember seeing him post anything helpful, or on-topic. It's just three things on repeat, regardless the topic. Let's see what the admins think about calling other members boring, putting words in their mouth, telling them to get a job (thanks, I am self-employed and doing well). I don't think such behavior helps the community.

I'm available over the weekend, starting now, any time you want. Let's see who is making excuses.

I'm not surprised that the meme character has problems choosing which button to press. He's been presented with two choices that are both well-known to be incorrect (to anyone except DoctorOrgans). Sorry to disappoint, badosu, but it's hard to make a comeback. Without greatly lowering my standards for a discussion, that is. After being proven wrong in everything he says, DoctorOrgans switched to expressing himself with irrelevant pictures. Perhaps my simple English, which he considers to be of an academic level, failed to convey the fact that I'm actually willing to participate in a tournament. I seem to be unable to say that in a way he can understand, but that might really only have to do with the conflicting fantasy he is living in his head.

The real idea of coming up with with brackets of such arbitrary sizes is so that you can hope (based on your other arbitrary rules and the small number of active players) to get included in a top category and keep saying that you are higher class than specific other players. I can clearly see how you had problems finding who to put in the silver category to also omit me, but it's ridiculous how you include several other players that don't have a history of beating me more often than not. I don't also need to be a psychologist to see that your inclusion of roscany is rooted in your denial of my previous claims about the imbalance of some of the games you posted. Either a display of your developing insanity, or a lame attempt at trolling. I don't feel angry writing this, I just feel that it barely is worth commenting on. I think I might be up to participating in a tournament hosted with normal settings, fair-play enforcement and badosu's balanced maps too.

It's funny that I actually expected your next post to contain the phrase "common sense". When you get totally devastated by facts and arguments, what else can you do than trying to dismiss that using vague phrases? Maybe also add some more emoticons for emphasis? Of course, you can also try putting words into my mouth and end it all with unsolicited life advice. I take this all as an unusual way of expressing agreement through an emotional denial. There are some more facts for you: It's just you who regularly refers to this gold / silver / bronze classification. Also, I've never seen anyone except yourself claim that you are a "silver player", yet there is even a thread where several more reputable disagreed with that. It's just you who obsessively puts it in every other post. This makes me think if you even responding to me, or if that's an argument you are only having with yourself. Things don't become a fact when you repeat them more often. Saying that you don't care about the TG performance after we just discussed just that based on the replays you posted doesn't make the results look any better for you. BTW, Stockfish, sorry about hijacking your thread. Hope you are enjoyed.

I probably tried to reference what is normally called LLN, but you not only seem to not know the correct name of the theorem, you don't even seem to be able to apply it well. I won't go into details because it's irrelevant here anyway. I don't know how to understand your crazy smiley reaction to my summary of the games. Your methodology of looking only at the kill count is not accepted by anyone else. Maybe this is where you should add some references. You could as well post screenshots of your city and argue that you won because your city is the most symmetrical, but I prefer to not give you any ideas. The funniest thing is that even when I include the games that were known to be imbalanced in advance, even if I include the game that was closed because of one player early resignation, your sample just by no means shows you as someone who wins more frequently. On the other hand, the only games a sane person would consider relevant end in a harsh defeat of yours. I'm sure you fear the day when I actually agree to play a 1 vs. 1 with you (not that it's very relevant to my point about your poor performance in team games). Anyway, as I explained many times before, I'm sick of your practices when you "accidentally" delete your CC or pretend to be AFK, so that you can ask for a rehost and get a better starting position. You've shown several times that you are unable to follow simple fair-play rules, even in the official tournament. There is even a history of you rage quitting our rated 1 vs. 1 because "you were supposed to win". You couldn't accept that your simplified view of who wins a game just doesn't reflect reality.

I guess you're looking at the final kill count. Let me say that your definition of "outperforming" someone is really absurd. I hope that users posting their rating reflect this when deciding about your IQ rating. I really can't stress enough how ignorant it is to only compare the final number of kills, and especially if you compare it with your allies when the game was lost for your team. This just shows that you're fighting your team instead of the opponent, and it could be one of the reasons why many people prefer to play against you. You're counting kills occurring at minute 2 the same as Gaia woman kills from minute 30. You pretend to miss that 18 of my kills in the last game were expensive siege weapons, which made you unable to keep pushing on a map with limited resources. A kill is a kill, right? When you are advanced enough, you might start to realize that it's not the final kill count that wins a game, but mostly the eco. You might start to employ different strategies than hoping for the rest of your team to hold for 20 minutes until you finally start fighting, then preferably going for the weak players (because "a kill is a kill" and "who cares if we end up losing, i outperformed everyone"). I'm not surprised that you selected games from the recent period after my real rating fixture. I'm not gonna check what you left out, but I'm gonna comment on what you selected: When you look at the first game, it's a balance a good player can't be proud of winning with (especially if he'd like to consider himself superior). CryptoCamelius with a weaker civ beat roscany at the opposite front, so we'd have to win our side with Rockss. But you can't really compare Rockss to Akazid because Akazid is experienced with low-pop games. He knew to do cavalry and he brought a lot of infantry to your P3 attack, even though he even went for a big infantry rush before. You'd have to give me credit for keeping the K/D > 1 after rushes from both of you (and none of my kills were women), but if it was to be just moderately balanced, Rockss would have to be able to push first in P3 because he didn't participate in the rush. What happened instead was that he was going for a wonder and kept too many units on eco. I'd have to get more credit for telling exactly what we needed to do, but I'm only writing this because you'd usually start claiming (without being involved in the chat) that it was me who gave wrong commands to the team. You don't mind saying that from a position of someone, who really was only required to go for his 7/10 boom and then send all units into a fight. So this is how DoctorOrgans outperforming everybody looks like. The second game crashed in the middle of what would be a losing fight for you (your untanked army of archers vs. our slinger army, properly tanked with 30 pikemen). From what I remember, you were at a lower pop, lacking minerals (no, those few low-income traders weren't making a difference, even though that was why you said you'd have won). You never even got to build a fortress and you were just going to fall in the next moments. Funny enough, you tried to blame (?) my allies for helping me a lot, yet if if wasn't for Rockss from the opposite front coming to me, I wouldn't ever have been really attacked well. Your K/D is only better because hamdich K/D is much worse and you let him take the damage, while mostly only making the lowest DPS unit available. DoctorOrgans's outperforming in action. Third game: Since Ajan2017 knew how to play, the balance is off. Fourth game: Your rush made Ricsand resign early without saying anything. I guess he wouldn't have to do that if the balance wasn't in your favor. I congratulate you on not making this game last an hour though. I was rushing very successfully too anyway. Fifth game: I think you faced me that game. Early rushes, then fast steamroll. You weren't even P3. Sixth game: You think your rush was getting you ahead of me, but your camels weren't useful anymore that I got P2 towers. I'd be able to get a faster P3. Other than that, I don't like to make conclusions from unfinished games. Seventh game: Now this is a relevant game. Teams look balanced, my civ is typically considered as worse. We were both holding two players. Now since you like kills, notice you only get about half of them as me. I wasn't rushing, so most of my kills are actually soldiers. Eighth game: Unfinished, you are clearly losing though. Ninth game: Yeah, I already commented on that. Final stats look balanced though, so better not make conclusions. There is the summary of the presented replays (from my point of view). Bad balance: 1 3 4 Won: 2 5 7 8 Lost: Undecided: 6 9 I'm looking forward to you claiming that the imbalanced games were actually balanced well, yet even if they were (which would confirm you have to be regarded as a weaker player), the results don't look very good for you. Now keep in mind that my stats are based on longer-term data.

Well, it's not very advanced, maybe you were just looking for a joke that isn't there. Kush is supposed to refer to the Kushites civilization as in "I'll play Kushites", and it is a pun on rush. Thanks for asking instead of faking a laughter.

The reason why the stats are relevant in our case is that we are regarded the same for the sake of balancing.1 There have been games where you were on a slightly better or slightly worse team, but you've only been winning games where the rest of your team was significantly stronger. The numbers were so significant (only around 20% win rate for you) that it made me start regarding you as less skilled and accept balances that would otherwise be wrong. This produced a few victories that made claims about your superiority even more laughable. The top three players might really often get a team that requires them to do wonders, but we all know that this is not really your case. What remains is trying to blame it on the civilizations. I know you're often playing Sparta to have this excuse at hand, but it's not very relevant for the comparison because I'm most often taking Random anyway, so I didn't have a better civilization in most of the games. 1) The only reason someone asks to switch you and me is that they don't want to play with you. It's never happened for the sake of balancing.

These are some nice suggestion. It might be a good idea to check how the behavior has changed in the SVN version of the game though. The current alpha is already two years old and many changes have been made since.

Hello there... I am not sure if it's possible for the host to selectively start ignoring your commands without causing an OOS error. But the part where you describe not being able to type any text in the chat window suggests that it was a bug in your instance of the game. I don't know the internals much and I've never encountered this myself, but we'll know that it's not something new when it happens to someone else. One question: Aren't you by any chance playing on Mac OS? There have been some problems with that version of the game. It might help to restart the game before matches, I think that works for some people.

Hi there, I think that an easy approach could be to add your hosting e-mail account to a desktop e-mail client (Thunderbird or similar). If you haven't done this yet, check what your hosting provider says about the IMAP or POP3 access. From there you can easily select the e-mails and save them to your hard drive (just Save as or whatever your e-mail client supports). If you use Gmail, there is a feature that lets you add you another e-mail account, and Gmail then acts similarly to a desktop email client. I'd have to check, but I think that Gmail then allows you to also transfer all the past e-mails to your Gmail account.

I've checked some of the replays from recent months and you just don't win when you face me directly. Do you always have a bad civilization? Less food? Bad allies? Or what is the reason why it doesn't count this time? The only thing that I said about the presented rating in respect to you was that I don't consider you a better defender than borg or Feldfeld. If you have any idea why that should be right or wrong, feel free to elaborate. If you don't, could it be that you are the one who can't handle that he's just got a lower total rating from an independent player?

You are right, you respecting anyone is never gonna happen.

It's important to define your team roles well at the start of a match:

Ok, maybe I can start with one to set the bar low enough:

Great thread, I like puns! Sometimes it surprises me how I can still come up with something new after many years. I'm not saying they are all good puns, but I'm saying them anyway. Not only because the taste differs from one player to another, but also because you can laugh at how unfunny a line is. And it creates a great contrast to let the good puns shine. Sometimes I even take screenshots to get a permanent record of how (un)funny I was. Too bad that I'm too lazy to go through all of it and pick something to post here.

You made me think about the categories more. Let's take the boom category. To me, it's so closely related to defense, IQ and also attack (so subsequently also multitasking). I've never understood when players congratulate others on how many women they could spam by minute XY. It probably also can be learned and optimized pretty easily just by following a fixed build order based on the starting position. I only take this kind of boom as a soft skill, which is mostly only good for troll games. On the other hand, the top three players are known to do a safe boom, where they can continue to grow well even when rushed at any point (but they still grow fast if they aren't). Does this skill still count as a booming skill, or a defending one? Or perhaps the IQ? Consider that very often the best defense is attack. I rarely find myself just doing the boom because when you compare some early game vs. none, the one side that does the early game usually wins. Knowing how cheeky you can afford to be when booming probably fits better in the IQ part. I appreciate that sarcoma took the time to do the rating. I believe that it's hard to do and he did fairly well (considering that I don't even ever remember seeing him online). I definitely would have to rate borg and Feldfeld higher regarding the defense. I remember several games when they were attacked while having no soldiers and still barely took any damage. When you rate DoctorOrgans higher then them, you must probably have those team games in mind where he's the last remaining player of the team, who "forgot to resign" and "wow, he's defending so well". Honestly, doing this kind of "defense" would only make me lower the player's IQ rating because you can't compare your results with other team members after you let them down to the point of resignation (which is all what this behavior is about; unless you are PhyZic who now has OP cavalry going to destroy all, but that's not the case). When we were talking about defense, fpre sure has to be sad to be left out of this. He'd have to get a 10 on your 9-based scale. I realize that I really have specific games and situations in mind when I think about the rating, so I wonder which situations you had in mind. There has been a game recently when fpre got rushed hard early, yet he never fell. If I had to compare with DoctorOrgans (one of the top 3 defenders based on sarcoma's rating), no supporting situation comes to mind. There was a recent game when we both had to hold two enemies, yet he couldn't slow them down and blamed his allies for this. There have been many games when he never even gets to get a fortress up and gets steamrolled in the first big attack. I can't even remember when he could hold a double-rush fairly well. This just isn't how I imagine a defensive player. Of course, I won't deny I'm gonna get offended for the low IQ score you gave me, but I respect this opinion because I don't even know what you saw. Just in the replays that have been posted here, I think that I've shown the ability to successfully play a variety of less usual strategies when appropriate. I've done early ram attacks at minute 10, various champion raids getting me to 50 K/D, P2 towering, early warships, or just getting a super strong eco and boosting all allies to victory. And of course, cooperated raids with whoever is into that thing. Those games often ended so fast that it's easy to forget about them when doing the rating. OK, let's do it like this. Instead of posting my own rating, I'll just argue with anyone who posts one. Sounds like more fun to me.

This reminds me of the thread where we voted for the best team player, the most overrated player etc. I don't want to be so negative about this, but I don't believe the ratings might be of any high value because: Medium players get affected a lot by the displayed ELO rating, and when they do the rating, a high-ELO player will get high-rated in all the categories (in other words, the winner takes it all). I realized this when people voted one of the best players as the best team player. If you take away the booming, multitasking and micro skill difference, there would be many more players that could win the category. Think players like Issh, who know about the team play. Typical players don't even remember how good others play. I realized this when I hid my rating in the game and some people I've been playing with for years started asking what my rating is. Hard to believe. You have to understand the game well to judge the gameplay well. But the good players already know other good players, so they might not consider it useful to rate them. I'm now thinking, Stockfish, if this isn't about your teaching experience that you have this ambition to rate (grade) players like this.

Hi, I think it's just the Elo rating system with a minor customization.

Organic units can't be captured. You can only lure an elephant by attacking it with a ranged unit, which makes the elephant to follow it to wherever you want. Then you can kill the elephant with other units, provided that you keep the luring unit in a safe distance.

You might better notice the flaws with this strategy when you play against good human players.

Hello there! A badly planned expansion can really cost you the game. In biomes with lower tree count, you'll be forced to to expand for wood. Specific civs also depend a lot on metal (Ptolemies) or stone (Athens). It is very often enough to have one extra mine of those, so if you do, and if wood isn't the issue either, it might work well to only expand later (and attack the enemy expansion first). If you play with the AI, trading is a good alternative. In games against real players, it's harder to keep trade protected though. You might not have enough time for the investment to return either. One other thing to consider is what kind of expansion you go for. If the goal is to acquire extra resources, then you're playing the long game. You should probably play it more defensively after that because time is your friend in that case. You can also make a more aggressive expansion, which lets you disable some of the enemy resources with towers, and it can give you a good starting point for an attack. This can work well when the enemy thinks he doesn't need extra resources, but you make them need some. Losing the only CC you have makes your buildings convert to Gaia, which makes all your eco stop for a long time. Also it possibly allows the enemy to steal all your buildings, which makes you almost certainly lose. One reason for the expansion might be to provide a nearby backup CC if your main one becomes endangered.

Oh, look who is commenting? It's Boudica herself, the best performing heroine to have in your champion army. I'm sorry, but it kind of offends me how you imply that it's a good thing to "reduce the impact of early cavalry rushes". First of all, many types of rushes have already been made less powerful in the recent alphas. Not so long ago, cavalry used to be cheaper, stronger, tougher, faster and more accurate. If you want to be an eco bot playing the same 20 minute start every game, there Sandbox Petra AI is still there to serve you (funny enough, the AI is a female too).

Trust me, it's better not to know. Actually, you could get a good estimate by going into the Replays menu section and summing the game durations of all games. This could be an interesting value to compute in a mod and show to the user. For a quick estimate, I'd just try to guess an average game length and multiply it by the replay file count. Anyway, due to lag, pausing and long setup time, the actual time could easily be twice as long.