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Post by The Tortoise & The Hare on Mar 1, 2021 18:07:29 GMT
Not my final submission
Hi, this is the hare speaking! Let's start by talking about how we played as a hydra. After we got through the first round of tribes, we realized that tortoise had a very busy life, and didn't have as much time as me to send messages. We arranged ourselves in a face/manager relationship, where I did the PMing, and every night, Tortoise and I would get on discord and plan out our strategy for the next 24 hours, then I would go and execute it. Playing as a hydra allowed tortoise to experience survivor with me even though he would normally be too busy IRL to make it on his own in this game. So even though you didn't see very much of tortoise, he was pulling my strings from behind the scenes  And while this speech was written by me, I was up with tortoise last night brainstorming the main points! Don't count him out, okay?! He puts in the work!! Based on our results, I think it would be fair to call us the most effective hydra in mafiascum history. Our premerge game was a standard game where we built as many connections as we could. Our strongest connections came from the maroon tribe, which was a tribe that bonded very closely during the Grogu vote. These connections paid off when we appeared to be in danger on the red tribe, but we were saved by our connections with Bonobo and Bees, and we were able to take out Lindsay instead of going down ourselves or losing an ally. When Grogu/Ranger returned to the game, we got very close to Grogu very quickly and agreed to work with him and protect him in the shipwreck. In the early merge and shipwreck, our main allies were the maroon 4 (Droids/avo/bard/T&H + ranger), our close ally Grogu, in addition to some weaker side alliances/good relationships with Bees and Bonobo. Tortoise and I thought about who we wanted to endgame with, and we thought droids would be a good option, so we offered them an F2. Avocado also approached us for an F2. But our F2 with droids went bad quickly when they blew up their game by trying to pull off a blindside on bees, so we had to adapt. With ranger voted out to take a shot at the maroon 4, we tried to make ourselves the most approachable remaining member of the maroon 4. We tried to make it seem like we were an outsider to the group, despite the fact that we had two final 2 deals internally. This was a successful effort, because when Dave made his public posts calling out the big threats in the game, we were never mentioned. This effort also paid off, because after Dave went home and all eyes were on the maroon 4, we were not being strongly considered as a target on the round droids went home. We tried to make a move using Bard's idol which we learned about in the last 10 minutes, but unfortunately we came up just a couple minutes short on that one and earned ourselves a rival named Maggie Smith After droids was gone, we knew wanted a strong relationship with Bees because we knew he was in a very good position, and he would be key in a lot of votes coming up. we put in a lot of work to try to convince him we were with him and that we would work with him to take out the returnees. When the game took us to space tribes, we made our first big move. Bees and Avocado, two of our allies, wanted each other gone, but we had other ideas. Bonobo was someone we saw as a major threat to our game, because we didn't see an opportunity to get rid of him later. He was doing an excellent job keeping his connections hidden and staying under the radar. His main enemies were in the collapsing maroon 4 alliance and due to his low profile, we recognized that people would likely want to endgame with him. So we threw the challenge with Avocado. and co-ordinated with him to get the prime idol. We convinced enemies Bees and Avocado to stop targeting each other for one round and we made the play that was best for us by voting out Bonobo. (I know what you're thinking... T&H, you threw the challenge by scoring 3/6?! Yes! I thought everyone was going to score perfect on that challenge because I found it easy! I thought it would at worst go to a tiebreaker at time, so I even wasted an hour before submitting.) As things were approaching endgame, we were openly targeting the returnees alliance, and trying to warn people they still had a lot of advantages and wanted to endgame with each other. So despite being the main person to openly target the returnees, our close relationship with grogu, and the idol shards/items/high perceived threat levels of bard/maggie kept us safe when the returnees controlled the game with their items during the F8 and F7 rounds. At F7 when I drafted my plan to split votes on cleric and rey, I fully expected it to fail because it had grogu in it. However, I also trusted in my knowledge of grogu that he both liked me, and had been targeting maggie since even before the space tribes. I correctly assumed that even in the case that my plan failed, maggie would be the one to take the fall for it instead of myself. And considering how we were both selling each other out behind our backs... I considered this an acceptable risk. F6 was supposed to be the round we dealt with the problem of the returnees using the item Bees had, but the tension between Avocado and Bees grew to be too much and unfortunately we had to send Bees home early. This would have been a game losing scenario if it wasn't for Bees giving us his javelin-syringe item <3 At F5, we knew grogu had a vote nullifier, and that he wanted to target avocado next. He said quite plainly to us that we would be the standout target in F4 after avocado left, but that it would give us the best odds of immunity. At this point the returnees had become complacent, with Dark Rey saying that the next rounds "might become boring". The returnees were co-ordinating for the idol, so there was no hope that avocado and I could have gotten it. Fortunately, I came up with what I consider to be the play of the game. Grogu told us that if Avocado and I guessed low numbers, then he would get the idol. I came up with a plan to guess low numbers with avocado, give grogu the idol, then force him out of the TC with our item and force firemaking against cleric or rey to ensure I didn't become the obvious F4 target if neither of us won immunity. Avocado didn't want to go with this plan at first, because he was confident in his chances of winning immunity and strongly wanted grogu gone immediately, but I convinced him it would give us the best odds of survival, and it paid off. Once we got Avocado on board, grogu won immunity, got the idol, and I immediately took him out. From this point, Avocado and I practiced hive together, and I went from someone who never heard of the game to someone who could consistently stomp beginners in a matter of days, thanks to some helpful youtube videos I found, and plenty of practice. We targeted cleric, expecting her to be weaker at challenges, and the play paid off. Neither of them had the idol, and Avocado won firemaking. Having learned the game of hive and put in our practice, we knew we couldn't go to the end with Grogu after the huge amount of control he had over the game. Fortunately, we were the last person in the game that Avocado felt respected by, so it was easy to vote with him and win firemaking against Grogu in F4. Overall, I believe we played a winning game for a bastard game like this one. When the twists and items worked out in our favor, we capitalized on them to their full extent and made the highest value play we could (bonobo & cleric & grogu + a missed shot on maggie). When the twists and items didn't work out in our favor, we had a low threat level and strong allies to keep us safe. I'm proud of the way we made big moves while at the same time keeping a low profile and maintaining strong relationships that kept us safe. Oh, and also it's a beautiful narrative arc that we were able to take down the most dominant alliance in the game without even having a majority over them after calling them out all game, we should totally win for that alone  I know this is a short speech (~1.5k words), but I made it that way on purpose to respect your time! Please ask questions about the stuff we glossed over if you need more detail. |
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Post by The Tortoise & The Hare on Mar 1, 2021 18:09:00 GMT
I'm going for a Summer from KYE style speech where you just give a short one (hers was 1.4k) because you know you're the standout winner and you're just flexing
Aristophines wrote 4.9k words and got roasted for bringing summer to the end which was a bad move. i expect avocado to do a similar thing here
tris wrote 1.5k but she was not in a winning position and she knew it, i expect dark rey to do the exact same thing here
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Post by The Tortoise & The Hare on Mar 1, 2021 19:14:49 GMT
Hi, this is the hare speaking! Let's start by talking about how we played as a hydra. After we got through the first round of tribes, we realized that tortoise had a very busy life, and didn't have as much time as me to send messages. We arranged ourselves in a face/manager relationship, where I did the PMing, and every night, Tortoise and I would get on discord and plan out our strategy for the next 24 hours, then I would go and execute it. Playing as a hydra allowed tortoise to experience survivor with me even though he would normally be too busy IRL to make it on his own in this game. So even though you didn't see very much of tortoise, he was pulling my strings from behind the scenes And while this speech was written by me, I was up with tortoise last night brainstorming the main points! Don't count him out, okay?! He puts in the work!! Based on our results, I think it would be fair to call us the most effective hydra in mafiascum history. Our premerge game was a standard game where we built as many connections as we could. Our strongest connections came from the maroon tribe, which was a tribe that bonded very closely during the Grogu vote. These connections paid off when we appeared to be in danger on the red tribe, but we were saved by our connections with Bonobo and Bees, and we were able to take out Lindsay instead of going down ourselves or losing an ally. When Grogu/Ranger returned to the game, we got very close to Grogu very quickly and agreed to work with him and protect him in the future. In the early merge and shipwreck, our main allies were the maroon 4 (Droids/avo/bard/T&H + ranger), our close ally Grogu, in addition to some weaker side alliances/good relationships with Bees and Bonobo. Tortoise and I thought about who we wanted to endgame with, and we thought droids would be a good option, so we offered them an F2. Avocado also approached us for an F2. But our F2 with droids went bad quickly when they blew up their game by trying to pull off a blindside on bees, so we had to adapt. With ranger voted out to take a shot at the maroon 4, we tried to make ourselves the most approachable remaining member of the maroon 4. We tried to make it seem like we were an outsider to the group, despite the fact that we had two final 2 deals internally. This was a successful effort, because when Dave made his public posts calling out the big threats in the game, we were never mentioned. This effort also paid off, because after Dave went home and all eyes were on the maroon 4, we were not being strongly considered as a target on the round droids went home. We tried to make a move using Bard's idol which we learned about in the last 10 minutes, but unfortunately we came up just a couple minutes short on that one and earned ourselves a rival named Maggie Smith After droids was gone, we knew wanted a strong relationship with Bees because we knew he was in a very good position, and he would be key in a lot of votes coming up. we put in a lot of work to try to convince him we were with him and that we would work with him to take out the returnees. When the game took us to space tribes, we made our first big move. Bees and Avocado, two of our allies, wanted each other gone, but we had other ideas. Bonobo was someone we saw as a major threat to our game, because we didn't see a good opportunity to get rid of him later. He was doing an excellent job keeping his connections hidden and staying under the radar. His main enemies were in the collapsing maroon 4 alliance and due to his low profile, and he was close with our rival maggie. We recognized that people would likely want to endgame with him. So we told Avocado to throw the challenge, and co-ordinated with him to get the prime idol. We convinced enemies Bees and Avocado to stop targeting each other for one round and we made the play that was best for us by voting out Bonobo. (I know what you're thinking... T&H, you threw the challenge by scoring 3/6?! Yes! I thought everyone was going to score perfect on that challenge because I found it easy! I thought it would at worst go to a tiebreaker at time, so I even wasted an hour before submitting.) As things were approaching endgame, we were openly targeting the returnees alliance, and trying to warn people they still had a lot of advantages and wanted to endgame with each other. So despite being the main person to openly target the returnees, our close relationship with grogu, and the idol shards/items/high perceived threat levels of bard/maggie kept us safe when the returnees controlled the game with their items during the F8 and F7 rounds. At F7 when I drafted my plan to split votes on cleric and rey, I fully expected it to fail because it had grogu in it. However, I also trusted in my knowledge of grogu that he both liked me, and had been targeting maggie since even before the space tribes. I correctly assumed that even in the case that my plan failed, maggie would be the one to take the fall for it instead of myself. And considering how maggie and I were both selling each other out behind our backs... I considered this an acceptable risk. F6 was supposed to be the round we dealt with the problem of the returnees using the item Bees had, but the tension between Avocado and Bees grew to be too much and unfortunately we had to send Bees home early. This would have been a game losing scenario if it wasn't for Bees giving us his javelin-syringe item <3 At F5, we knew grogu had a vote nullifier, and that he wanted to target avocado next. He said quite plainly to us that we would be the standout target in F4 after avocado left, but that it would give us the best odds of immunity. At this point the returnees had become complacent, with Dark Rey saying that the next rounds "might become boring". The returnees were co-ordinating for the idol, so there was no hope that avocado and I could have gotten it. Fortunately, I came up with what I consider to be the play of the game. Grogu told us that if Avocado and I guessed low numbers, then he would get the idol. I came up with a plan to guess low numbers with avocado, give grogu the idol, then force him out of the TC with our item and force firemaking against cleric or rey to ensure I didn't become the obvious F4 target if neither of us won immunity. Avocado didn't want to go with this plan at first, because he was confident in his chances of winning immunity and strongly wanted grogu gone immediately, but I convinced him it would give us the best odds of survival, and it paid off. Once we got Avocado on board, grogu won immunity, got the idol, and I immediately took him out. From this point, Avocado and I practiced hive together, and I went from someone who never heard of the game to someone who could consistently stomp beginners in a matter of days, thanks to some helpful youtube videos I found, and plenty of practice. We targeted cleric, expecting her to be weaker at challenges, and the play paid off. Neither of them had the idol, and Avocado won firemaking. Having learned the game of hive and put in our practice, we knew we couldn't go to the end with Grogu after the huge amount of control he had over the game. Fortunately, we were the last person in the game that Avocado felt respected by, so it was easy to vote with him and win firemaking against Grogu in F4. Avocado winning immunity here was a best case scenario, since I ended up becoming a stronger hive player than Avocado, so this gave us the best chances of making it to the end together. Overall, I believe we played a winning game for a bastard game like this one. When the twists and items worked out in our favor, we capitalized on them and made the highest value play we could (bonobo & cleric & grogu + a missed shot on maggie). When the twists and items didn't work out in our favor, we had a low threat level and strong allies to keep us safe. I'm proud of the way we made big moves while at the same time keeping a low profile and maintaining strong relationships that kept us safe. Oh, and also it's a beautiful narrative arc that we were able to take down the most dominant alliance in the game without even having a majority over them after calling them out all game, we should totally win for that alone
I know this is a bit of a shorter speech but I wanted to respect your time: so if you have any questions feel free to ask!
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Post by The Tortoise & The Hare on Mar 1, 2021 19:36:02 GMT
Hi, this is the hare speaking! Let's start by talking about how we played as a hydra. After we got through the first round of tribes, we realized that tortoise had a very busy life, and didn't have as much time as me to send messages. We arranged ourselves in a face/manager relationship, where I did the PMing, and every night, Tortoise and I would get on discord and plan out our strategy for the next 24 hours, then I would go and execute it. Playing as a hydra allowed tortoise to experience survivor with me even though he would normally be too busy IRL to make it on his own in this game. So even though you didn't see very much of tortoise, he was pulling my strings from behind the scenes And while this speech was written by me, I was up with tortoise last night brainstorming the main points! Don't count him out, okay?! He puts in the work!! Hi, this is the tortoise speaking!
I'm going to let Hare talk about the game next, but as part of the hydra, I think you it's important to realize how much we actually talked to each other. Because of limitations IRL, I didn't have the ability to be online during the day. The fact that, as a hydra, I was able to experience this game to its full extent, I am so grateful for it. I hope the hydra option is going to be around for future games, because I think we've proven that it's possible to play a very strong game with 2 heads where opinions don't collide. As Hare said, we agreed Hare would be the face of our Hydra, while I would play more in the background. At crucial times, I came in and put in some extra effort to make sure the game progressed the way we wanted to. At some point, it even involved writing up a huge PM on discord so Hare could forward it to one of the players. Thank you all for a really enjoyable game. I've had a blast and I consider this a victory regardless of how the vote turns out. Special shout out to my partner, Hare, who has been the most amazing partner I could've wished for.
Back to the Hare: Based on our results, I think it would be fair to call us the most effective hydra in mafiascum history. Our premerge game was a standard game where we built as many connections as we could. Our strongest connections came from the maroon tribe, which was a tribe that bonded very closely during the Grogu vote. These connections paid off when we appeared to be in danger on the red tribe, but we were saved by our connections with Bonobo and Bees, and we were able to take out Lindsay instead of going down ourselves or losing an ally. When Grogu/Ranger returned to the game, we got very close to Grogu very quickly and agreed to work with him and protect him in the future. In the early merge and shipwreck, our main allies were the maroon 4 (Droids/avo/bard/T&H + ranger), our close ally Grogu, in addition to some weaker side alliances/good relationships with Bees and Bonobo. Tortoise and I thought about who we wanted to endgame with, and we thought droids would be a good option, so we offered them an F2. Avocado also approached us for an F2. But our F2 with droids went bad quickly when they blew up their game by trying to pull off a blindside on bees, so we had to adapt. With ranger voted out to take a shot at the maroon 4, we tried to make ourselves the most approachable remaining member of the maroon 4. We tried to make it seem like we were an outsider to the group, despite the fact that we had two final 2 deals internally. This was a successful effort, because when Dave made his public posts calling out the big threats in the game, we were never mentioned. This effort also paid off, because after Dave went home and all eyes were on the maroon 4, we were not being strongly considered as a target on the round droids went home. We tried to make a move using Bard's idol which we learned about in the last 10 minutes, but unfortunately we came up just a couple minutes short on that one and earned ourselves a rival named Maggie Smith After droids was gone, we knew wanted a strong relationship with Bees because we knew he was in a very good position, and he would be key in a lot of votes coming up. we put in a lot of work to try to convince him we were with him and that we would work with him to take out the returnees. When the game took us to space tribes, we made our first big move. Bees and Avocado, two of our allies, wanted each other gone, but we had other ideas. Bonobo was someone we saw as a major threat to our game, because we didn't see a good opportunity to get rid of him later. He was doing an excellent job keeping his connections hidden and staying under the radar. His main enemies were in the collapsing maroon 4 alliance and due to his low profile, and he was close with our rival maggie. We recognized that people would likely want to endgame with him. So we told Avocado to throw the challenge, and co-ordinated with him to get the prime idol. We convinced enemies Bees and Avocado to stop targeting each other for one round and we made the play that was best for us by voting out Bonobo. (I know what you're thinking... T&H, you threw the challenge by scoring 3/6?! Yes! I thought everyone was going to score perfect on that challenge because I found it easy! I thought it would at worst go to a tiebreaker at time, so I even wasted an hour before submitting.) As things were approaching endgame, we were openly targeting the returnees alliance, and trying to warn people they still had a lot of advantages and wanted to endgame with each other. So despite being the main person to openly target the returnees, our close relationship with grogu, and the idol shards/items/high perceived threat levels of bard/maggie kept us safe when the returnees controlled the game with their items during the F8 and F7 rounds. At F7 when I drafted my plan to split votes on cleric and rey, I fully expected it to fail because it had grogu in it. However, I also trusted in my knowledge of grogu that he both liked me, and had been targeting maggie since even before the space tribes. I correctly assumed that even in the case that my plan failed, maggie would be the one to take the fall for it instead of myself. And considering how maggie and I were both selling each other out behind our backs... I considered this an acceptable risk. F6 was supposed to be the round we dealt with the problem of the returnees using the item Bees had, but the tension between Avocado and Bees grew to be too much and unfortunately we had to send Bees home early. This would have been a game losing scenario if it wasn't for Bees giving us his javelin-syringe item <3 At F5, we knew grogu had a vote nullifier, and that he wanted to target avocado next. He said quite plainly to us that we would be the standout target in F4 after avocado left, but that it would give us the best odds of immunity. At this point the returnees had become complacent, with Dark Rey saying that the next rounds "might become boring". The returnees were co-ordinating for the idol, so there was no hope that avocado and I could have gotten it. Fortunately, I came up with what I consider to be the play of the game. Grogu told us that if Avocado and I guessed low numbers, then he would get the idol. I came up with a plan to guess low numbers with avocado, give grogu the idol, then force him out of the TC with our item and force firemaking against cleric or rey to ensure I didn't become the obvious F4 target if neither of us won immunity. Avocado didn't want to go with this plan at first, because he was confident in his chances of winning immunity and strongly wanted grogu gone immediately, but I convinced him it would give us the best odds of survival, and it paid off. Once we got Avocado on board, grogu won immunity, got the idol, and I immediately took him out. From this point, Avocado and I practiced hive together, and I went from someone who never heard of the game to someone who could consistently stomp beginners in a matter of days, thanks to some helpful youtube videos I found, and plenty of practice. We targeted cleric, expecting her to be weaker at challenges, and the play paid off. Neither of them had the idol, and Avocado won firemaking. Having learned the game of hive and put in our practice, we knew we couldn't go to the end with Grogu after the huge amount of control he had over the game. Fortunately, we were the last person in the game that Avocado felt respected by, so it was easy to vote with him and win firemaking against Grogu in F4. Avocado winning immunity here was a best case scenario, since I ended up becoming a stronger hive player than Avocado, so this gave us the best chances of making it to the end together. Overall, I believe we played a winning game for a bastard game like this one. When the twists and items worked out in our favor, we capitalized on them and made the highest value play we could (bonobo & cleric & grogu + a missed shot on maggie). When the twists and items didn't work out in our favor, we had a low threat level and strong allies to keep us safe. I'm proud of the way we made big moves while at the same time keeping a low profile and maintaining strong relationships that kept us safe. Oh, and also it's a beautiful narrative arc that we were able to take down the most dominant alliance in the game without even having a majority over them after calling them out all game, we should totally win for that alone I know this is a bit of a shorter speech but I wanted to respect your time: so if you have any questions feel free to ask!
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Post by The Tortoise & The Hare on Mar 4, 2021 17:34:10 GMT
THIS IS A DRAFT
Hello everybody,
This is Tortoise wrapping it up for us. Hare will make some additions where he feels this is needed. It's been a long game and I'm pretty happy to have had the opportunity to play as a hydra. I remember that we had lengthy discussions on how we would play, how we would keep each other updated and how we would deal with answering PM's. I think we were an instant match game-wise and I don't think we've ever had a disagreement on how to proceed with the game. Even if it sounds easier to play as a hydra, there's a lot of extra obstacles you need to overcome too. Because of my limitations, we agreed that Hare would be the face of the Hydra and I'd play more from the background, as the Manager, as we called it. I think we were a perfect combination and we combined our strengths to play an amazing game.
We played a game where we didn't want to appear too threatening, we wanted to be in the middle to be approachable while having a lot of connections. We made that work pretty wonderfully:
- We were part of a strong group that was perceived dangerous, but we were seen as mostly the bottom of that group, even though I don't think we were.
- While being part of that group, we also had strong connections outside of that like Grogu and Bees, and used this to our advantage.
- The strong connections we made, allowed us to convince other players to take part in our moves, like the Bonobo vote.
On top of that, we made moves when we thought they were necessary:
- on tribes designed by Rey, using the merge splitter, we threw the challenge and convinced other players to vote out Bonobo, who we thought was a player who would be very hard to eliminate.
- We tried convincing everyone to not allow the Returnees to make it far into a game, which was a risk because they were very much in control. Despite not succeeding at convincing them, I think we made one of the most epic plays in history of this game to get what we wanted.
I really want to focus on that move here, because if you cannot respect how big of a move this was, I don't think we have a shot at winning here.
- At F6, Avocado forces a 1vs1 with Bees. We're not able to swing this any other way, which puts us in a 2(Avo, us) vs 3 (Grogu, Rey, Cleric) situation.
- At this point, the returnees think they have it in the bag. They get cocky and pretty much tell us Avocado is going next
- However, Bees had given us the Javelin, which allowed us to remove someone from a TC, but you couldn't play it on yourself.
- The options at this point were for one of Avocado or us to win immunity. Then remove the other person from TC. Which is exactly what Avocado was banking on.
- Grogu felt comfortable enough to tell us they coordinated on the idol, and wanted us to guess low, so he would get the idol.
- So instead of trying to bank on winning immunity, we focus on Grogu, who would have both the idol and a vote nullifier.
- We convince Avocado to join in on our plan.
- Grogu also wins immunity to make things even better. As soon as he gets the necklace, we send him, along with all of his advantages, to Exile.
- We're in a 2vs2 situation and decide to target Cleric, who we think has less of a shot in the tiebreaker game.
- Avocado wins and we're back to 2vs2
At this point, we're putting it all on the line in a direct confrontation. We target Grogu, who doesn't have any items after they all expired and we defeat him in a 1vs1 match to take us to the end. The fact that this was Grogu, who we both thought would have a really good shot at a victory, makes it so much sweeter. We take out our biggest competition by ourselves and we EARN our place in the final.
Grogu, I wanted to give you a special shoutout here, because I thought you've played a brilliant game. Unfortunately, we've beaten you by a few inches.
I think the rest of our game speaks for itself. If you don't think this is a winner move, then I don't know how much more epic we could have made it.
Thank you all for a wonderful game. I've had a blast. I can't wait to talk to you all post-game and I hope you all have great memories when you look back at this experience.
Also thank you mods for putting in amazing effort, you guys rock.
See you on the other side.
The Tortoise
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And while this speech was written by me, I was up with tortoise last night brainstorming the main points! Don't count him out, okay?! He puts in the work!!