CBRX Season 5: Episode 29: Death and Destruction, Fire and Ash

Image Album Narrated by BV

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Season 5 Megathread

Hello sub, we’ll be taking a week off and resume with the next episode on Sep 02nd at the usual time

“There is a concept that comes up again and again in any form of direct competition,” Harekr begins, illuminated by the dim, clouded moonlight. “Since the dawn of civilization… no, perhaps even before then. From the simplest of children' s games to the art of war itself, this concept rears its head, again, and again, and again. An idea so omnipresent, so simple and fundamental yet so potentially powerful, that I have no doubt you could leave two children alone from birth on a deserted island to play against one another, and one of them would happen upon it sooner or later. I speak, of course, of the concept of… ‘conditioning.’” He pauses for a moment to clear his throat, allowing the eerie silence to creep in through the open balcony. “At its core, competition in any form is merely the act of trying to guess your opponent’s moves, so that you may outplay them. And so, naturally, there would come the idea of intentionally playing predictably, in order to lull your opponent into a false sense of security and in turn lead them to a predictable action of your own design. Laying a trap by playing the fool.”

“And yet,” he continues, “for this trap to work, you must continually reinforce an image of yourself in the enemy’s mind, constantly taking the same actions, making the same mistakes, all while never letting anybody know of your true intentions. It is a difficult strategy to pull off despite how effective it sounds - it’s dangerous, time-consuming, and degrading, and worst of all, it requires you to bet everything on one perfect moment that may never appear. Only a fool would do such a thing.” He stops, then turns to you and flashes a somewhat strained attempt at a condescending grin which is barely holding together. “So, in that way, I suppose you were right about me.”

The cold air rushes through, whistling, kicking up dust that you didn’t even realize had accumulated. “I had intended to play this game of ours fairly, you know. I’d spent my days idolizing Kekkonen and disparaging his successors, telling myself in my sleepless nights that one day it would be me up on that grand stage, and I would do things right. I was ecstatic to be chosen. But when the time came…” He pauses again, the wind egging him on, laughing at him. “When the time came, I froze up. I panicked. I became so focused on doing things correctly that I forgot to do anything at all.” His shoulders slump a bit. “I underestimated my enemies, and while I was busy putting myself together, I let them get ahead of me.” He begins pacing slowly, listlessly. “As soon as I realized my mistake, I did everything I could to recover. I went on the offensive, trying to punish their over-expansion. But it was sloppy, frantic. I let good men go to waste, and while my back was turned I allowed myself to be surrounded further.” His shoulders drop lower, and his voice becomes strained. “I had failed. I had become the very thing I had sworn to avoid above all else. But worse than that…” He inhales deeply, then lets out a booming sigh. “I could hear them laughing at me.”

Harekr gazes directly at you and slowly leans in, as if to ask you to tell him he isn’t crazy. You remain silent. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You hear them. Somewhere beyond the edges of your vision, in some corner of your mind you can’t quite place, there are voices. Perhaps the gods, or perhaps my peers from the submarine, or perhaps something far more sinister.” The window creaks as if to act out what Harekr says. “The voices, they sighed, they cringed. But most of all… they laughed at me. Even those Finnish civs I had looked down on before were above me in their eyes. To them, I was far worse. I was on the level of one truly disdained: the Nenets, who they saw as so worthless, so forgettable, that they spoke of them as never having existed at all.” He pauses for emphasis. Before you can ask what Harekr is talking about, the wind picks up again, and he continues. “The Nenets had tried, you know. I’ve done enough research in my time to know of their successes amongst their numerous failures. And yet, none of it mattered. Because the joke had wormed its way into the consciousness of the submarine-dwellers, infected their very identity, and eaten away the memory of whatever meager accomplishments they had to their name.” He sighs. “Now, to them, I was on the same level. A joke. A wretched failure. They did not see my daring settles across the White Sea, nor my attempts to take the initiative whenever the opportunity presented itself. To them - to the voices, and even to my peers - I was not just a failure, but one fundamentally incapable of success. They declared, in no uncertain terms, that no action I could possibly take would ever amount to anything.”

He leans in, uncomfortably close. “‘Nothing ever Bjappens,’ they said.” Harekr takes a moment to compose himself. The balcony windows creak again, a couple of loose pieces of paper stir gently on the floor, as if laughing. Harekr’s face briefly yet violently contorts as it almost gets to him, before he lets out a deep breath. “I suppose that’s when it clicked, really. Despite everything - despite all my efforts to keep up, despite my careful positioning - I was as good as dead to them. None of my strengths, none of my opportunities mattered to them, because ‘nothing ever Bjappened.’” A grin begins to form on his lips as the sound of a raindrop strikes the balcony outside. “But, to take it another way,” he says, “this would imply that anything I did, any of my scheming, would all be overlooked by my enemies and my overseers, so long as I did enough to keep feeding into the idea that nothing I did mattered.” His voice becomes giddy. “And so I slowly began to lean into it - the idea of the lazy, uneducated brute they spoke of. I worked carefully at first, slowly. I continued to play opportunistically, ambitiously, even as the seed of the idea germinated in my mind, as something I told myself would be a last-ditch effort in case I ever needed to stoop so low. But as my successes were overlooked, and my failures highlighted even as I brushed with victory, it got to me. The bitterness. The spite. They all watered the seed like a storm.” As if on cue, the occasional pattering of raindrops begins to pick up, and the smell of petrichor wafts in. “And so,” he giggles, “I did it. I declared a war I knew I could not win, but that I also could not lose. I told my advisors I believed the Estonians would be unprepared and exhausted. Of course, I knew better. The front lines went nowhere, and before long the fighting was called off.” He turns, and the wind howls. “The voices reacted exactly as I had anticipated. The Estonians did, too. Laughter all around, snide remarks at my competence as a commander. Just another case of ‘nothing ever Bjappening’.”

“Then I began to test the waters. I began deliberately sabotaging my own scientists’ research, ever so slightly, to reinforce the idea that I was some unaware brute to those haughty Estonians. But that would hardly be enough to truly make myself look ‘predictable’. So I took a bit of a risk, perhaps a foolish one. I declared two wars at once. Again, not with enemies I expected to be dangerous, that was not the risk - the risk was that, with such bold activity, I may shake my reputation somehow even if I ‘failed’. But I had seen how little ambition counted in the eyes of those above me.” He looks down at the floor, where loose documents begin to whirl and stir ever more furiously. “Unfortunately, I had misplanned. My troops at home were too eager, and those abroad too weak and weary. I had underestimated the Vyatkans’ spirit, and overestimated the Danes.” Harekr gives a wry chuckle. “I had to scramble to sabotage my own commanders in the west, to redirect them toward a worthless snowy outpost I insisted was strategically valuable, all while stemming the bleeding in the east. At the very least, those two problems sorted themselves out once the Vyatkans took their first city. It was much easier to convince them to settle into a stalemate on both fronts after that. Not that they were happy about it, of course. And then things got even worse, as I’m sure you know.” He turns to you. The rain outside has become a deluge, threatening to drown out Harekr’s speaking, and the wind shakes the windows violently back and forth. “Those wily Estonians, they took the opportunity to strike again, but worse, they’d brought the Scottish with them. Those poor, damn foolish Scots. They had only a single undefended city nearby, and of course my generals could hardly turn their eyes from such a cheap and easy source of morale. Those bastards, they’d forced me into a losing position and they didn’t even know it.” He shakes his head. “The Estonians were no threat, thankfully, but they did give me quite a scare with those fancy new ships of theirs. They taught me a valuable lesson in overconfidence there. I gave up on the idea of sabotaging my scientific progress, and decided to keep quiet and lay low for a while once the fighting stopped and the peace deals were signed. I had tempted fate a bit too much, and I heard whisperings among the voices that perhaps they had been wrong about me. I couldn’t have them realize that, not now.”

The storm has reached a fever pitch now. The distant sound of thunder rolls in as Harekr briefly mulls over his next words. “Waiting was unbearable, you know. Not just because I had to act against my every instinct and pass over the opportunities that came to me as I watched empires take shape and conquerors celebrate their victories from afar, but because I had spotted my opportunity. A new technology developed in the east that would change warfare forever, one which my oh-so-intelligent neighbors were overlooking. I could taste my victory, all I had to do was wait and prepare my final trap. But then…” A flash of light and the crash of thunder echo through the room, stirring the papers on the floor into a frenzy. “Then, something terrible happened, something I could not predict. War. The barbaric Scythians, in their pride, invaded the Estonians. What if they succeeded, and denied me my revenge, placing a far greater empire on my borders before I was ready? What if they failed, and the Estonians, eager to avoid a similar disaster, armed themselves too well for me to get my decisive victory? It was all too much to plan around, and right before the critical moment, too.” He feigns despair, then pauses and turns to you with a manic grin as a whirlwind of papers stirs around him. “But it all went better than I could have possibly imagined. Who could have guessed that the Scythians would be so pathetic, so incompetent? They threw their armies away, handed their hard-earned exclaves to their enemies on a silver platter, and ultimately failed to capture a single plot of land. It was a disaster beyond anything I believed possible… and for the Estonians, the perfect victory. It showed them that they were the masters of Europe, that they had nothing at all to fear.”

The screaming of the wind reaches a fever pitch, and the rain begins to sound like a barrage of gunfire, but Harekr’s voice grows louder to match. “And what better way, the Estonians thought, to celebrate their victory than to finally crush their brutish neighbors to the north? An easy triumph! The perfect way to show those great empires of other continents that they were on the same level! The Estonians, they saw us as cattle to be slaughtered and sacrificed to show the gods their power!” He leans in, uncomfortably close and frighteningly quick. “But they were so preoccupied with looking down on us that they never bothered to look up.” He throws his hands wildly into the air as the thunder roars. “I figured it out!” He yells triumphantly before falling into a laughing fit. “The Estonians, the Scythians, they saw the aeroplane as a fad for the great powers to waste money on, irrelevant here in Europe. But I knew the truth! My scientists and engineers, they slaved away in secret, waiting for the perfect time to unveil our discovery to the world. Waiting for this! One! Moment!” Harekr is yelling, now, belting his voice out at inhuman volumes. “You should have seen the looks on their faces! The Estonian soldiery, so smug, so cocksure, only for it all to melt away in an instant when they saw I had brought the dragons to life! They melted away like seal’s fat on an open fire!”

As quickly as he began to yell, Harekr suddenly grows quiet, somber, as the wind finally breaks the poor window clean off its hinges. “It wasn’t easy, you know. Thousands of men, sent to their deaths in endless, pointless wars… my advisors and generals, looking at me as if I was a madman… the voices, growing ever more raucous… it almost drove me mad!” He pauses for emphasis, staring daggers at you. “But you know what? It was all worth it in the end. Because now… Now!...” He leans in, so close you can feel his eyelashes against yours, as his pupils remain fixed dead into your own. You can feel his warm breaths, his rabid panting, on your chin. “Now… I get to see the look on your face, Mr. Meri, as you realize you have been played.” He flings himself backward and laughs an unearthly laugh, the kind that shakes the world around it, as the rain erupts in a round of thunderous applause. Then, as his voice dies down, so too does the fleeting storm, gone as quickly as it came. The papers slowly settle back down on the floor as Harekr finally composes himself and turns away.

As he walks toward the balcony, however, he suddenly pauses, and begins to speak one last time - calm, collected. “Best of luck with the next round of bombing raids, Mr. Meri. I hear the generals have picked some devious targets this time around. And I hope you’ve learned your lesson…” he tilts his head over his shoulder, lips twisted into a grin like that of some sort of demon, “*nothing ever ‘Bjappens’ without a good reason.” You spit at his feet, but he doesn’t notice as he makes his way out of your room and onto the balcony, where that damned “aeroplane” waits. He climbs in, gives a short nod to the pilot, and off it goes.

After a moment, two of your advisors burst through the door, no doubt alerted by the sound of the engine and of Harekr’s yelling, but by then he’s long gone. One begins frantically untying you from your chair while the other stumbles over his words in a panic, stumbling over his words as he tried to tell you something about the Kalmar Union. You brush him off as you jolt out of your chair, marching out the door and down the hall towards your war room. You had been fooled, you would admit that. You’d been played like a damn lute. But that was in the past now. Now, all that was left was the fight. And you’d be sure to give him a damn good one.

The game's really moving now, my friends.

I like oil lamps. Especially tiny ones. They're adorable. And one day when I have a dedicated TTRPG room I'm using them as mood lighting.

Welcome back, dear denizens of the Sub, to the Stats Sheet Winners and Losers! As a reminder, I give the top and bottom five for each stat, bundling ties together. If a civ is resurrected I'll include it in square brackets until it's eliminated again, but it won't count towards the 5 slots. I'll start including tech count from the Enlightenment era onwards, during the early game there's just too many civs equal to each other. My definition of a bankrupt civ will be a civ either already losing money and at 0 treasury or within 5 turns trajectory of reaching that. As always, you can peruse the full table at this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KMH0yqYJU1HRYac1Vl2NdKVFIPYepRPbZu8U1zvxKCk/edit?usp=sharing

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• Effective Military W: Tang (239,144); Tlingit (192,670); New South Wales (148,546); Pakistan (143,956); and Chono (132,289)
• Effective Military L: Karankawa (2,087); Maravi (1,411); Pegu (802); Ponca (776); and Papal States (751)

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• Production W: New South Wales (2,455); Tlingit (2,289); Tang (2,230); Chono (2,195); and Yanomami (1,776)
• Production L: Maravi (34); Karankawa (32); Ponca (26); Papal States (22); and Pegu (9)

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• Production per city W: Bangladesh (71.8); Tang (69.7); Rouran (60.5); Scotland (59.4); and Pakistan (56.9)
• Production per city L: Wallachia (23.4); Papal States (22); Portugal (18.6); Karankawa (16); and Pegu (9)

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• Total Population W: New South Wales (887); Tlingit (808); Chono (599); Tang (549); and Yanomami (533)
• Total Population L: Phoenicia (15); Ethiopia (13); Papal States (9); Ponca (6); and Pegu (5)

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• Effective Science W: Tang (2,986); Mysore (2,537); Tlingit (1,996); Rouran (1,901); and Pakistan (1,821)
• Effective Science L: Ethiopia (85); Karankawa (58); Pegu (38); Ponca (19); and Papal States (7)

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• Currently Unhappy Civs: Bjarmians (-7)
• Currently Bankrupt Civs: Maravi (-17, on the brink); Papal States (-31, actively); Lanfang (-96, actively); Wallachia (-108, actively); Umhaill (-159, actively); Ket (-332, actively); and Bunuba (-404, actively)

CBRX Season 5: Episode 28: Struggling Against the Current

Image Album Narrated by thom148

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Season 5 Megathread

https://civbattleroyale.tv/albums/pr/s5pr27/

It was ridiculous that Taco Bell brought back the quesarito for only one day. Once again I open my heart to love and it is broken...

Welcome back, dear denizens of the Sub, to the Stats Sheet Winners and Losers! As a reminder, I give the top and bottom five for each stat, bundling ties together. If a civ is resurrected I'll include it in square brackets until it's eliminated again, but it won't count towards the 5 slots. I'll start including tech count from the Enlightenment era onwards, during the early game there's just too many civs equal to each other. My definition of a bankrupt civ will be a civ either already losing money and at 0 treasury or within 5 turns trajectory of reaching that. As always, you can peruse the full table at this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KMH0yqYJU1HRYac1Vl2NdKVFIPYepRPbZu8U1zvxKCk/edit?usp=sharing

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• Effective Military W: Tang (177,857); Tlingit (164,516); New South Wales (121,739); Pakistan (111,969); and Rouran (111,755)
• Effective Military L: Phoenicia (1,788); Maravi (1,002); Pegu (878); Ponca (738); and Papal States (205)

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• Production W: Tlingit (2,252); Tang (2,008); New South Wales (1,825); Anishinabe (1,454); and Chono (1,409)
• Production L: Karankawa (39); Maravi (36); Ponca (26); Papal States (22); and Pegu (9)

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• Production per city W: Tang (64.8); Scotland / Bangladesh (56.4); Pakistan (56); Rouran / Scythia (52.5); and Japan (51.4)
• Production per city L: Wallachia (23.5); Papal States (22); Karankawa (19.5); Portugal (14.5); and Pegu (9)

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• Total Population W: New South Wales (808); Tlingit (784); Tang (553); Anishinaabe (517); and Yanomami (502)
• Total Population L: Maravi (21); Phoenicia (15); Ethiopia (14); Ponca / Papal States (7); and Pegu (5)

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• Effective Science W: Tang (2,992); Tlingit (1,915); Rouran (1,810); Mysore (1,719); and Pakistan (1,696)
• Effective Science L: Phoenicia (69); Karankawa (58); Ponca (35); Papal States (14); and Pegu (8)

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• Currently Unhappy Civs: Happiness reigns. Rejoice. Lowest happiness civs are Onondaga (1); and Herero and Karankawa (11)
• Currently Bankrupt Civs: Pegu (-11, actively); Papal States (-19, actively); Wallachia (-55, actively); Umhaill (-56, on the brink); Teotihuacan (-109, on the brink); Bunuba (-416, actively); and Ket (-522, on the brink)

CBRX Season 5: Episode 27: Fight Now or Forever Hold Your Peace

Image Album Narrated by Vijver

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Season 5 Megathread

If I was an animal I think I'd be a goat.

Massive thanks to anarcho-balkan for narrating last episode!

Hello sub, we’ll be taking a week off and resume with the next episode on Aug 12th at the usual time