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FTC Speech
Topic Started: Aug 27 2017, 06:45:40 PM (35 Views)
Boudica
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Hey everyone!

I just want to start out by thanking you all for partaking in this game. It’s been a hell of a ride, and none of this would have been possible without y’all. Also, thank you moderators for taking the time and effort for putting this all together. Win or lose, it’s been a wonderful experience. So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time and words the last few rounds arguing why I’m beatable. At a fundamental level, I had to in order to make it to this point. Now, however, it’s time to reverse course and argue why I deserve to win this game. I feel that there are two distinguishing aspects of my game that put me above everyone else:

1) I demonstrated tactical and strategic intelligence end-to-end, despite the constant pressure I was under as a perennial target.
2) I showed an ungodly amount of fight, never giving up even in the most adverse of circumstances.

On tactical and strategic intelligence:

Throughout this game, I have shown myself to be a strong strategist and tactician with a level head, even when I was under incredible pressure to survive. The tactics I employed were effective time and again, and the strategy that drove me to execute on those tactics was good.

Tactically, I executed three things very well, which kept me moving forward in this game:

1) I was successfully able to reach the right people with the right arguments to ensure my own survival, making multiple miracles happen during the later stages of the game.
2) I used directness to build trust with people, flipping former enemies into allies within single rounds.
3) I took big risks at smart times, playing more boldly than anyone else.

I demonstrated the first most strongly in the final rounds of this game. After F7, I was persona non grata. I walked into F6 thinking that I had to the IC to make F5, but I lost the IC. I convinced Alexander to flip the vote with literally less than a minute left in the TC by offering him security (in the form of slaving my vote to his for the rest of the game). I knew he was going to be in a precarious situation at F4, with everyone else in the game holding a knife behind their back waiting to stab him, and that my allegiance at that point in time would be a tempting thing to take. Then, during the tiebreaker, I worked with Alex to force Theodora to side with me over Gilgamesh by using the threat of the idol against her. At 5, after Alex flipped on me, choosing favorable odds in the FIC over security were he to lose, I went to the other players in the game with a proposition: keep me to beat Alex in the F4 IC. I had long since laid the groundwork of establishing Alex as the biggest threat in this game, and so the argument that my presence in the game was a necessary evil to stop Alex at 4 resonated. It all worked, and linear from the F5 vote was voting out Alex when he lost the FIC.

The second, my ability to use direct and authentic communication to build trust, is something I did over the course of the game. In the second round of this game, I was almost voted out of this game, with the initial vote having tied 3-3. During that initial vote, both Liz and the majority of the Asia tribe voted for me, but ultimately the vote flipped against Dido. Surely this meant that, when America lost the next TC, Liz would get voted out. After all, she had just come for me.

However, I chose to swing the vote onto Stalin instead of Liz, because I was able to very quickly patch up that relationship through directness. We worked out why she wanted me gone, and we voted out Stalin, who had demonstrated himself to be a massive liability and all-around shady dude. During the next swap, I was able to work with Liz and not have to worry about her coming for me again on the very first vote.

And the players from the Asia tribe? Harald and Montezuma both immediately gunned for me when we swapped together onto New World, but I managed to get through things with Maria and come to an understanding with her about where we could mutually coexist. While I can’t truly know the full range of considerations that went into Hatshepsut being idoled out over me, the fact of the matter is that she ultimately bit that bullet, and that afterwards I was able to work enough with Harald so that he didn’t immediately flip on me at merge, either. Montezuma’s personal issues very much got in the way of he and I reaching a reconciliation, and those same reasons ultimately drove him to quit.

After Pocatello considering setting up a blindside on me at F9, we were able to reconcile quickly and work together again to try to blindside Alex. After I failed to blindside Alex, I won him over to my side. After Napoleon failed to vote me out at 6, I won him to my side at 5. Each time, my directness was a path through which people could believe that my word was good.

The third tactic, well, everyone saw the posts I made at the end of F6, the F6 revote, and F5. Each of those were plays designed to keep me in the game when everything seemed lost. In those moments, I knew I had to make bold bets to move myself forward, and I showed no fear in taking action. It would take me a while to walk through the entirety of the logic of each one and everything that went into them, but the first post was designed to try to get one of:

1) Jules and Napoleon nervous about their ability to win in the end without a move to claim as their own.
2) Alex to take my offer by illuminating the fact that he was still in need of a shield, particularly through the lens of highlighting the Gilgamesh/Julius/Napoleon F3

The F6 tiebreak post was 100% about getting Theodora to flip, specifically through the thinly veiled threat of Alex’s idol knocking her out at 5. The F5 post was an attempt to mindgame Alex into using his idol on Theodora (ultimately this one didn’t achieve its objective, but it was still worth the effort in that moment).

Strategically, I consistently had good vision throughout this game of what I needed to be doing in a given moment. In the pre-merge, I focused primarily on building relationships with a broad range of people and surviving round-to-round, since the game post-merge is incredibly different from pre-merge, and therefore making merge was adequate. During the early merge, I chose not only not to make any big moves, but also to limit my strategic talk to prevent people from wanting to make a big move against me. I took this so far as to throw Majority Rules to prevent tipping my hand about how I perceived the gamestate. Once it was time to pull the trigger, I identified Alex correctly as the biggest threat to win this game (and as the most likely idol holder) and started gunning for him. Even though I failed to get him out at 7, and at 6 and 5 he was immune, the amount that I built him up as a huge threat and dominant force made my argument at 4 all the easier. The “Alex is the favorite to win this game” narrative had just been around for too long for him to shake, even with the miracles I’d made happen the prior two rounds compounding the target I had previously had on my back.

All of this tactical and strategic acumen I showed, I showed while perpetually under pressure. I received more votes in this game across more TCs than any other player. From literally the first TC, people were throwing out my name, and once that target was placed on my back, it was kind of unshakable. And despite that, I remained calm and executed on what I had to. Unlike Theodora and Napoleon, who got to make their decisions with little pressure directly on them, each decision I made was literally life-or-death, and I always chose right.

On being a fighter:

I fought my way to the end harder than I thought myself possible at the start of this game. I never, never gave up. If there's anything I want to be remembered for in my game, it's my undying will to survive and keep moving forward.

I was the first person to make use of public posts to change a vote. I certainly wasn’t the first person who knew they were going. I saved my ass literally in the last minute of the TC. That’s some fucking hustle right there. Then in the next round, after securing the votes to ensure my survival, I took an extra step to try to ensure the idol got played wrong, because every little bit counts.

Discounting the post-merge challenge that I threw for strategic reasons, I won 3/8 post-merge ICs and got 2nd in 4/8. Even the stupid multitasking challenge, which I went into thinking I would bomb, I managed to get 2nd by a substantial margin. Even though I had reached a high enough score to get 2nd place within 1.5 hours of the challenge being posted, I pushed my score even higher over the last 4-5 hours prior to deadline. I literally got home from work, put my headphones in, and just grinded out rep after rep of that thing to get my score as high as it would go. When I'd start slipping, I'd listen to some music to refocus and then just keep on grinding. Similarly, I won Borobudur because I was the only person who looked at the challenge, figured out what it was about, and part way through developed a system to prevent myself from repeating paths. Even though it took me to the very last possible path to win the challenge, I still finished in 1/2 the time of anyone else.

Even going back to the start of this game, with the technologies, I showed real hustle in how those played out. Every time one of those got posted, I hustled my ass off trying to get to them first. I was the only person in this game, other than Montezuma, to get a technology. I found the crossword and had it solved within 26 minutes of the tech being announced. Montezuma was a monster when it came to the techs, but I, and I alone, managed to best him once.

I never said to myself "this is too hard, I can't do it." At worst, I said "this sucks, but I'm gonna work my ass off to overcome this challenge." I came into this game saying that I would absolutely give 100%, and then still find more to give, and I achieved that here.

In conclusion:

I’m around 1700 words at this point, so I think it’s time we wrap things up. I think the two aspects of this game I listed above, the strategic/tactical side of the game and the unbridled fight and hustle and will to live, are the areas of this game I truly excelled at, but I don’t think that means I was bad at anything else. I played the social game, building connections with people to leverage down the road, but I recognized at a point that I wasn’t going to win this game by using emotional appeals to drive people to make irrational decisions. I had to play to my strengths, to read the gamestate well and make the right arguments to the right people at the right times to convince them that working with me in that moment is the best decision for them (regardless of the veracity of it being the right decision), and to exhaust every possible angle, even angles that I maybe didn't even realize existed.

Thank you for hearing me out. I look forward to being able to answer your questions over the allotted period of time, and I hope I am able to answer anything you have to your satisfaction.
Edited by Boudica, Aug 27 2017, 06:46:53 PM.
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