Have a very little time right now.
There is a lot of msgs from Asterix. Didn't even read them all yet. Asterix dont like OS much.
Reply from LP:
@Dhalphir: Would you please stay as our team DedLurker? In case DMOC and me cant play some turns?
There is a lot of msgs from Asterix. Didn't even read them all yet. Asterix dont like OS much.
Reply from LP:
Quote:Greetings EggHeads,
It’s a pleasure to meet you at last! We’re sorry it took so long for us to get in contact… we would have met you around T20 but for horrible RNG luck (we lost our Scout at 20% odds against a lion). We’ve seen your Gold being worked from afar for some time now, but like you we weren’t able to spare our troops for exploration until recently. Never mind, it’s good to be in contact now!
Thanks for the kind words about our opening. We’ve been impressed with your opening as well – working your Gold exceptionally early, expanding quickly and managing to keep up in tech while being one of the few non-Financial civs. Nicely done!
The rest of this mail got quite long, so I'll try to break it into clearly labelled parts.
The Map
Your experience with the map mostly matches ours, though we can correct you on one point – having finished Stonehenge, we can see that we are in fact in the northern hemisphere, not the southern. Apparently the mapmaker chose to use artistic license and line the equator with tundra and ice, which is interesting. We haven’t yet ruled out the possibility of a Pangaea map… continents layouts are unusual at RB, and the lack of north-south contact could be simply due to folks not bothering to explore the icy wastes. Either way, from Stonehenge we know for sure the map dimensions are 76x48. This matches the average east-west distance between civs of around 15-16 tiles, and indicates a likely north-south distance between civs of 20-24 tiles.
It certainly seems the northern hemisphere of the map is packed with the stronger civs on this map, which is quite unusual. The score split right now makes this very clear – the top 5 civs are all at least 14 points ahead of the bottom 5 civs, and every single one of those top 5 civs is in the north! Pretty interesting, and it will likely have big implications for the future of the game. One possible scenario is that a reasonably competent team in the south (perhaps Blame Caledorn) may have a field day expanding into one or two weak and backward neighbours while the northern nations are in deadlock with one another, cruising to an easy win. Alternatively, the game could end up as some sort of north vs south variant (perhaps minus the Care Bears) – that’s a scenario we much prefer, so we’re keen to forge a strong alliance with you rather than wasting our efforts attacking one another.
Other Civs
We haven't met anyone from the south yet, same as you. We’ve met everyone in the north except for the infamous Care Bears at this point. We’re concerned about them too – seven cities already, now coupled with the Oracle! We’re not sure how they’re managing the maintenance costs. Based on what we’ve heard from Team Margarita (and now yourselves) it doesn’t sound like their rapid expansion is making them particularly popular. With their overexpansion and crippled tech rate, they may be a target ripe for the plucking at some point in the future… perhaps you’ve already considered that. Let us know if we can help in some way – this early the distance is a bit of a limiting factor for us, but we might collaborate in other ways. I think we can both agree, for instance, that Care Bears with the Pyramids is in neither of our interests.
Our Agreements
We are happy to accept your offer of a NAP to T90. In the spirit of friendship we’d be glad to extend our NAP well beyond this if you’re interested – for instance, a NAP to T150 as a ballpark figure. Our reasoning is that given the map, any attack on a competent civilization at tech parity prior to at least Knights isn’t likely to meet much success. Being Byzantium I imagine there’s even more incentive for you to wait until at least Knights to attack. Of course we hope that your attention will be focussed towards the bigger threat of the Care Bears rather than us when the time comes.
We can certainly agree to Open Borders with you for the length of our NAP. We should get to work on building a road between our nations so as to get those foreign trade routes (and possible resource trades) up and running soon. We’d prefer that the Open Borders agreement was for trade only – so our units would not enter your territory and vice versa, unless agreed in advance of course. What do you think?
It’s good to hear you’re not planning on settling further west right now. It seems a border agreement would be in both our interests, so as to avoid any potential hard feelings in the future. We propose that neither of us settles more than 5 tiles from our capital in the direction of the other nation (east for us, west for you) without first coming to a mutual agreement. We can of course fine-tune this later, but it should be good enough for the time being and prevent any misunderstandings. What do you think?
Would you be open to an espionage limiting arrangement? We’d be happy to limit our espionage spending to 43 EP’s for the length of our NAP if you’d do the same. That way we’ll both have enough espionage to see graphs, and we can focus the rest of our spending on more threatening nations. We can of course make minor adjustments later if (for instance) different numbers of Courthouses causes one of our graph thresholds to move beyond 43 points.
Anyway, that’s probably enough for now. We will of course not share your information with any other nations, and trust you will do likewise. We look forward to hearing back from you!
Kind regards,
Lord Parkin of Orgynized
@Dhalphir: Would you please stay as our team DedLurker? In case DMOC and me cant play some turns?