[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Old Harry]

I hope you get invaded and die (and vice versa).

Love you too Krill. I'm sure we will eventually. I challenge you not to be delighted when Mackoti offers you something like this when you next play him...

But yeah, I'm no sure what to think about this. I assume that technically it's ok to send such messages, but I would not like communication like this becoming a habit in AI Diplo games, because NAPs suck hard. For future AI Diplo games I think it would be good to set some kind of rules about coded messages, I think Iron for Iron trades to signal friendship are fine, but I think that you should not be allowed to discuss NAPs via messages.

That said, I'm not sure how real NAP that is. We certainly do not close our eyes and just trust mack, we'll send our sentries inside his borders anyways and I'm sure that mack does not trust us either.

Agree totally - we can't consider this to be the kind of cast-iron NAP that Krill hates, we need to build military and have enough defensive units on our borders not to be a target, while keeping an eye on where Mack's stacks of doom are and probing for weakness ourselves. I'm still going to assume that we need to defend our coastal cities in eight turns, but if Mack is sending the message "I don't want to attack you in the near future" that gives us a great chance to dust ourselves down and jockey for a position in the second rank of civs, in the hope that the leaders trip themselves up and give us a chance to get back in the game.

I don't see it as much different from the fish for fish deals earlier in the game - it's no more guarenteed, and after people read this thread (if they can wade through the whole thing) with all the thoughts about back-stabbing TBS, Dtay, Ichabod, Mack and Suttree, no-one is going to particularly trust us with a pretend-NAP in future...

Anyways, implications for coming turns, let's play along with this until we can make up our minds and see how our suttree adventure succeeds. Taking Ichabod's island cities sounds like a reasonable plan (Astro bulb coming?),

I've been thinking that, but just realised that Gunpowder means we can't bulb Astro anymore (I'll switch those scientists in Om over to be merchants instead...)

I was thinking something similar to your 2-galleon plan, we can get Amphibious promo on muskets and maces with 5XP and on knights with 10XP , so even after the initial strike we can threaten the whole of Ichabod's coast (which currently has one unit per city). We need to figure out how quick we can get galleons, but if Ichabod doesn't get a little paranoid we could really roll over him. In my wildest imagination he'll get trashed by William's stack of cats and have no answer to our Cuir army sweeping through his mainland cities (his backlines all have one unit per city and we might even be able to drop off enough units to threaten his capital), but in reality he'll probably get Nationalism soon and draft muskets everywhere.

That's really really nice! The fact that suttree did not send his lbows minimizes our losses here. Although he will still have a chance to do it this turn I guess? I believe that those two knights are the only units we have lost to suttree in this game so far, kind of crazy when you remember how long this conflict has been.

Are our knights going to have enough health next turn to attack with good odds or do we want to heal longer?

It's probably bad that they didn't attack, as they are all CGII, so we will lose 5-10 units attacking anyway. Good news is that only a couple of our units won't be fully healed next turn. The question is: do we sacrifice ancient trash, drafted muskets or highly-promoted 2-movers to break through the top defenders. I'm assuming we'll lose 7/9 catapults, but might do some simming this afternoon to see what works best.

On espionage

I again just state the obvious, we would like to have graphs from our all neighbors, but if that goal can't be met denying visibilities from dtay/ichabod/mack is a good secondary target. Sentries inside dtay's and mack's land is probably a must regardless.

Tech visibility on Mack and graphs from Dtay are our priority. I don't like that Dtay is spending so many EPs on us...

I don't think I'd settle a one-tile island city just to gain extra visibility - what you really need is just to remove suttree's culture (in the works) and expand your own (way less costly than a crappy city, unless ICTRs or something).

Edit: Nevermind, Fintourist commented on this, said it would be profitable. Any other settlement (along the border) in the works?

At the moment we've got a decent amount of hammers, but we need tech for them to be used effectively, so spending 130 hammers for ~25 commerce per turn seems a good deal to me. I dunno about other settlement on the Mack-border. Creating tension seems like a bad move, at least until we have frigates of our own to use. So perhaps just settling site 1 to give us some protection in our core - again not a great city, but it'll pay for itself from the start. And like Midway could be a decent draft camp later on...