RBP3 - [SPOILERS] - Team DIM (Mehmed of HRE)

[meatbalz]

hi guys i'm back. those demographics look terrible then again we've said all along this is a long-term deal so no need to panic. as long as we stay in touch until CoL we'll be in very good shape.

we received a message from A4. i'd like to get back to them quickly

Honourable triumvirate of DIM

We are glad that you are pleased about our recent message. We are pleased about your recent message too, so at least there is a mutual benefit involved.

We are also glad that you are willing to use screenshots to help solve some possible tensions between our civilizations. We accept your offer of E of our capital and W of yours. We can also assure you that any screenshots that we exchange about this matter will remain between us.

Your thread's been active? We had no idea, seeing as your team thread is currently one of the primary leaders in the post count race. Most of our thoughts on the map have just been incorrect guesses. However, we will share with you that we know that no capital is coastal, and therefore the possibility of ocean on this map is minimal.

We would be happy to research alphabet and writing and trade them to you. We would rather research maths for our UB, but if worst comes to worst, we can get alpha. We can trade writing to you for hunting and either meditation or masonry (or polytheism if you want to take that route, but that makes the trade in our favor). How does that sound?

Trying to find a ETA for alphabet isn't easy at the moment for the same reason that you can't find a ETA. However we will keep researching in this matter and get back to you when we have a answer.

We also believe that finding more parties to trade to will be very important. While we will do our best in this matter, we know that the speed of cortes will make this easier for you than ourselves with Conan the Slow but be assured we will endeavor to find some likely partners.

We agree about the 4 or 5 player trade. Ideally we would like to end up with alpha, maths, monarchy, IW and maybe HBR. HBR would be useful as we have a supply of horses nearby and IW would be useful to chop our jungle and reveal iron.

Enough Talking!

A4

here's the screenshot



here's what i suggest we send back.



it's a lot of info, but i think we're going to come to agreement over settlement with these guys, allowing military to be deployed in other directions. so i think we take the plunge.

very preliminary dotmap:



the key location is red dot - it would make an awesome production centre as well as securing marble. it's a 2-hammer plant and at size 6 can pump out 17 hammers/turn, that's 2 turn chariots/axemen.

i think negotiations re: settling should aim to secure this site for us, even if we make concessions elsewhere. the other blue dot is lower priority but will make a decent commerce city.

we should go back saying maths is more than acceptable + we'd prefer it to alphabet, just as long as somebody in the 4-5 civ trade provides alpha we're fine. the trade for writing is awesome for us + we should bite their hands off: yes i'd like one of my useless starting techs to partly fund a trade for one of the most useful techs in the early game (speaking of which, ilios i told you we'd get some trade value out of our starting techs :neenernee)

looking over tech path, if we go for monarchy, ignore oracle + trade for writing then medi+priesthood are useless. we can trade them poly at favourable to them to build further goodwill for blue/red dot? tech path would be masonry->poly->mono->monarchy

i noticed in their list of preferred techs CoL is missing, as is aesthetics. hmmm... not sure if that was an oversight or not. HBR and IW are lower beaker values. not sure but i really would like CoL to be included in the trades, even if we don't get the religion. we should probably lobby for this but it's not a deal-breaker. even if it takes a bit longer to research it's a hugely useful tech to have and those benefits are well worth the extra ~5 turns it takes to rsch. hmmm...actually would require writing, which we wouldn't get until whoever gets alpha... so that is a big delay. bah. so monarchy it is then? ~50T ETA at the moment

we should also tell them 11W 8N is where to find rego et al (assuming it's confirmed that's the team). it seems like there's quite a lot of land behind the ottomans - i'm pretty surprised cortes hasn't bumped into anyone else until now.

i think they're going out of the way to be nice to us now and we should return the favour. i'm not saying game-long alliance, but certainly we should aim to keep relations as strong as possible with the ottomans in the near term.

thoughts?