RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Speaker]

Sent. And their team has over 100 gold lying around right now, plus they can generate about 75gpt at 0% science. They could probably get us the gold relatively fast. And if not, they'll tell us and we can suggest your plan too. (We want to slam Currency ASAP at 2 turns of 100% science, not slowly research it with an extra 20 or 30gpt).

I won't be around this evening though, I'm afraid. Maybe sometime tomorrow in the early evening, before this little shindig gets started?

OK, no worries. That looks like a fun little event.

[Speaker]

I logged in this morning before work and did most of our turn. There is still one worker to move next to Hampton Roads. I think he'll move over near Fort Henry and road, as he makes his way to St. Albans. The missionary is in position to spread to St. Albans next turn. I've got the cities microed pretty tightly, and we're able to get Metal Casting next turn for sure.

[Sullla]

Yep, things look pretty good overall. I would like to request not moving the workers next turn though, as they have to be in some pretty exact places to get our chopping ready at St. Alban's. While I have no doubt that Speaker could plan the moves out in his head too, there's really no reason for both of us to do the work.

Noticed this Nakor chariot snooping around:



Obviously that's not so good, as it indicates that they have at least one galley in the central sea roaming around. (Or I guess Whosit could have gifted Nakor a galley.) It's frustrating because we wanted to get into that central region first, and made it a high priority. But you just can't do everything, and fighting off a massive attack will tend to prune back some of your goals. Still, frustrating to see another team waltzing in much later and stealing any potential prize that might be out there.

I only made one micro change to Speaker's work, at Fort Henry:



I swapped off the cottage and onto the third farm tile (note that the bottom tile is the brand-new sugar cottage). That's because we need exactly 10 food to grow to size 4 in the city, and so I wanted to emphasize food for growth in two turns. I actually planned the worker micro to take advantage of this, and it only costs us 1 gpt and 1 beaker, so I went ahead and made the change here.

Now that the granary is full, we should be able to grow pretty quickly here and keep adding more and more grassland river cottages. Once the chopping for Hanging Gardens is done, I'm going to keep a pair of workers on cottage duty for the Fort Henry/Spartansburg pair, which will both be growing like weeds and swapping new cottages furiously back and forth.

Minor additional note: see the trade route with slaze/IKZ in the picture above? I'm glad we were able to get Open Borders to go through!

The big focus for this turn is on diplomacy, but I'd like to cover that in a large separate post...

[Speaker]

I'll be hands off with the workers from now until you tell me otherwise. When I find a bit of time, tonight or tomorrow, I'm going to start looking at city micro and see what we can accomplish. One interesting note I found this turn: swapping Hampton from 3 mines to 3 coastal tiles (9 commerce per turn) generated fewer actual beakers than simply hiring a scientist in Gettysburg, since the 3 beakers from the scientist does not get modified by us working just 20% science, and it also gets the Academy and Library bonus. Though we ended up needing to work 1 coastal tile so we could actually afford a 20% science rate. But this didn't slow down Moai statues at all, so it works out alright in the end.

Looking forward to the post on diplomacy. I saw the interesting mail that came from Plako this morning...

[Sullla]

We did receive a message back from plako last night:

Dear Killer Angels,

I haven't yet discussed with Broker, but I'm personally favourable to trading for gold to speed up your progress. We just had to find a trade that would be beneficial to both of us.

From your proposals trading of units seems most natural to me.You could spare some in unit support costs and we could use some gold to hammers conversion. I'm most intrested in Fast workers and Horse Archers. What kind of price tag these have and in what kind of time frame you could deliver? Our borders aren't that far from each other through the sea. Our island is just few tiles north from Jowy's current cities so I suspect a Galley could reach our island in reasonable time frame assuming you've one ready or can get one fast. Please specify the promotion status of the military units, when offering them.

We'll have Construction ready next turn and after that I'm going to accumulate gold for MC. Some of this gold could be used also for purchases. In 2 turns we've ~100 gold accumulated and ~70 more turn after that.

Best regards,
plako

So they would like horse archers most, it seems, and that's a natural fit for our teams. They don't have horses at all, nor did they research Horseback Riding. I think we can make a deal along those lines. Here's what I'm thinking, Speaker: send them two of our horse archers, and ask for 100g in return. (I would love to send them one of our 10 XP horse archers in exchange for a big gift of cash, but this is specifically outlawed by the game rules, sadly.) We have two 6 XP horse archers that could be carried up to the north by our galley right after it drops off the current Sentry horse archer next turn. We could live with losing 2 horse archers, especially now that we have some cities with barracks + stables, right?

Then ask if they would be willing to lend us another 100 gold for Currency purposes, to be paid back with interest in something like 10-20 turns. I'd try wording it something like this:

Dear Broker and plako,

Unfortunately we lost some Fast Workers to enemy action during the war, so I don't think we can send you any of them at the moment. However, we would be happy to pass on a few of our horse archers to make up for your lack of mounted units. I personally wanted to sell you a 10XP horse archer for Heroic Epic purposes, but the game rules specifically forbid this. What a shame!

Instead, we have a pair of 6XP horse archers available, both of them promoted with Combat I and Shock, which have already proved themselves to be very good anti-Praetorian counters! We would like to sell them to you for the sum of 100 gold, which is a pretty good deal for a pair of double-promoted horse archers. We have a galley on hand on our northern coast, and could reasonably expect to get our units to you in roughly 6-10 turns. I would be more specific, but we don't have that area mapped out yet!

In a separate deal, we would also like to know if we could "buy" another 100 gold from your team. We could agree to pay you back, say, 120 gold something like 10 turns after the transaction goes down. How would that sound - it seems like a pretty easy way for you guys to make some free extra money!

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

I'll hold off on sending this until I can hear back from Speaker. Hopefully he can take a look at this during his lunch break.

Now we also received messages from Jowy and Nakor yesterday. I sent them back emails this morning telling them that we received their notes, and we'd talk things over and get back to them shortly. Let me start with Jowy:

Hello dear Spullans,

Nice chatting with you earlier Sullla. Very informative indeed :) Congrats on settling ex-Sparta's area, I was a turn late! It really is a nice spot.. Anyway. I thought I'd "clear up" more on the whole conflict we had earlier, but now that I've thought about it I'm not quite sure what you already know. So I'd like to take this chance to let you ask me if there's something you want to know. I can't promise to answer everything, but if it's a fair question I'll give it a shot.

There are some things I'd like to know myself. I understand if you don't feel like answering though.
* Do you trust Dantski?
* What exactly was the deal you made with him?
* Any plans with the stack of doom?

Also I want to apologize for my posts in the IT thread, especially to Speaker. I was going to apologize earlier but thought it should wait till you are out of the game and cooled down.. well, that didn't happen. Anyway, I'm sorry.

~ Jowy

At least, that's what he sent us. Now before we make any response, let's make some things clear. I don't trust Jowy. Speaker doesn't trust Jowy. We would be fools to make any kind of permanent arrangement with someone who's been shown to be an extremely untrustworthy character. At some point in this game, we're going to want to expand again, and I don't see it coming through Dantski. We'd love to tech up to the medieval period, get knights and maces, and then finish off this weasel who did everything possible to remove us from the game.

But for the moment, we can play nice. I mean, we don't want to sign any agreements that we would have to break, or do any outright lying, but I think we can be cordinal and at least sound like we might not wipe his sorry civ from the face of the earth before the end of this game:

Dear Jowy,

If you would like to let us know your side of the story, we're happy to listen. We think we have some understanding of how and why conflict broke out: you felt we were crowding you, maybe saw an opportunity to make big gains and also remove a potential rival, etc. We obviously wish that you had chosen to team up with us, but the past is the past, and it's over and done with.

In response to your question, you'll understand if we're not willing to explain what deals our team has made with Dantski. That's going to have to remain in confidence, I'm afraid. I can honestly tell you that there are absolutely no plans to attack your team right now. Hopefully that can serve as a starting point for rebuilding trust and friendship.

Moving forward with your team, we need to know that you aren't simply going to serve as an attack dog for Kathlete. From our point of view, your civ was ground into the dust producing units to attack us, while their team kind of sat around laughing their rears off expanding, building cottages, and teching up. If anyone was the big winner in that round of wars, it was unquestionably the Ottoman team. To have a real relationship with your team, we'd need to know that you aren't simply serving as an effective vassal for Kathlete, doing whatever benefits them. Fairly or unfairly, that's the impression we received from the last war. Obviously it wouldn't help us to trust your team, only to have Kathlete give the order and you plunge a dagger into our backside!

Anyway, you wanted to know a little bit more of what we were thinking, so I've tried to pass that on. Our main goal remains the same as it was before, security, with a secondary goal of economic development. We mostly want to build and develop in peace, as befitting Elizabeth of India. Don't forget, we never declared war even a single time on anyone.

Thank you as well for the apology, it is greatly appreciated over here.
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Of course, the key point in that second paragraph was "absolutely no plans to attack your team right now", which Jowy will probably catch, but whatever. At least it still sounds nice. Despite writing a lot of text, I said almost nothing in that draft, which is staple of both diplomacy and academic writing, haha. Is there anything else we should put in there?

OK, wrapping up with Nakor, who out-weasels even Jowy:

Hi Sullla and Speaker,

That war is over, the axe burried.
You've ignored our last messages, but that was before the war ended.

Is there a way we can leave this behind us and focus on a good future together?
Or should we start sharpening our knives and expect you to join Dantski in an attack on us after t150?

We do believe that Dantski will attack us since he is ignoring all our messages.

Hope to hear your thoughts on this situation.

Regards,
Nakor of HRE

Let's clear the waters again: this guy is a snake. He brutally stabbed us in the back, and now wants us to trust him? Yeah right. So let's weasel the weasel here, and capitalize on his feelings of guilt:

Dear Nakor and DMOC of Holy Rome,

Yes, we did ignore the previous message, but I'm sure you'll understand that we were a little occupied at that time.

Let's see, focus on the future together... well, a lot of that depends on what your team does going forward. We can see that you have a very strong research economy, and not the greatest military in the world. Given our past history, honestly, why shouldn't we join Dantski in an attack on your team after our treaty-enforced peace is up? Heck, we don't even have to wait that long: what's to stop us from gifting most of our army to Dantski and letting him tear you a new one? We'd pay less in unit maintenance, we'd see an ally get stronger, and the tech leader would be slowed dramatically.

Of course you could give us your word that you want to clear the waters and move forward together, but there are still some hurt feelings over here about what happened. So let me offer you guys a deal: we'd like some repayment for what happened earlier. Call it war reparations, call it a bribe, whatever - but we'd like a gift of, say, 100 gold. Your team seems pretty flush with cash right now, I don't think that would be a serious issue for you. In return, we promise that we will *NOT* do a massive gifting of units to Dantski, and we will wipe clean the slate of past actions to start over again diplomatically.

That might sound like we're being jerks about this, and we sort of are, but then again your team was pretty unfriendly to us earlier as well. I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to expect some kind of compensation.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

Basically, trying to see if we can weasel them into paying us for not doing something that we weren't going to do anyway. (We were never going to gift like half our military to Dantski, because we don't really trust him too far either.) If they call our bluff, oh well, like we care about relations with Nakor. But I think there's a decent chance of this working, because they've got to be feeling pretty bad about their play earlier. Here's to getting 300g in cash from these other teams, hahaha!

I also sent a short message to Dantski telling him that we were returning his units, and thanking him for their use.

So.... thought, Speaker? If you approve, I'll send the message to these three teams. But feel free to counter-propose and make suggestions!

[novice]

I mean, we don't want to sign any agreements that we would have to break, or do any outright lying

Dear Broker and plako,

Unfortunately we lost some Fast Workers to enemy action during the war, so I don't think we can send you any of them at the moment.

Is that true about the fast workers? Is it wise to tell outright lies to potential allies?

OK, wrapping up with Nakor, who out-weasels even Jowy

[Speaker]

Sullla, I like the stronger tone of this round of diplomacy. 100 gold for 2 HA seems a little light, to be honest. That's a 1:1 hammer:gold ratio, which seems too low. Maybe offer 2 HA for 150 gold or 2 HA and a Catapult for 200 gold or something?

Your "offer" to Nakor is pretty spot on. I doubt he'll give us anything, but who knows, maybe he will.

As for Jowy, I wonder if it would be possible to get some sort of longer non-aggression pact with him? When you logged in, I'm sure you saw his gifted Praets heading west toward Kathlete, and the new settler heading west as well. Maybe we should put our heads together and see if there is any way we can work out a longer NAP with him alone? Maybe if we offer to not kill him with Crossbows, Horse Archers, and Catapults, but instead give him room and time to rebuild and try and still be a player in the game?

Is that true about the fast workers? Is it wise to tell outright lies to potential allies?

It's true. We lost 1 fast worker to Dantski in the war.

[Sullla]

Umm, Dantski killed one of our Fast Workers during the war. He even mentioned in during our peace talks about possibly replacing it as a sign of good faith. That's why we only have 7 of them right now instead of 8. I don't think this mistake is on me.

Per Speaker's suggestions, I'll upgrade the offer in the Broker/plako message:

Dear Broker and plako,

Unfortunately we lost some Fast Workers to enemy action during the war, so I don't think we can send you any of them at the moment. However, we would be happy to pass on a few of our horse archers to make up for your lack of mounted units. I personally wanted to sell you a 10XP horse archer for Heroic Epic purposes, but the game rules specifically forbid this. What a shame!

Instead, we have a pair of 6XP horse archers available, both of them promoted with Combat I and Shock, which have already proved themselves to be very good anti-Praetorian counters! We would like to sell them to you for the sum of 150 gold; we'd ask for 100 gold for unpromoted horse archers, but veteran units coming with double promotions. are worth a little more. We have a galley on hand on our northern coast, and could reasonably expect to get our units to you in roughly 6-10 turns. I would be more specific, but we don't have that area mapped out yet!

In a separate deal, we would also like to know if we could "buy" another 100 gold from your team. We could agree to pay you back, say, 120 gold something like 10 turns after the transaction goes down. How would that sound - it seems like a pretty easy way for you guys to make some free extra money!

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

And add in a little more to the Jowy message:

Dear Jowy,

If you would like to let us know your side of the story, we're happy to listen. We think we have some understanding of how and why conflict broke out: you felt we were crowding you, maybe saw an opportunity to make big gains and also remove a potential rival, etc. We obviously wish that you had chosen to team up with us, but the past is the past, and it's over and done with.

In response to your question, you'll understand if we're not willing to explain what deals our team has made with Dantski. That's going to have to remain in confidence, I'm afraid. I can honestly tell you that there are absolutely no plans to attack your team right now. Hopefully that can serve as a starting point for rebuilding trust and friendship.

Moving forward with your team, we need to know that you aren't simply going to serve as an attack dog for Kathlete. From our point of view, your civ was ground into the dust producing units to attack us, while their team kind of sat around laughing their rears off expanding, building cottages, and teching up. If anyone was the big winner in that round of wars, it was unquestionably the Ottoman team. To have a real relationship with your team, we'd need to know that you aren't simply serving as an effective vassal for Kathlete, doing whatever benefits them. Fairly or unfairly, that's the impression we received from the last war. Obviously it wouldn't help us to trust your team, only to have Kathlete give the order and you plunge a dagger into our backside! Assuming we can clear that hurdle, Speaker has given the OK to go forward with signing a longer NAP agreement beyond Turn 150 with you. Not with the full four teams that attacked us, but just with you. Would you be interested in working out something along those lines?
Anyway, you wanted to know a little bit more of what we were thinking, so I've tried to pass that on. Our main goal remains the same as it was before, security, with a secondary goal of economic development. We mostly want to build and develop in peace, as befitting Elizabeth of India. Don't forget, we never declared war even a single time on anyone.

Thank you as well for the apology, it is greatly appreciated over here.
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Unless there's some objection, I'll send these update versions later today.

[novice]

Umm, Dantski killed one of our Fast Workers during the war. He even mentioned in during our peace talks about possibly replacing it as a sign of good faith. That's why we only have 7 of them right now instead of 8.

I don't think this mistake is on me.

Ah, I missed that, thanks for clearing that up. So "some" is in fact one?

Speaker, why do you want a longer term NAP with Jowy?

[Sullla]

If saying "we lost some Fast Workers" instead of "we lost one Fast Worker" is considered an outright lie, every diplomat on the planet would be looking for new work.