Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[kjn]

I prefer to refer to their war, and that we wish to remain neutral in it. We are already providing militarily significant resources to them, and anything else would put our good relations with the Spanish in jeopardy.

That way we can give a firm no that is tied to their concrete situation, without having to bog down in stupid minutiae (compare the Germans with their idea of collaborating on the known tech bonus).

[Brian Shanahan]

I think the best response would be simply:

We are sorry but we cannot forward you the gold.
When it comes to wars between other teams, our policy is neutrality.
Naturally, we will refuse any loan requests from Spanish Apolyton as well.
Best of luck.

Or something along those lines.
Let's not pretend to be interested in their offer, or pretend that we might accept if the terms were right, or pretend that any assistance on our part might be forthcoming.

Personally, I reckon this is the best response that the team can give. We don't want to help CFC, we don't want to be mean about it, and frankly, pretending to be interested only to later refuse will only put their backs up, making them less likely to play nice with us than a straight-up, polite, refusal.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Haha, we're the Imperios who don't care about anyone but ourselves. We're also in a position of power where we can gift people up to second place or something.

So agree with Shoot, need to let CFC down gently and still give firm refusal. Of course I'm going to advocate hawkishly in our private boards, but I'm disciplined enough to not let that leak out into the public diplomacy.




Also, I've got a brilliant idea for how CFC could possibly end the NAP and attack us. What they could do is request that other people send their army to attack our spices city. As soon as it's cut off, CFC could say "look, you're no longer gifting us spices, which were a contingent of the NAP. Therefore it is null and we can now attack you with this giant army we've built up". Chances of this happening? Unlikely. Chances of this happening if they got the opportunity? Possible.

[novice]

Why attack the city when they can just sabotage the spices.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Ooooh, forgot that espionage was on!

Yup, watch out for this! Hahahaha, watch them fucking try once the Spanish war is wrapped up, they have a huge army building up, and they cut a deal.

[Ceiliazul]

Why are we joking about this? Many of you seem to think we'll be dogpile-proof on t130? I know the track record of dogpiles is poor, but that shouldn't mean we act as if it is impossible.

We're not helping matters if we shove the CFC offer back in their faces. Cash for workers is a good counteroffer- we can build wealth to make up the lost beakers.

[Shoot the Moon]

Why are we joking about this? Many of you seem to think we'll be dogpile-proof on t130? I know the track record of dogpiles is poor, but that shouldn't mean we act as if it is impossible.

We're not helping matters if we shove the CFC offer back in their faces. Cash for workers is a good counteroffer- we can build wealth to make up the lost beakers.

There's no way they trade us 300 hammers worth of workers though, so still not worth it.

[Sullla]

- CFC has signed a NAP lasting until Turn 175.
- CivPlayers has signed a NAP lasting until at least Turn 140.
- German team has signed a NAP lasting until T150, and we're planning on attacking them when it ends.
- WPC has signed a NAP with our team and wants to join us in the German attack.
- All the other teams are much too far away to matter at this point.

No one is advocating that we shove a refusal in CFC's face. Obviously we will respond in a diplomatic fashion and put the best spin possible. The point is that we don't want any part of their deal, and there's really no reason to waste time discussing it. We don't want to start going in endless circles about trading for workers or any nonsense like that. We're just not interested, period. They are not trading for gold with us right now. It's simply a bad deal for our team.

[scooter]

Heh, that was quite an explosion of posts . Glad to know everyone is still interested and reading! Anyways, I'm going to draft something up here in a minute, but the gist of it should be "nope, sorry, we're going to be neutral" in nicer terms. I won't reiterate all the reasons we should say no, because you kind people have covered all those reasons pretty thoroughly.

[kjn]

I also wish people would look up the actual agreement we have with CFC. It includes the clause that we are not to perform espionage actions against each other, which I imagine covers not putting wooden shoes into the improvements of the other party.

Yeah, we're not dogpile-proof, but I think Scooter has managed to put us into such a situation that a dogpile is exceedingly unlikely, and since we have Construction, this means that offensive warfare against us is quite hard, especially given that we're culturally dominant all around us.

But I miss Scooter in all this. We should probably at least send a message-received message back to CFC relatively soon, in case we have to wait longer for him.