Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[dazedroyalty]

I don't understand the reasoning behind this, please elaborate.

My understanding is that we want to 1) commit enough missionaries to make it attractive to them while 2) not committing more than necessary given that they will be highly motivated to spread religion themselves. By mentioning a vague number of missionaries, we can let them know we'll give them more to one without locking ourselves into a set amount.

[NobleHelium]

I think WPC is expecting us to provide all their missionaries for them, in exchange for archers. I don't think we actually want to make that trade, so we want to provide just enough missionaries and make them think that we'll keep providing more, so that they convert. Once they convert they'll be stuck even if we don't give them more missionaries, so eventually they'll build their own.

[Azoth]

Are we sure we don't want to trade missionaries for archers?

We'll want some MP units for our Bureaucracy/Academy capital and the cheapest unit we can build is a 30-hammer War Chariot.
For just 10 hammers more, we can have a 6XP Archer and spread Hinduism to a WPC city. That gives us 1 gold/turn (plus eventual multipliers), prevents passive spread of foreign religions (denying rivals free shrine income), builds goodwill, and (potentially) allows us to scout WPC territory. War Chariots are more useful in an actual war, but we have long NAPs with all our neighbours, and by T150 we should be strong enough not to care about the makeup of the capital's garrison.

It's not a great exchange, but it's not bad.

Edit: Crosspost with the Dark Arts thread.

[BRickAstley]

I think it shouldn't be necessary, just go along with Noble's idea, be somewhat helpful but don't build their whole religion infrastructure ourselves. There's not really sense in doing so, and getting them to think slightly more of us doesn't seem to benefit us much in the long run.

[scooter]

Sent to WPC:

Tatu,

Great! We'll make sure the missionary heads towards you right away. We might be able to send you a couple more if you'd like to get you a jump start on spreading it around. Let me know if you're interested in anything like that.

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

They didn't ask for further missionaries, so I left it open-ended, but also not promising too much. This is pretty much my original draft with some slight modifications.

[Bigger]

Sent to WPC:

Tatu,

Great! We'll make sure the missionary heads towards you right away. We might be able to send you a couple more if you'd like to get you a jump start on spreading it around. Let me know if you're interested in anything like that.

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

They didn't ask for further missionaries, so I left it open-ended, but also not promising too much. This is pretty much my original draft with some slight modifications.

iirc, they asked for 2 free and then trading missionary for archer after that? That seems like an invitation to send as many as we are able to me!

[kjn]

That was in their preliminary in-game chat with me, not via official channels.

[scooter]

From WPC:

Hello,

Yes, couple more would speed up the spreading nicely. Passive religion spread can be slow and unpredictable.

Thank you.

Tatu of WPC

I think we send them 2 more (3 total) and let them do the rest.

[Bigger]

From WPC:

Hello,

Yes, couple more would speed up the spreading nicely. Passive religion spread can be slow and unpredictable.

Thank you.

Tatu of WPC

I think we send them 2 more (3 total) and let them do the rest.

ah well of course. they aren't in OR and probably don't have any monasteries, how were we expecting them to spread the religion themselves?

[scooter]

ah well of course. they aren't in OR and probably don't have any monasteries, how were we expecting them to spread the religion themselves?

They did say in their message they plan to revolt into OR. They just want a couple cities to get converted first. Once we do that, it'll be worth it for them to revolt into OR, and then they can spread on their own easily.