RBP3 [SPOILERS] Hannibal of Byzantium (Bobchillingworth, ManiaMuse & SleepingMoogle)

[Bobchillingworth]

Oh man I love this diplomatic stuff


Had a long chat with Maniac and RefSteel of Maya. They are indeed our other neighbors. The chat kind of rambled on at points (mostly my fault) and went on for a couple hours, so I won't post a chat log or attempt quite the same bullet-point summary as before. The chat was in 3 or 4 parts due to switching between gmail, g-talk, and group chat, but it should be all or mostly saved in our chat inbox. I think the conversation was all-in-all successful, given that we seem to now have peaceful, friendly neighbors on both borders and are integral members in what looks to be a burgeoning 5-person tech alliance bent on getting us to cataphracts as quickly as possible

A summary of the agreements and proposals that I posted toward the end of the chat:

Me: I think we discussed pretty much everything we could discuss- to sum it up, we will work together to get each other contact with Mali, Babylon, and England; establish a tentative trade / settling / scouting framework after consulting with our respective teammates, agree to work together to form a 5-team trade and military alliance between Mali, Babylon, ourselves, yourselves, and England (barring any objections from potential member states), and plan on working together to unlock guilds, with the intention of us gifting you some cataphracts and obviously never deploying them against you.

what a block o' text... sound about right?

Maniac: Yeah

Thrilling stuff, I know. Also:

* Maya confirm that the map is as Kyan explained it, evidenced by their own testing and calculations. It seems to be like a layered cake, alternating between layers of 4 players in rough horizontal line, a productive hammer or commerce terrain above / below them, and then 4 more players, repeating for 8 or so "layers", if that makes any sense. Current theory is that the map is 64 tiles wide, with our band consisting of Mali -> Babylon -> Us -> Maya -> Mali again (with torrodoil world map). England is above either Mali or Babylon, but apparently has focused their scouting southwards. Since our area consists entirely of techers (and largely people new to RB and /or pitboss), it makes some sense for us to all work together.

* Maniac gave us an (outdated) screen shot of his capital and the surrounding area; he expects one of our capital area and the north so he can guide his warrior to Babylon. He will give us an updated screen cap of his capital in return. We should help him reach Babylon and work with Maya to contact Mali ASAP so that we can get everyone in the prospective tech alliance talking together.

* Maya will let Mali and England know that we wish to work together in a 5 person tech alliance, should they contact them before use. We should likewise notify Babylon of Maya's interest.

* Maya is relieved that we will not be throwing cataphracts at them, and as noted above is more than willing to help us beeline guilds They would like to be gifted some uberknights once we unlock them, which sounds good to me if we can get fair deal and work together as a tech alliance... that lets us crush our enemies via proxy without paying too much for troop costs or incurring excess war weariness.

* Maya does not have as strong a relationship with the Mali as we seem to with Babylon, Mali seems to be playing a fair bit more conservative game, but is still interested in being in a tech alliance.

* Apparently we were already mentioned as being one of the 5 tech alliance members before we even met Maya- I guess Babylon suggested our membership to Mali who passed it on. Which is excellent news- I want them to already have the idea in their heads, so we don't come across as desperate by asking to be members.

* Our southern land appears to be substantially better than Maya's.

* Maya will not be settling toward us in the near future; their 2nd city was toward the SW, and the 3rd will go South as well (will be founded in the next few turns).

* Maniac will confer with his teammates and they should have a formal proposal for us by sometime Sunday; we should aim for the same.

* Maya claims no intention of attacking anyone for quite some time; I am inclined to believe them. They had wanted England for drafting aggressive Redcoats ASAP, thus why Ragnar.

The Mayan screenshot:






Huh, I guess I did end up typing some bullet points after all!

[SleepingMoogle]

Nice work there Bob! Things are getting interesting pretty fast now. This alliance of 5 has the potential to be a beast, with so many financial Civs working in concert. We should definitely keep ourselves attached to it; it may put us into a winning position if they all want us to get Cataphracts out asap.

I think we can work out the screenshot and arranging a Babylon/Mayan meet all at once, by providing both with a map much like the one Kyan sent us. I already sent a quick message towards Babylon:

Esteemed Periwinkles,

We would like to share with you that we have come in contact with our eastern neighbour, a nation referring to themselves as the Mayans. From our initial conversations, they seemed eager to become a part of our proposed alliance and share information. It seems like they have been in contact with Mali as well, and suggested that they are actually their eastern neighbours with the English lands somewhere to the north. We have as yet been unable to confirm this, but trust that they wouldn't hold this belief without strong evidence to back it up.

As per our agreement, we have let them know about you, and they seemed eager to establish contact with one of your representatives. To accomplish this, they will send a scouting party around or northern border. Perhaps it might be an idea for your scout Plako to move up and meet them? We would be happy to assist in making this happen.

On behalf of the Spectre Council,
-SleepingMoogle

Assuming they'll want to meet up with them, one of us should make a screenshot later today (with the sensitive bits covered or cut out) and send it to both teams. Additionally, I'd really like to get some kind of word back about the state of the teching alliance. We're 3 turns away now from researching Pottery, and would like to know whether we should go IW next or not.

Building-wise, we should definitely start expanding to the west soon. I would propose trying to get city 5 and 6 to the SE and E of the citadel respectively. And we probably want to do so fairly quickly, probably no later than T110 or so. Given the relative food-surplus at the citadel, perhaps we can skip the granary for now and work on getting our the third Settler around T75 or so? We still don't have a real production city yet, and the sooner we can set that up, the better.

[Bobchillingworth]

I don't really care where the cities go as long as we produce a lot of them at this stage


Check our inbox, it sounds like Babylon has been slow to reply because it's just Twinkletoes playing at the moment, and I think he's wrapped up in PB1 currently, and Kyan has been making most of the decisions. Looks like we will be getting formal confirmation of our deal Tuesday; we should probably go ironworking regardless, since I can't imagine them objecting to our tech deal. They would like an email summary of our proposed deals- I thought we already sent one, if not I guess I or someone else could dig through the chats and/or this thread to scrape one together.

Edit: Just recieved a chat from Kyan at my personal email account restating that they've been slow to reply because TT and Whosit are busy and Kyan broke his computer. They will be sending us some sort of confirmation email later today. I told him "no problem"; no reason for us to be undully concerned about delays due to RL problems.

[SleepingMoogle]

Yeah, no worries.

I'll work up something longterm later on when we have confirmation of the tech deals. Nothing as detailed as the current turnplan, but aiming to have at least 6, possibly 7 cities by turn 110 and with enough defense to keep them safe.

[SleepingMoogle]

Turn 53:

Played according to the turn plan. The Citadel finished its Worker, which moved into a forest. Barla Von finished mining the plains hill today, and Anoleis is chopping at Feros.

Jenkins moved onwards towards England (no contact yet). As the barb Warrior on the Banana resource moved onto open ground, I sent the SSV Normandy slamming into him. Easy battle, we won with 3.4/4 health remaining and gained 2XP from the fight, enough for a promotion next turn. And since we still had a move left, we already spent one of the two turns needed to heal to full. :-)

[Bobchillingworth]

Recieved this email from Kyan:

Greetings friends,

I appreciate your patience as our team has temporarily had some issues connecting to the internet.

Although early, it never hurts to be prepared so i would like to start putting some concrete plans in place in regards to technology trading. There are obviously some key techs we will want to be focusing on within our group if possible. Please state your preference for research and we will try to find the best and most efficient path for us as individual civs and as a group.

Babylon: Writing -> Alphabet
Mali: Monarchy?
Byzantine: Iron Working?
England: Hunting -> Archery -> HBR?

Obviously these aren't exact trades and beaker values are way off. I believe this is the general direction we are heading currently?

We have recently met Inca and will speak to them to discuss whether they are currently forming or joining a bloc. We would appreciate the other members also sounding out Maya and HRE.

Your Friends,

Kyan
Kysit's Periwinkles

And sent this in reply:

Hi Kyan (and TT and Whosit!),


No worries about any delay; RL can't be helped, and I don't think anyone expects immediate responses in a game of this magnitude. I know my team doesn't

I will discuss with Mania and Moogle regarding what tech we prefer to research, but I think Ironworking sounds about right, given that I suggested it.

We are interested in meeting the Inca, and would appreciate any directions to them you have to offer. Thanks for letting us know you've found them.

A note, however- I would be wary of inviting too many people into our burgeoning tech "cartel" (we should call it a syndicate, sounds much more sophisticated I have spoken with Maya, and I think we are in agreement that the ideal alliance would consist of you, us, them, England, and Mali- all powerful techers with close borders (although England is a little bit of an outlier). Maya believes that more members than that may invite a dogpile against us by the remaining teams, and I am inclined to agree. Maya is interested in working with my team to secure guilds ASAP so that we can begin constructing cataphracts, with batches of them being gifted to alliance members. This plan appeals to my team for fairly obvious reasons, but I think would also benefit the entire group as a whole. Regardless of what we elect to do in the end, the immediate goal is for the five teams to all obtain contact with each other as quickly as possible, so that we can discuss in tech paths, strategy, and other concerns together, possibly in a group chat. To that end, I will send you and Maya screen shots showing how you can reach each other's scouts. Thanks to the maps you sent us earlier, my team should have contact with England in the next couple turns, leaving only Mali to go.


For the Spectre Council,

Bobchillingworth

Ironworking is what we had agreed on, correct? We really all do need all 5 teams to get contact with each other ASAP so we don't have to do silly constant back-and-forth emails with 4 other parties trying to reach some sort of agreement.

If we get to suggest a name of the tech alliance (assuming the entire thing doesn't fall apart...) I propose the "Cerberus Syndicate"


Regarding our diplomatic strategy, I do have a a couple thoughts / comments. I realize that I've sort of been running off and single-handedly working our first contact chats, proposing agreements and the like. I've witheld approving or forming any formal offers on my own initiative, because I'm obviously only a 3rd of this team, but I do have an overall plan that I've been trying to slowly develop. The strategy I recommend is for us to work as something akin to covert mafia dons in our tech alliance, using our cataphracts as leverage; we get the other teams to help sport our beeline to guilds, with the promise that we will gift them our UU once we can start producing it.

The catch is that we come ahead in all regards in this situation; we look like the good guys for not deploying 'phracts against our immediate neighbors, when we weren't necessarily ever going to do so in the first place. By getting our allies to help us reach the UU sooner, we control the tech paths of 4 other teams and positon ourselves as the most critical members of the alliance. When we gift our UU we offer security for our allies, but with conditions that ensure we subtly end up stronger (examples: we dictate their targets with our gifted units, or request a hammer-exchange ratio favorable for us, or trade for great people or cities or settling arrangments or four seperate non-aggression pacts that leave all of our allies unable to attack us... etc). The end goal is that when our UU is finally rendered obsolete, we will have arrangments in place that position ourselves as the dominant power in our alliance, in a subtle manner that doesn't draw undue attention and lead us to getting dogpiled.

Devious? Perhaps! Delusional? Probably! But I think we have an excellent chance to get an edge over just about everyone else, without anyone necessarily realizing until it's too late. It helps if we remain entirely honest in our dealings and transparent about the fact that everyone helping us to our UU is to our great personal benefit, while at the same time assauging fears by promising gifts of units or other material / military aid.

The Byz in PB1 errored by obsessing over wonders and ignoring the potential of their civ until it was too late. The Byz in PB2 errored by being so obvious in their aggressive intentions that their neighbors had no choice but to initiate pre-emptive war. I think we can easily avoid both situations, if we play our cards correctly.

[Bobchillingworth]

Sent an edited screen cap to both Babylon and Maya. I removed a few of the "city here?" signs, didn't replace them all because I A. forgot where they all were, and B. they were subject to change anyway. We can always use an old screen cap for reference if we really want to replace them, I suppose.

[SleepingMoogle]

No problems with you handling a lion's share of the diplomacy Bob. It sounds like you're having a lot of fun with it, and you're living in a much better timezone to contact our allies too.

I had a quick look ingame, and there's an English warrior right next to Jenkins now. We'd better send them a quick greeting.

Anyway, the idea of us assuming unofficial leadership of the teching alliance sounds like a neat idea, as long as we can avoid any backlash from allies that may be unhappy with it. But this is still quite some time away as well. Let's first focus on contacting Mali (the only member we haven't yet met) and Iron Working first to set up some tech trades.

We need 2-3 more turns to get visibility on Babylon's demographics. I suggest we move espionage to our Mayan neighbours afterwards.

[Bobchillingworth]

Speaking of timezones, you seem to be getting up at the same time I'm heading to bed- I hadn't realized we met England already, please feel free for you or Mania to send a first contact message, I'm going to be asleep for the next while

[SleepingMoogle]

Early shifts and long commutes will do that. Hopefully I'll be more in sync with you both in a few weeks. I sent a quick greeting to England. Hopefully we can figure out where their lands are in relation to the rest of us. Right now it's still a bit unclear where to find them.

I think we're agreed for the moment to go for Iron Working after Pottery completes. Depending on what the other teams do, perhaps Masonry would be a good pick afterwards? We could really do with boosting the production of Feros around that time, and I don't really expect anyone else to research it unless they also have access to Stone and/or Marble. We should be able to trade it around for some good value.

When I have the time later on, I'll have a look at our turn plan and see if we can get city 4 out right around T75-80. We may have to delay the Granary at the Citadel to make it happen, but it has enough of a food surplus at this point that it's not as critical a build as it is for Feros.

Also, what would be your thoughts on builds for our third city by the way? If we're starting on Iron Working next, a monument would be the obvious start to get the rice into our borders, but after that? Maybe a Warrior or two for added defense?