Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[Ceiliazul]

Do we need a poll? This question is both urgent and divisive.

[scooter]

Urgent? I don't think the fast worker thing is urgent. And yes, even if we do ask them (leaning towards just skipping it now since that seems to be the general majority opinion), it's highly likely they ask for too much.

[Bigger]

no. just defer to sulla. I don't see the harm in closing borders preemptively. we can reopen them when the missionary leaves.. and I believe we have plenty of trade routes, no?

[Ceiliazul]

Urgent? I don't think the fast worker thing is urgent.

I was 100% referring to the CivPlayers open border decision, sorry that wasn't clear.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I'd be OK with asking a price for a pair of fast workers. We could sell them a line about trying to speed up hacking away a lot of jungle tiles if they want to know why we want them.

I'd be OK with trading a pair of knights for a pair of fast workers. It isn't like they can do a lot of damage to us with two knights, but to them the units could be somewhat valuable dealing with their Spanish problem. Maybe they'd go for it (once we can build them anyway).

[NobleHelium]

no. just defer to sulla. I don't see the harm in closing borders preemptively. we can reopen them when the missionary leaves.. and I believe we have plenty of trade routes, no?

I would be extremely hesitant to re-open borders with CivPlayers if we close them. We will not be able to cancel them again for ten turns without declaring war, which would sort of break the NAP. So yeah.

[scooter]

I would be extremely hesitant to re-open borders with CivPlayers if we close them. We will not be able to cancel them again for ten turns without declaring war, which would sort of break the NAP. So yeah.

Shrug. If we close them and then explicitly say "you cannot enter our borders" and then re-open them and they move in anyways... That's an equivalent agreement violation. So I'd say screw them and declare war to break the OB in that case.

I'm not afraid of that scenario is what I"m saying.

[NobleHelium]

I'm just saying that it's likely going to be an event that's open to interpretation by other teams if we declare war on them, regardless of the actual reasoning or situation.

[antisocialmunky]

They're going to crap themselves if they see Close Borders -> Edu/Lib/Nationalism -> Nationhood -> Mass Drafting. I would give up on good relations with them and spend our time trying to figure out how to keep everyone from killing us.

Or you know, tell them after we declare on the Germans "we needed a good alibi."

[scooter]

We need to respond to WPC. Here's their message for reference.

Hello,

that's OK. Probably makes them suspect the war even less.
We'll begin churning out the cats and supporting units from now on. I bet the German team will see the powergraph spiking up, but I believe they don't have a chance even if they prepare for war a little bit. Our two front attack plan will make sure of it. Also they don't have the cats that are really vital at this era. Lets make a specific attack plans together later. At this moment the best invasion route for us seems to be from very north. You can choose the best route for you, but it seems that the strategic copper resource is near your border, so that might be one prime target for you.

Also, your missionary in our lands seemed to move quite slowly. Try to keep your people running, OK.

Best regards,
Tatu of WPC

Suggested response:

Tatu,

Great to hear about pushing out more units. We'll of course be making our own preparations soon too - we've already begun churning out cats, and we should have some strong supporting units too . The good news is that even though we had a no-scouting clause with the German team, they seemingly forgot about that and started poking around in our borders. We of course took that as license to scout out nearly all of their cities, so we'll be able to share with you whatever map intel you need. Turns are moving slow so we haven't mapped out a specific invasion path yet, but we'll be working on that in the next week or so. Either way, we'll just want to make sure both of us hit around the same time.

Our goofy missionary does indeed like to wander, but he insists that he still is getting to your cities as early as possible. Regardless, we cracked the whip and insisted on "less lollygagging, more proselytizing!" and he seems to have gotten the message.

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

First paragraph is just giving them a meaningful response so we keep them in tune, second paragraph just responds to their light-hearted poke in kind. Thoughts?