Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[Sullla]

We meet them and they immediately offer an NAP to last for 100 turns.

LOL

Sorry about that, I thought that it was 2010 again for a minute there. Agree with the emerging consensus. Yes, we should sign that immediately. God these teams are dumb. All we have to do is avoid signing a long NAP with one carefully chosen victim (We Play Civ! We Play Civ!) and then laugh as the other teams realize they've signed away any chance to stop us from becoming a runaway.

I would also ask if they possibly had west and east confused; we could say that we have seen a body of water to the west and not the east, and ask for clarification. Agree to "forget" to ask about any discussion of known civ bonus in tech research.

We should definitely start opening a diplo thread for each team, to keep things straight. And we also want a thread stickied just for posting official emails (outgoing and incoming) for easy reference. Should be easy to set all those things up.

[scooter]

My feelings are pretty similar to all that have been expressed.

1) YES to the NAP immediately, please and thank you. Told you guys NAPs would be really easy to sign. :P

2) I'm probably going to just ignore the question about the known-tech bonus and hope it just drops. If they press us, saying something like "we aren't comfortable telling people our tech paths" and nice it up a little bit. Preferably we just don't answer this and focus on the other parts - there's enough other things to talk about that they may not care about the omission.

3) I'll of course seek clarification on the "sea" question since that's obviously confusing. CFC seems to think there are no true oceans here and we're basically looking at sea-like lakes... which makes sense. So German team may just be seeing an inland sea and assuming it's THE ocean.

4) The info that Apolyton is west of them is new I believe. Though they are implying Apolyton is directly west and WPC is directly east, when CFC seems to think we're all in diagonals. Anyways, soon I'll share this info with CFC and ask them for their current chart of who is where.

5) I'll of course respond positively about having trade routes along the river - that would be great. Especially nice if we're land Currency - would really like some foreign routes. I'll also ask if they want to include a no-scouting clause.

More discussion welcome, and after seeing some more I'll draft something up tonight. I'm also leaning pretty strongly towards opening a thread for each opponent that is purely for correspondence (message tracking thread just like the turn tracking thread), and then leaving this as our sole discussion thread. Opinions on that?

EDIT: this was crossposted with Sullla

[scooter]

More discussion welcome, and after seeing some more I'll draft something up tonight. I'm also leaning pretty strongly towards opening a thread for each opponent that is purely for correspondence (message tracking thread just like the turn tracking thread), and then leaving this as our sole discussion thread. Opinions on that?

To further elaborate on this... Seeing Sullla's crosspost reminded me of the other idea for thread creation. I see two options:

1) One central discussion thread (this one), and one thread for each team that is solely for correspondence and deal tracking with that team. The only posts are correspondence with those teams.

2) One discussion thread for each team, and one central diplo tracking thread that contains correspondence for each team. It would also be strictly for correspondence posting, no discussion.

#1 is a little neater on a team-by-team basis, #2 is a little easier to digest in a big-picture format. Does the team have a preference? I'm slightly partial to #1, but I'll go with whatever the team thinks is easier to follow. Using just this thread is obviously way too much now.

[SevenSpirits]

Regarding the tech shadowing, one thing we can say that's true is it doesn't seem worth it for the very small bonus it's worth in a game with this many teams. If it seems our relationship is already quite solid, I might be willing to say that we don't want them to know what we're teching, but otherwise that seems like it might push them away, so I would prefer to avoid it.

[Tyrmith]

Is tech trading on? Maybe we can spout something about that as an excuse if they press the issue. If they don't ask though I don't think we should say anything. Least said soonest mended imo.

As for the threads personally my opinion is option #2, as that will make it a bit easier to see the big picture, and to avoid things getting confusing when were negotiating with several teams at the same time later on in the game.

[Fintourist]

This is interesting! And good news! Is there a chance that the Germans start settling aggressively towards us and we want to push them into the ocean already before T150? Would that kind of scenario be aligned with our C&D info on them?

I also think that it is the best solution to simply accept without negotiations, but in perfect world ~T125 would sound better.

[scooter]

Note: there's a big jungle between us. Doubt they're in a hurry to settle aggressively into that.

[mostly_harmless]

What they are saying is inagreement with CFC info. I think kjn posted about thi waaaayyyy back, but the starting positions are likely to look like this:

simplified:
oo1ooo2ooo3o
4ooo5ooo6ooo
oo7ooo8ooo9o

5 - RB
8 - CFC
2 - WPC
1 - Germans
3 - Apolyton

mh

[Lord Parkin]

I'm amused at the immediate NAP proposal. Perhaps they're not familiar with Pitboss 4...

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Nothing wrong with a brief 30 turn NAP or something with WPC or something. I'd hate to see early dogs in our face pre-horses.

How about an old-fashioned Curaissier rush? Get a a triple golden age (2 from great people, 1 from Taj), lib MT, whip.

Or, even a Knight rush?

On the other hand, WPC's land might be difficult to hold. But still, they're our easiest target.