This is getting a bit ridiculous. Luddite hasn't turned off his espionage, and moreover has been ignoring my emails and chat messages for the past several days. Most recently I caught him in-game for a chat... and he
logged out to avoid having to talk to me. Pretty lame, IMHO. Can't even seem to face up to the fact that he's breaking his word... yet again. At least I'd have a tiny bit of respect if he said "yeah, I'm breaking my word, so what?". But breaking his word and then purposefully avoiding contact to temporarily escape having to admit to the fact is just... lame.
I was already unimpressed with Luddite's lack of respect for the deals he makes... now I'm fairly disgusted, to be honest. I'm sure he's a nice guy in real life, but in the game he's so disrespectful to his own deals it's ridiculous. If you don't like a deal, there's a simple solution - don't sign it in the first place, or at least negotiate. Going with this "happily sign then immediately double cross" approach is a bad idea all around and loses you a lot of respect.
In other news... I think we'll probably want Democracy next for SOL, although I'm still contemplating the benefits of earlier Rifles. Especially now that diplomacy is starting to get a bit frustrating. A lot of folks these days are either ignoring us, avoiding us or straight up admitting they don't want to talk. In fact only Rego, Mackoti and Adlain still respond to our messages on a regular basis. I guess it's the curse of being in the #1 spot... although I would have hoped we'd get better treatment than what we've been getting.
Luddite is obviously one of the worst offenders - he's been acting badly towards us for a long time. But there's also Plako, who was in the lead for a while himself and was supposedly our secret ally... until apparently he decided to forget that as soon as he wasn't the #1 partner in the relationship. Plako's been playing the "avoiding game" too - he hasn't been available for chat outside the game for weeks now. I finally managed to catch him in-game today, and at first all seemed well and good. But then I asked some questions about if he knew if anything was going on regarding us - at which point he ignored me for a while, then gave a lame excuse and logged out. Pretty poor show considering our "alliance" (if it can even be called that any more) was supposed to work two ways. What a joke that turned out to be. After everything we did for him, he gives us a cold shoulder followed by the silent treatment. Well, at least it gives us a glaring clue that something's very wrong with this picture.
Sure we're quite a bit ahead now, so you might say that justifies all this bad behaviour towards us - although Plako's GNP hasn't been that far off from ours in his golden age, and his MFG and food are actually ahead of ours. But this isn't even a recent thing; Plako's clearly been distancing himself from us since pretty much the instant we pulled ahead on the scoreboard, and obviously Luddite's been acting badly towards us for a long time - ever since he decided to steal a city from us that he'd just agreed not to settle. Not exactly what I'd call honorable.
Personally I stick by the commitments I make to my allies, regardless of whether they're doing well or badly. I've had many awesomely fun games that I played to a loss, because I valued loyalty to my allies ahead of throwing everything away for a vague shot at victory. Apparently some folks would rather throw loyalty out of the window as soon as it doesn't suit them, though. A shame to see.
Perhaps I'm being unfairly critical due to being in a bad mood, I don't know. I'm just a bit tired of getting ignored and avoided, I guess.
![[Image: Civ4ScreenShot1874.jpg]](http://i328.photobucket.com/albums/l323/LordParkin/Realms%20Beyond%20Pitboss%204/Civ4ScreenShot1874.jpg)
