Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[SevenSpirits]

2 gems
2 whales
1 sugar
1 spice
1 incense

Those are all the happy resources we have. Furs isn't even in reasonable reach. We have walked straight through yuris land and he has at least:

1 gems
2 wine
1 sugar
1 spice
1 dye
2 ivory
1 fur

We have 23 riverside tiles. He has, based only on our limited stripe of vision, 45 or more.

We have ~16 food resources.

He has 12 visible. (This is the stat that is most hurt by our lack of vision by the way. I'm sure he has more than us given the amount of fog, especially seafood ones.)

He has marble (according to another player; maybe not). We only have stone, which is worse.

This level of asymmetry is not OK if the borders are so clearly defined.

Map balance update!

Good news: MNG only has 27 riverside tiles that we can see. Hopefully that's all, in which case he only has 4 more than us.

Commodore has 40. And did I mention GES has 50+? So maybe Gaspar just decided to give an extra 20 or so riverside tiles to each financial civ.

Bad news: MNG has at least:

1 gold
1 spice (no jungle)
1 silk (no jungle)
2 ivory
1 fur
2 silver
1 whale

So no respite there.

[Lewwyn]

Well I am not in favor of allowing them to raze the city. I also agree that triremes could hurt if he builds them. The city is not hurting us financially and we can protect it. If he comes after us its easier to defend. He may have cats though. If you want to talk Yuris down maybe you can placate him but I'm not interested in giving up the city. We had to settle the city or he would have settled. It's seemed pretty obvious to me that he had started a bit of a settler blitz and it was only a matter of turns before he got settlers to that area. IMO it was now or never. The move ensures us an extra city and really screws Yuris.

I played the turn and left tons of notes. Ranamar you forgot to switch Dale's build to a warrior to eke out another warrior before hunting. As a result I've delayed hunting again this turn. We will get 2 warriors this turn. Send one to Angmar and one to the Desert Hill location East of the cap. I've already sent the new warrior to the Rice city West of Osi. Next turn set tech to break even and we'll finish Hunting and archery in 1 turn each.

Additionally, BD is growing but I didn't give it the corn from Osi this turn in order to get Osi to grow. Have Osi switch off the corn next turn to the plains hill cottage and give BD the corn.

Didn't change the two city names because not sure what to call em. I'm not really the namer guy.

Didn't switch graphs to MNG because I didn't see your notes until after I played.

I set Osi to Galley build and MT to worker. The settler in Grey havens should go to Angmar. Let it finish the Barracks and grow. It should finish in time to start on Skirmishers. We will need at least one spear in Djenne (what to rename it?) as well. Currently Grey, Edoras and Dale are primed to pump out units. One should start a spear build next turn, I suggest Edoras starts a spear.

[SevenSpirits]

Well I am not in favor of allowing them to raze the city. I also agree that triremes could hurt if he builds them. The city is not hurting us financially and we can protect it. If he comes after us its easier to defend. He may have cats though.

What the heck kind of reasoning is that? Not to mention facts - yes it most certainly is hurting us financially. What numbers are you even looking at?? If all it did was build troops to defend itself it would still net a negative amount of commerce and yuris would still raze it. And he'd be our neighbor who teched military techs and was forced to be friendly to MNG and will try to hurt us. This outcome is massively negative for both our teams. This isn't a two-player game!

We had to settle the city or he would have settled. It's seemed pretty obvious to me that he had started a bit of a settler blitz and it was only a matter of turns before he got settlers to that area. IMO it was now or never.

If we don't make good with yuris we will be forced to favor military techs instead of economic ones. We will lose hundreds of beakers and hammers. That translates directly to us conquering fewer cities later.

By comparison you suggest we keep a city which will be choked and not be able to produce as much money as it's costing us. That's not a good plan. We need to wait a bit longer for our early GPP focus to pay off, whip out a real offensive army and actually capture some land.

Ranamar you forgot to switch Dale's build to a warrior to eke out another warrior before hunting. As a result I've delayed hunting again this turn.

We could have Masonry by now, maybe even IW, and not have delayed Hunting/Archery. Saving gold is pretty silly when we're talking about 1t techs. If we don't want to research something yet... don't research it?

[Ranamar]

--snip reasonable and straightforward stuff--

* I don't think this aggressive plant vs yuris is a very good idea right now. (Too early.) We are still nowhere near metal casting, so he could hurt us a lot with a trireme. I'd definitely look into making a deal with them. For example:

- We allow them to raze the city.
- They give us $50 when either one of us reaches currency.
- They give us their Mausoleum building rights.
- They give us Ivory for 35t and we have a NAP during that time.
- We maintain OB during that time too and close borders with MNG.
- We each promise not to settle each other's blobs or bridges during that time.

(And this could be negotiated down a little bit.)
What do you guys think?

Sorry I didn't comment on this earlier today...

I think that deal is pretty advantageous for us, actually, to be honest. If we were offered that, I'd take it straight up. On the other hand... I dunno. It feels good to be doing something about our deplorable land. Of course, if we use the city to bludgeon something like that out of them, that's certainly one way of doing something about it.

I'd probably be willing to negotiate down to "You can have the city for 20-30 turns of ivory," but don't tell them that.

Honestly, letting them raze it will get us a better dotmap of targets later, so we can easily afford to lose the city. The question is seeing how much we can extract from them in the meantime. The only thing that city really gets us a bridgehead for an attack, frankly. It's a pretty weak city, but, if we can extract something... I think that's a reasonable payoff for keeping our cities from growing, no? (I guess it comes down to a question of how many hammers is n turns of ivory worth... which could possibly be calculated based on the Statue of Zeus, at its crudest. Edit: SoZ is 300H base, so it's approximately our input cost back... but I dislike great artists, generally and we probably have something better to build.)

[SevenSpirits]

Some diplo occurred -

Hi Seven,

Maybe you can hold that city, maybe not, it's 50/50 at best.
Skirmishers are good, but the city is a long way away from your core,
and I don't remember seeing a lot of Skirmishers when our Warrior was
passing through your land

In any case, I don't want to be enemies with your team either. Maestro
is pushing for blood ever since he saw that city plant, but I think I
can convince him to stay peaceful if we can work something out. I
don't think it would be good for either of our teams to go for
military build-up now

I'm definitely open for negotiations, the 20t loan of ivory we offered
in our email is still on the board. I'm happy to hear counter
proposals, as I want to come to a solution which would be satisfactory
for both sides. I see what you mean about the amount and quality of
your land, and appreciate that you have to expand somewhere. You
founding a city in our continent isn't too much of a problem, the big
problem is its location. It makes several planned city sites
unavailable. Letting you keep a location on our continent not only
cedes that location, but allows you to found a fishing village on the
landbridge as well

I'm not including Maestro in this email; as I said, he wants to go
total war, and I don't think I can talk him out of it unless we can
work out a reasonable deal. I hope you can convince your teammates to
go for a peaceful solution - good luck with that!

Cheers
Yuri

Good cop / bad cop fight! That whole not including Maestro thing seems incredibly transparent to me; maybe I'm wrong though.

I replied:

OK, I can try to negotiate some. Unfortunately Lewwyn is pretty happy with the situation as is (and wants to defend our prize), but Ranamar and I can override him if we agree.

Naturally trading an entire city which has a luxury and two food resources for a mere 20t of a luxury is not going to fly. Here is my counterproposal (for ease of pronouns I'm treating our team as singular so that "we" can refer to both our teams):

* You may raze the city (and you may declare war to do so, but may not take other hostile action and must make peace immediately thereafter. I won't stop you from razing it).
* We will have a NAP for 35 turns. (Of course, we can always add more NAP to the end later.)
* You will give me ivory for the duration of the NAP. (Just the 35t)
* Neither of us will settle a bridge that between the other's blob and another blob during that time. (With The Middle counting as a blob.)
* At least until 5 or fewer turns are left on the NAP, we will maintain open borders with each other, and close borders with France.
* You will not complete Mausoleum of Maussollos before t80, and I may do so. You're welcome to all the failgold you can manage. If MoM is built before this deal is signed this term will have to be replaced with something else.
* You will give me $50 when one of us reaches currency.
* I will not use a great artist for culture in a way that takes tiles from any of your cities or potential cities while we have a NAP.
* We will resolve to attempt cooperation and friendship in the future.

Hopefully these seem mutually beneficial to you. I think getting your entire dotmap back and avoiding war is a big win for you guys. Losing a nice city (and several turns of wasted city maintenance and production) would be disappointing for us of course, but acceptable with the above terms, which I have tried to keep cheap from your perspective.

Please respond quickly so we can come to an agreement before the military production ramps up too much.

Seven

I rearranged the terms I posted above a bit to hopefully make them seem better to them. I also added two pretty meaningless concessions by us at the end.

Ranamar being fine with much less compensation (and me too), I just hope I'm reading Yuris correctly as a sensible guy who will try to negotiate us down a little and really wants peace, rather than someone who will see the email as an ultimatum and decide to go to war immediately.

[SevenSpirits]

Btw: might want to set tech to something more useful (like masonry/IW) next turn since it's very possible we're not fighting anyone.

Also: HOW IS THERE NO ACTIVITY IN THE LURKER THREAD THIS GAME?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

You should feel how I feel with PBEM18

[Lewwyn]

If he accepts those terms then I might be fine with letting them raze it. Just because I'm in favor of keeping it doesn't mean I can't be swayed towards giving it up. Actually, all you have to do is whisper, "Serdoa" :neenernee

You make a good point about just teching something else. Probably should have done that.

Also I think a lot of people who would be lurking are dedlurking or playing. Gonna need to eliminate some teams to get some people talking in the lurker thread.

[SevenSpirits]

Played t67. First I caught Yuris on chat and we agreed to the deal I proposed, minus the Mausoleum part, but plus 5t of NAP/ivory. This is a good deal for us. It seems likely we could have asked for a little bit more, but it wasn't worth the risk IMO.

Because he needs to declare war on us, he is not giving us the ivory yet. (We set the 40t to start after he razes the city.) That's good because I don't think we need it quite yet.

For the turn, I changed a few of the builds to libs/lighthouses. I let one barracks finish and switched away from another. We really don't need that many. Edoras is building the Mausoleum until it completes, so that we get some nice failgold. Our doomed city is building an axeman to hopefully whip out before it's razed.

I microed Barad-Dur so it grew this turn by working three cottages instead of mines. Next turn we need to work all the mines again. This does not delay the Parthenon - it was just over two turns from finishing, and now it's just under after we switch back to the mines. After that it can start the Pyramids, which would be really nice to land.

I set research to masonry so we can quarry the stone. Next turn we can get IW with all the overflow. Then on to Currency which now has an additional $50 reward tacked on for us.

I renamed the northeastern city to Lorien as we had marked on the map a long time ago. I think we should build Moai there, so I started a lighthouse.

I offered OB to commodore as our warrior is at his borders.

We should be whipping more. I forgot to whip the lighthouse in MT, oh well.

Switched EP to MNG, we have graphs on everyone now.

[SevenSpirits]

The deal we agreed to is this:

* We recall our notice of NAP cancellation; NAP continues to exist
between our teams
* We will raze your city on the rice not later than on T70. We will
have to declare war to do it. This will not constitute a violation of
the NAP
* After the war, we will sign a new NAP for at least 40 turns
* After the war, we will gift you ivory for 40 turns
* After the war, both teams will close borders with France, and will
keep them closed at least until there are 5 turns of the NAP left
* After the war, our teams will maintain open borders with each other
at least until there are 5 turns of the NAP left
* We will gift you 50g as soon as one of the teams has Currency
* Neither team will settle a city on a tile which has only a
1-tile-wide connection (landbridge) to the other team's continent
* You will not use a great artist for culture in a way that takes tiles from any of our cities or potential cities while we have a NAP.
* We both will resolve to attempt cooperation and friendship in the future.