Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[kjn]

I may just send this verbatim when I reply to them - you know the situation better than I do.

You probably should leave out the remark about why we knows about the end of the era of barb animals.

[kalin]

Scooter, that's a good chat. FWIW, my opinion: I think it's good you took that initiative and I agree with what you shared. I am noticing that CFC seem to be relatively cautious with what they share.
Kalin

[scooter]

Yeah kjn, will do.

I am noticing that CFC seem to be relatively cautious with what they share.
Kalin

Yeah, that's my sense with Caledorn. He's being cautious and is choosing his words carefully, as is the team. Hopefully we can loosen them up a bit.

I'll draft something shortly.

[scooter]

Recommended movements for them:

W-NW-NE-NW

Wait, how is that possible given this:



Edit: by swapping the E and the W your directions do make sense. Is that it?

[Ruff_Hi]

I think someone has the W and E mixed up. A big downside of giving explicit directions like this is that it is very obvious where our map knowledge ends. I know that I mentioned giving them defensive tile info earlier, but I would limit that to 'tiles we can see from our existing lands'. That way, we can stop giving them 'tips' when they leave our vicinity and we don't have to tip where our map knowledge actually ends.

[scooter]

I think someone has the W and E mixed up. A big downside of giving explicit directions like this is that it is very obvious where our map knowledge ends. I know that I mentioned giving them defensive tile info earlier, but I would limit that to 'tiles we can see from our existing lands'. That way, we can stop giving them 'tips' when they leave our vicinity and we don't have to tip where our map knowledge actually ends.

They pretty much know our map knowledge is light right now. Also, I would end it with "and that will put you into many forested/jungle tiles and you should be safe for awhile" rather than just explicitly give those tiles and nothing else, so there will be some fuzziness on how much we can actually see.

[scooter]

I realized kjn flipped east and west in his whole comment and not just the moves, so I adjusted my message I was drafting accordingly. I see them flipped a lot, so I'll just remind everyone what I learned when I was in grade school to keep them straight. Think about what they look like on a compass:

Code:

N
W E
S

Ok now get rid of the N/S and squish the letters together:

Code:

WE

Ok good, now WE will never get these wrong again . Ok, back to the draft. How about something like this? Any objections to the directions?

Caledorn,

First things first, I checked on the barb thing for you guys. We've seen a couple panthers roaming around to our northwest, but that's further from you guys. There was one north of your warrior, but it's dead now and won't be bothering you anytime soon . Supposedly real barb units should start appearing soon though, so take caution to land on defensive terrain. Assuming you are still 1N of the pigs (you were as of the most recent screenshot I was shown), you can go E-NE-NW-NE. Your first move will be flat ground and will be the one risk, but after that it's all forests and/or hills. That should put you into a patch of forests/jungles, so you should be safe for awhile after that.

We agree with your suggestion to better define the agreement on meeting other teams. I'll be sure to let you know if we meet anyone, and I'll include the info on which team, direction, turn number, etc. Hopefully between our two teams we can chart the rough map shape and where everybody is at pretty quickly.

As I said last night, our map info is a bit light, so our speculation has been limited so far on map setup. We do suspect there is a fair amount of water out there, but it seems likely to be a land-dominated map overall. Your comment on the saltwater body was interesting, I'm wondering myself if there's some mild mirroring going on for everyone's starts. Have you seen any signs of explicit terrain mirroring with the land south of us and the land south of you?

Thanks,
scooter
Team RB

Really hoping that last paragraph gets them talking a bit about the map info they've uncovered. He's been a bit tight-lipped on that so far, but surely they have more info than us.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

This looks good to me. Doesn't give too much away, hopefully some dialogue about the map that will help us.

[kjn]

Looks good. I note it's hard to initiate info sharing when you're the part with less knowledge, and right now CFC probably has twice as much map knowledge as us.

[Ruff_Hi]

ha re your 'WE' comment. I typically have to think 'NYC is East coast, LA is West coast' (or 'Sydney is East coast, Perth is West coast') and then picture it on a map and W and E fall into their correct spots.