Niccolò Machiavelli's Thread

[pling]

I'd rather they move their Cows city 1N .

Darrell

Yeah... or if they insist on that location, we definitely need the NAP to end on OUR turn. Otherwise, they can threaten to hit TWO of our cities directly with 2-movers. If they agree to move the city 1N, we can haggle it down to "NAP can be canceled at any point after turn X, but whoever cancels must let the other move first".

I think Lewwyn's already said they won't go for that - coz it would make a city between their cap & that one pretty much impossible.

[pling]

Deal draft from Lewwyn:

TEAM:
Capture worker T54 and offer Peace + Gift Losing

A nitpick here - they've already played their T54, so that should read T55.

Don't think I already said, but I'm OK with the deal in general

[novice]

The deal looks not great, but alright. Probably as good a deal as we can realistically expect.

We should ask for a long enough NAP that TEAM would rather go after Pirates than us. We should ask when their NAP with Pirates expires.

Is the stone between us and Gillette in our settling zone?

[plako]

It currently is. In case we manage to get reasonable dealI'msure we can still keep it on our side when we start to negotiate for situation after T70. If we don't get a deal with TEAM, I think we need to secure our Gillette border giving them land.

[plako]

Krill being an obstacle. Got this on chat from Lewwyn, when I wasn't around:

okies so I have a quick response so far
"settler up front or nothing"

Sent him this:

So what was that settler upfront thingie? We don't have a single settler on production at the moment. 5T is pretty good when considering we've chopped most of our forests and need to even use whip to get it that fast.

And got this:

Well, I mean that's what he posted in response. No deal unless the settler is upfront. Basically I think the idea is that you receiving Losing before we get a city to compensate gives you too much snowball. IE: 4 cities to 2. But I haven't talked to him on chat and all he posted was the one sentence in response. I don't really want to argue with Krill.

Would it be possible for us to simply delay gifting you the city until the the settler is ready? You'd get the city at size 2 instead of 1. Instead of settling the city 2 E of the deer you could settle it north of the gold? In that case the city wouldn't be generating competing culture over the forested deer 2nd ring. Perhaps to sweeten it, we still capture your worker this turn, but we use that worker to improve the deer or horse for you so that they are already improved when we gift you the city?

I'm just spitballing possible ameliorations. Not even sure if Krill would go for them.

This just makes me mad. Sorry guys as long as Krill is involved in the process I'm not sure we can get a deal. Sent Lewwyyn this.

I haven't presented this to the team, so this is just my opinion.

Why are looking a ways to slow us down? I thought we were looking for mutually beneficial deal to come back to the game? I think no upfront worker for you either then? We would hate to see it used to you snowballing to victory.

I'm not pleased that you would be accumulating culture over the forested Deer tile. This means I would had to insist you don't settle Deer being 2nd ring.

I urge you to consider, what that city brings in within next 7-8T to you or us and compare it the case where it grows to size 2. Difference isn't that much. It costs/saves some maintenance and gives you Archer unless you chop forests, but I would not approve a deal that would allow you to chop multiple forests.

Getting tired of this. I don't even know what you want at the moment. Krill just throwing one liner and all of a sudden our hard work for consensus is thrown in to litter pin.

And please tell me, if I stepping over the line and should consult you more on this matter. I'm just firm beliver that constant team input just won't give us fast enough response times so I'm only asking opinions on bigger things.

[novice]

I think you're doing great, Plako.

Just tell them we're not the team to beat currently, Gillette is. They don't want to slow us down, they want us to recover so we can bother Gillette, and TEAM can focus their expansion efforts on Pirates. It's win-win.

[zakalwe]

Yeah, great response, Plako.

We're giving them a chance to catch up by agreeing on borders, and giving them a worker and a NAP. Considering that the alternative for them is to have a city razed and subsequently be choked to death, it's a pretty sweet deal. The only thing WE gain is to build our fourth city a handful of turns sooner, at the cost of a worker. We could nix the deal and settle a gold city instead... we might honestly be better off for it, in the short term. But in the long term it would only further cement Gillette's victory, since we'd be compelled to keep fighting TEAM.

I don't know what else to say, really. If they don't take this deal, they're not being rational.

I guess we could give them an even longer NAP, if they don't trust our intentions to bother Gillette next.

Gahh.... tempting to just tell them to shove it, at this point. Asking for a settler up front is just flat out ridiculous.

[darrelljs]

Diito, great response. I vote we continue with the plan to raze the city. If a deal happens in time, great. If not, oh well.

Honestly I didn't want to take the deal on the table, but was willing to along with majority .

Darrell

[plako]

TEAM is slow in their descision process

Get back to you tomorrow. Not sure I'm playing the turn tonight (my time). But we're leaning toward accepting and getting on with it.

My response:

Good news. Unfortunately I had to play the turn 54 so everything will be postponed by 1 turn and you lost your warrior near Bloody Mary. However I think we're still pretty much ok with the most important parts of the deal, assuming you can get things sealed before I had to play my next turn.

Playing the last turn didn't cost us much. Biggest cost is that I moved our workers away from the area they would be needed next. However Next turn will again be pretty expensive since without peace I would be whipping Axe from Bitter.

[zakalwe]

It also delayed our acquisition of Losing by one turn.

I'm annoyed that they didn't accept already, but I guess I'm still hoping they will accept. Otherwise razing Losing and settling on their gold sounds like a good fallback to me. (Easier said than done, perhaps.)