Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[NobleHelium]

Agreed with sooooo.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Agreed with sooooo.

Same. This is...helpful.

[Lord Parkin]

From CFC:

Hi Scooter / Team Realms Beyond,

Thanks for checking in. The Zulu have been a headache to have to deal with, that's for sure. We've successfully been able to hold off any attack from them, but we're not in position to go on the offensive ourselves and they are refusing to give us peace. It's kind of annoying, but what can you do? Thanks for the congratulations on the Pyramids! We were pretty happy to be able to pull that off. Congratulations to you on your wonders and your Golden Age. You are playing a very strong game. How are you guys doing otherwise?

As you can imagine, this war with the Spaniards has made it harder to plan things in that area around the marble. They are actually controlling the hills around the marble right now with a woodsman II Impi that we haven't been able to dislodge. We are still very confident that we will be able to chase (or fight) them away from the area where the Marble is. If anything does change, we'll let you know.

Take care,

Caledor, on behalf of Team CFC

[scooter]

Sent with sooooo's suggested change.

[scooter]

As for CFC - that's pretty much okay with us. We've practically locked down our Taj Mahal + National Epic marble (barring a flakeout from the German team), and a marble gift to us is technically not mandated any sooner than T165, so we're good.

Since I don't want it to get lost in the shuffle, I did post this draft for CivPlayers earlier:

Decebal,

Hey! Been awhile since we last chatted, wanted to check in and see how things are going. We've now completed our full set of contacts, so if there's anyone you would like help meeting, let me know and I can hook you up with directions.

We're on T124 right now, so the guaranteed portion of our NAP is set to expire pretty soon on T130. I know it will become a rolling NAP subject to 10T cancellation at that point, but do you guys have any interest in extending the guaranteed portion of the NAP?

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

I will send this before I go to bed if there's no serious objections raised.

[Qgqqqqq]

Like them all.
I think we should try to keep dialogue with cfc going, as we may risk being diplomatically isolated soon (apart from WPC OC).

[SleepingMoogle]

If we end up gifting resources to the German in trade for a later Marble, we should let WPC know about that in advance as well. Just so that they won't start wondering whether or not we are suddenly buddying up with the Germans.

[Sullla]

While I agree that it's a bit difficult to say for certain right now whether we'll be able to declare war on Turn 150, I'm leaning towards thinking that we should be in good shape to do so. We're going to have 20 turns of Heroic Epic city production to work with, 8 of them in Golden Age mode, and the cities of Focal Point / Brick By Brick will only need forge + stables to go pure military as well. This is not even counting our Globe Theatre, which should also be going operational around roughly T150. If we build Taj Mahal around roughly Turn 140 (with marble), then swap to Nationhood civic and draft a round of maces/mukets off the top of our cities, we should have plenty of units to play around with by Turn 150.

For me, the key question is whether the Germans will manage to tech their way to a decent defensive unit. If it's Turn 150 and they still don't have Feudalism yet, we can go for the kill with reckless abandon, because they won't be able to field a unit higher than strength 5. Maces, elephants, and knights will have an absolute field day if they can't get themselves to longbows, and at their current tech level, that's looking increasingly likely. (No one in the entire game has Feudalism yet, much less the dead-last-in-beakers-researched Germans.)

EDIT: What the hell, I posted this hours AFTER the posts below me. Something very, very strange going on with the forum clock right now...

[scooter]

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NOTE!!! - this was posted after Seven's post below. The forum clock is messed up, so things are going to be a little wonky here. If you reply to me, make sure to quote so we can keep the order straight

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Agreed, if/when we send gems to the German team we immediately send off a heads-up to WPC.

Here's a thought. The Apolyton map rejection said they could not do it for 50T or "if both parties agree." How about we offer them permission to pass our maps off to their partner after the map trade? So we would effectively we trading with Apolyton and whoever their partner is. We may also consider asking who their partner is - if it's CFC for instance, we already have their land pretty much uncovered so it's not a big deal for us to get their maps.

They may just say no, but I think it's worth asking. This puts the decision to trade maps in the hands of their trading partner rather than them. I think it's worth a shot - any thoughts?

[NobleHelium]

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NOTE!!! - this was posted after Seven's post below. The forum clock is messed up, so things are going to be a little wonky here. If you reply to me, make sure to quote so we can keep the order straight

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Agreed, if/when we send gems to the German team we immediately send off a heads-up to WPC.

Here's a thought. The Apolyton map rejection said they could not do it for 50T or "if both parties agree." How about we offer them permission to pass our maps off to their partner after the map trade? So we would effectively we trading with Apolyton and whoever their partner is. We may also consider asking who their partner is - if it's CFC for instance, we already have their land pretty much uncovered so it's not a big deal for us to get their maps.

They may just say no, but I think it's worth asking. This puts the decision to trade maps in the hands of their trading partner rather than them. I think it's worth a shot - any thoughts?

I like something along these lines, for the primary purpose of perhaps finding out who their trading partner is. If we could stealthily ask that, that would be good. Maybe something like, could you tell us who your trading partner is so that we could negotiate with them or something like that.