Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[zakalwe]

I don't think it is a good idea to say 'sure that sounds fair' and then add in corollaries that will obviously favor us. What you're proposing Fintourist is a fairly transparent loop hole that favors us that any reasonable person will be able to spot coming from a mile away. We might as well be up front about us disagreeing with them. It shows that we respect them. The way I see it is we can either try communicating with WPC and trying to resolve this issue in good faith or we can piss them off later when we pull the rug out from under them. I'm hard pressed trying to come up with a scenario where the expected value of us trying to communicate our issue about the land split is worse than a guaranteed pissing off of WPC.

Maybe we could just try haggling. Say we want cites X, Y, and Z and see what they say. Maybe we can offer them units or something?

Who are you and what did you do to ASM?

Anyway, I agree with the above. We should try to communicate honestly with them, in a respectful way.

Trying to let the issue slide until there is no turning back (i.e. we are both at war) also makes sense, if that is doable. So we don't have to be in a rush about hammering out the details.

I think it's kind of impossible to agree upon anything up front other than general principles. But we should be careful about those, too. Some things to keep in mind:
- WPC will probably invest a significant fraction of their resources into this war, just like us.
- They may well end up taking more losses than us, since they have weaker units.
- They may even end up killing more units than us, depending on how the Germans choose to defend.

So if for example we were to say that the spoils of the war should be distributed in proportion to the losses we take, that could very well come back and bite us.

[Dantski]

IMO letting the land issue go is a very bad decision as our silence indicates an agreement with their proposal. Just remember two of the cities WPC will get are pretty bad in the tundra, whereas only one of the cities we take is kinda poor with an excess of desert and lack of food (Wanz in the west). I'd be fairly happy with this split even considering we'll be doing most of the killin' since we come out with around 7-8 new cities from the conquest (mostly productive ones too). If we want to haggle ask for Wien too.

[darrelljs]

Qui tacet consentire videtur only applies if invoked .

Ideal situation is to get into war with this issue unresolved, and we just gobble up as much as we can. We've spent a lot of our research and population to prepare for this war and if they failed to match us, that's on them.

Darrell

[Brian Shanahan]

Qui tacet consentire videtur only applies if invoked .

Ideal situation is to get into war with this issue unresolved, and we just gobble up as much as we can. We've spent a lot of our research and population to prepare for this war and if they failed to match us, that's on them.

Darrell

This. Either we flat out hit them the split is not going to happen as they believe. And then deal with WPC according to how they react (i.e. either gobble them or leave them as vassals). Even if they pull out of the attack, we don't need them.

Or we can ignore the split, take the cities we want and when they look for cities from us, point to the rules.

Anything else is pandering to a team to incompetent to hurt us.

[scooter]

I really dislike any suggestion that involves discussing city splits with them right now. I do like Brian's suggestion for making the last two sentences work a little better, so I made that change. I'm going to send this final draft in the next hour or so unless someone can make a convincing case why we shouldn't.

Beta,

Thanks for sending that, we took a look and discussed it, and compared it to our own planning.

We would really prefer that we both declare at the same time on T150. Giving them the opportunity to first wipe out one stack, then turn and try to do the same to the other is a very dangerous plan. Forcing them to try to defend both at the same time will stretch them much worse in our opinion. We put a lot of effort and planning into making T150 the exact attack date we agreed on, and I definitely think it's best that we stick with that. We don't want to give the Incan team more time to get a dangerous tech like Feudalism, so we have a strong preference to attack on T150.

Is going this route okay with you?

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

[Sullla]

scooter's draft is the best thing that's been proposed so far in this thread, probably without the "is this OK" part at the end. Per typical RB fashion, the discussion has already begun to spin in endless circles, which means we've reached the point of diminishing returns. It's about time we get ready to send a response.

[Brian Shanahan]

Kalin's post up-thread expresses my idea better than I did. Might use that instead.

[darrelljs]

I'm with Sulla...the wording of the first paragraph is so good, the last question is not even needed.

Darrell

[scooter]

Oh yeah that works well - somehow I missed that suggestion by Kalin. Got buried in all the other posts.

Beta,

Thanks for sending that, we took a look and discussed it, and compared it to our own planning.

We would really prefer that we both declare at the same time on T150. Giving them the opportunity to first wipe out one stack, then turn and try to do the same to the other is a very dangerous plan. Forcing them to try to defend both at the same time will stretch them much worse in our opinion. We put a lot of effort and planning into making T150 the exact attack date we agreed on, and I definitely think it's best that we stick with that. We strongly prefer declaring on T150 - we don't want to give the Incan team any more time to get to a dangerous tech like Feudalism.

We hope that you can see our reasons to take this approach. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

[darrelljs]

The only other thing maybe worth doing is invoking Speaker and saying his vast MP experience says simultaneous attack is far and away the best approach. But honestly its fine the way it is...either your original draft or the kalin draft.

Darrell