Hmm, I cannot get in contact with Slaze since yesterday in spite of trying multiple channels - but otherwise he does seem alive, as evidenced by him unexpectedly DoW'ing me in another game he play
Slaze,
I have to start to cook dinner for 20+ people soon - so please either play by 3pm your time or I will move scout 1NE->E .
Uh...ok, so the panther didn't even attack. Since it's out there, I move to the plains hill, though at monarch I'm confident it will survive. But where did it go?
For next turn I think definately 1SE, then likely 1NE maybe 1E.
(August 31st, 2013, 16:14)slaze Wrote: Uh...ok, so the panther didn't even attack. Since it's out there, I move to the plains hill, though at monarch I'm confident it will survive. But where did it go?
For next turn I think definately 1SE, then likely 1NE maybe 1E.
Slaze, thank you very much for playing so promptly. You never replied to my email asking if you want to remain our main turn player considering that turns are now lasting 10-12 hours, not 24 hours we initially expected?
(August 31st, 2013, 16:14)slaze Wrote: For next turn I think definately 1SE, then likely 1NE maybe 1E.
Yeah, both look fine, fortunately there is grassland nearby in the fog, so move after this one would be 2 tiles.
Unfortunately, we have tough decision to make this turn: next tech to research, AH or Mining? My initial trials indicated that building mine 1S of the capitol immediately after improving corn would be beneficial, but it did not have time to research it extensively. If we want to build that mine, we have to switch to Mining this turn (I tentatively did it in game).
Lion sighted West of our capitol
Native Americans replied:
Quote:Hello Master and Margarita,
We are very happy that our teams have gotten off on the right foot. Even before the game began, our team's desired strategy was to remain peaceful with all of our neighbors as early wars are so detrimental to all involved party's growth. We are delighted that your team shares these thoughts. However, we are going to reject your initial offer for the border proposal and NAP to turn 150. We believe that such a long NAP would not be conductive to peace, it would encourage both teams to settle aggressively and try to undermine each other. Quite possibly, war would break out as soon as the NAP expired. Real peace is an ongoing negotiation based on trust developed over time. So yes, we agree to a fair division of land, but we believe that our two civilizations should expand organically. It does not help that we have not yet scouted the land you wish to divide between the two of us, our scout has been moving in a circular fashion around our capital, so we haven't been able to travel very far west. We are hesitant to sign over land that we know nothing about.
That being said, we would like to offer you a NAP until turn 50, to be renegotiated 5 turns before it expires. Such a NAP would curb any nonsense such as chariot or axe rushes, but would avoid the scenario in which aggressive settlement leads to resentment on both sides. We have no intention of settling on your doorstep, and we believe you share the same distaste for such provocative actions. This NAP would keep both members honest and in doing so encourage a longstanding peace. In addition, we would like to sign a two-way information sharing pact in which both member agree to notify the other when contact is made with another civilization.
As for your concern with the proposed EP spending agreement, we meant that once other contacts are made, we agree to switch off spending to other civilizations. This stops an "EP war" where we would both waste espionage points on each other instead of using them in more beneficial ways. Both parties would agree to limit espionage spending to 43 points each, the magic ratio where both sides would maintain bar graph visibility.
Please let us know how you feel about our offer.
Kind regards,
Eagles and Condors
They basically say two things:
* offer us NAP until turn 50 - which is clear
* want fair land division, but to "grow organically" and reject our half-half land division
I was planning to just send them the screenshots of the lands we scouted (it is allowed in this game after meeting another civ, even before paper), but now I am having second thoughts. Their answer seem rather unfriendly to me - and definitely they do not trust us we are offering them a fair deal.
Should we just send them the screenshot anyway? NAP until T50 sounds like "wait until we get Dog Soldiers" than truly long-term collaboration. On the other hand, it is understandable they do not want to divide the lands they have not seen ....
Whatever we will do I think we should take our time - about couple days - before we respond. Ideally, we will know by that time what our Western neighbors are - or who are Eagles Eastern neighbors .
please keep Mining as researched tech. We can change to AH as late as 4 turns from now and still got it in time to improve cow immediate after corn, but to have a chance to build mine in between, we need to switch to Mining this turn, as I already did in game.
do you see any usefulness of T50 NAP to us? I am afraid that Eagles are correct, nobody sane will attack us before T50 anyway plus we now see their capitol through EP so will know what they are up to. other clauses their want - curb EP and exchanging info - are rather to their advantage, as so far we prioritized scouting heavily, so we have more info to share and will meet more civs soon.
I think we should not accept the NAP and terms they are offering now, in hopes of getting something better.
I'm also pretty sure it was not HBHR writing the last message, it looks like it was one of their lurkers - suttree or Oxyphenbutazone, who seem to overtake the team, based on the civstat logs . Pity that plans for my chat with HBHR did not work.
I find their message rather disappointing and not particularly friendly (even small things like saying that their "reject" our NAP offer instead of just not accepting it ). And this "keeping each other in check through threatening attack in 5 turns" idea seem rather silly and huge waste of resource to me . Strange that they see it in case of EP, but not globally . BTW, this whole thing sounds a bit like a "suttree doctrine" to me - so for posterity's sake, I am betting suttree was author of that message .
Suttree's doctrine
Suttree Wrote:Valuing military is a problem because, in theory, it's a waste. You build a better economy than your opponent, then pump out military units 'til he dies. In practice, it's part of a game that has nothing to do with the economy. Since it's my thread, here are my thoughts
Defensive military is easy, it just gets factored at face value in to the cost of the investment the military is defending. Seven's numbers are useful because they allow you to take build cost (in hammers) and maintenance (in gold per turn) and lump them together in a sensible way. You can answer questions like, "How much will it cost me to settle this frontline city?" Also, the numbers attune you to the most efficient way to build your military. For example, "Why is a single Heroic Epic city better than many hybrid cities?", "Why is Slavery efficient?"
But offensive military is entirely game dependent. It doesn't seem that way at first : "Look at my opponent! Noob doesn't have an army, I'll build an axe and take his entire empire! Woo 1000% return on investment!" Unless combat is skewed towards the attacker, however, this should never work. Your opponent just builds his own axe, and everyone's worse off. This is the problem of guns and butter - at the margin it is always better to build military than not, but over the long term everybody loses. So military is a a complete waste of resources and my opponents should never build a single military unit.
And yet expert players build military. Why?
In diplo games, military is an extension of the diplomatic game. Two players might develop their economy equally, but the player who has more influence wins. The threat of force is a useful psychological tool for garnering influence and takes its value from the judgement of the expert diplomat.
In no diplo games, warfare is a game of tactics. The expert player might not have the best economy, but he can gather information more efficiently and predict the behaviour of his opponents more accurately. The expert player builds military because he knows his opponent, in practice, will not respond. Or he uses tactics to spend less on military than his opponents and achieve the same result.
And that's why experts build more military than noobs like myself!
I fully admit that my goal in this game is to build an economy and then do something with it. PB13 on the other hand.....
as I wrote you before, playing the turns on the very tight schedule we have now - like 12 hours per turn - is not a problem for me. So are you OK with me playing without further consulting with you when there is less than 12 hours left on the timer and we are one of the 2 last teams to play?
We have this situation again, and especially since you left scouting instruction looks like I could go ahead and play and would not like to do it without your explicit consent. I will be leaving for a beach within an hour , though ...
EDIT: We are now the only team who has not played yet.
Calling all the lurkers - and teammates . How should we respond to Eagles? I generally think that since they seem to believe that "keeping each other accountable" through constant threat of war is such a good idea , I would give them that - even a bit more that they ask for in terms of uncertainty in hopes that they would reconsider ...
My first idea was to keep it "sweet and short", perhaps even play a bit dumb:
A.
Quote:Hello Eagles and Condors,
Thank you for answering our message and sharing your views. We were rather confused by some of your points, though. How can land division would lead to aggressive settling toward each other? Or why you think that NAP until turn 150 would cause war between us to start on T150, but at the same time you say that NAP lasting to only T50 would not cause war between us to break on T50? We do understand, however, your unwillingness to divide unseen lands, we planned to see the screenshots to you in the next email. If anything, the lands between us look better in your half .
If you want our borders and our relations grow organically, we can do it, too. We were glad to hear that you consider attacking us before turn 50 silly, so there seems no need for NAP until T50, either. It will be also more natural and consistent to subject EP point spending and exchange of information to this general principle of organic growth and slow building of trust.
As we said, agreement as above would not be our preference, but we are willing to do it to accommodate your wishes and vision of future relations between us.
Kind Regards,
M & M
Probably sounds at the moment too annoyed/arrogant/mocking . But generally the idea is to extend their idea of "organic growth" and constantly threatening each other (in their words "keeping accountable") to its logical conclusion. I wonder if they would like it to applied to them .
Let's counter with something like this, and please help wittle it down, this is a little raw:
Eagles and Condors,
Thanks for your your response. We accept your grounds for rejection and agree with you that our offer, reduced to its simplest form, could lead to situations where exploitation and aggresive settling could take place. We assure you this is not our intent, and given both our limited knowledge of the map it may not yet be time to fully dicuss any settlement issues and thus it is diffucult to phrase our desires correctly.
We're glad to hear you desires of peace and we certainly share those sentiments. But quite frankly, we are somewhat worrisome over your proposal. With you being the owner of dog soldiers and the first 50 turns being relatively uneventful, we propose a NAP until turn 100 with a 10 turn notice of cancellation policy.
And to facilitate organic border settling between our nations, we propose a "heads up" zone, 3 tiles from the halfway tile (see picture below), where if one of our nations intends to settle in this zone the other will be notified where at the earliest convinience (which could defined with further negociation as something like 10 turns before settling, when the settler for that city is finshed/begun, or some other way). I would think that to start our nations would only settle on that nation's side of the halfway line, though as settling should really be handled on a case by case basis. For example, so far (see bicture below) we are eyeing the site marked "A" and would be willing to offer the site marked "B" or any other site you prefer in that area on your side. But as we are looking at this as our 3rd or 4th city, our intentions may change as more is revealed etc. In general I think we agree to the prior dicussed ideas of settling "fairly" and "organically", just with so little of the world known at this point as you have mentioned, we find it challenging to create a framework to apply to all cases. The above may be about the best we can do at this point, and we certainly view the issue as something to be addressed in a city by city basis until the border is settled. Let us know what you think of these ideas above.
Otherwise, we can agree to capping EP at 43 and agree to the notice of meeting civs provision.
- but otherwise he does seem alive, as evidenced by him unexpectedly DoW'ing me in another game he play 
.
in hopes that they would reconsider ...