Thank you for answering our message and sharing your views. You have been very open with us about your views and plans regarding our civ so we will reciprocate with the same openness. We were glad to hear that you consider attacking us before turn 50 silly, however we are very concerned that you do not consider attacking us just after T50 equally undesirable . It is impossible for us to imagine how could we "provoke" you to attack us that early? We proposed already that each of would promise not to settle even as far as half distance from our capitols - the proposal that you rejected . So unfortunately we are drawing a conclusion that you would consider attacking us just because we are your neighbors Your choice of civs, whose both UB and UU are geared exclusively toward war and your very fearsome, resourceless Dog Soldiers do nothing to calm our fears.
We would gladly agree to your proposed EP point spending deal as a part of long-term NAP we proposed and an equal land division. Unfortunately, in current situation, when your intention seem to be to keep us in a constant fear of your attack to make us "behave", you actually seem like a very logical target to spend or EP.
We hope that our honesty - probably somewhat unusual this early in our relationship - will not come off as threats. That is definitely not our intention. We are simply very concerned that our relationship may end in a "cold war" and mutual military build up situation, that even if will not end up in an war, would leave both our civs economically damaged and left behind other civs, that would be able to establish trust with their neighbors earlier and without these extra costs. We can even envision the worst case scenario that we may be so worried by a constant threat of Dog Soldiers attacking us unexpectedly from the East that we will have to invest considerably into military which may lead to us being pushed to "fight for peace" to somehow end up this impasse - even though in our experience in this kind of game a war before T150 is rarely advantageous, therefore we had no problems offering you NAP that long even before our relationship blossomed.
As we said, we are very honest with you in an attempt to make it easier for you to understand our fears and worries how our relationship would evolve if we choose to keep each other "accountable" by military threats instead of trusting each others words and agreements we would mutually sign on. The decision is your and we cannot do anything beyond hoping that after understanding our perspective better you would reconsider. [Or that at least our other neighbors would share our views :P].
Kind Regards,
M & M
Note: the last version intentionally sounds slightly paranoid . But generally this is very honest attempt to explain to them what are likely effects of their "keeping each other accountable through NAP refusal" policy ...
(September 1st, 2013, 16:13)slaze Wrote: 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.
All the best
Master/Margarita
I generally agree with the sentiment, except sending them a screenshot before they would agree to something more concrete than essentially worthless NAP to T50.
We paid dearly for that scouting info - unlike them, we did not scouting vicinity of our capitol well, that may cause us to settle 2nd city in less than ideal location. They did not even acknowledge - not mentioning of thanking us - for giving them very valuable info how far away our capitols are . Of course, they may be thinking we are lying about that, but that does not make me better disposed towards them, either
Beautiful map, Slaze, btw . But I would not give them any more valuable info right now. It is their time to show some goodwill now - we do not want a one-sided relationship with them . At least not now, although of course our perspective may change if our other neighbor will be an aggressive Rome
Anyway, we have a very good idea when to look for Eagles Eastern neighbors - and should meet them in a couple of turns now, likely even before Eagles themselves - so no reason to hurry with the answer. Especially that this message was clearly not written by more friendly HBHR and we may get also another message from him, if we just wait.
Slaze, the last message we got was written by a native speaker, right?
EDIT: WOW, we did meet their neighbors already! Anyway, heading to a beach now , but the diplo does get complicated. Especially that now we will have to deal with Machiavelli of Civ4, Lord Parkin himself . Steeling myself for the job .
Slaze, I checked in game and I was wrong, we need 6 turns, not 4, to finish AH . We need to finish micro asap. That is to decide if worker should build mine or improve cow after corn
If we finish AH turn 21, worker can use it same turn, right?
That means we have to make the final decision if we keep Mining or switch to AH, turn 15, which is next turn and prolly translates to 24 hours .
As I said, from my testing, mine was good, but I am not a micro expert and more standard decision would be to improve cow. The reason I wanted mine it that we will be building workboat next - and for this production would be neat, and mine would be a really nice tile: 1F3H1C. But you are suppose to be our micro management Tsar. I have also saves from my sims, can put them on drop tomorrow.
especially after finding Eagles' neighbors and learning that it is LP, I am leaning toward answer A), that is that they convince us to their "keeping each other accountable through lack of formal agreement" idea so let us forget all the NAPs, EP spending agreements and such for a while :P. I wonder if what they would reply. The only downside I see we would have to put your beautiful land division pic on the shelf for a while. Anyway, replying that way should be good for us, either they will come back saying they changed their mind or were misunderstood - or not. But if they would accept our friendly and rather generous offer, we will be telling them at the moment that we met LP and where his capitol is - and since they reject our offer, we are not gonna tell them, just switch whole espionage on him the moment we meet. We should also discuss how to approach meeting with LP - I was thinking of letting them to have initiative and see how it develops. Although I am sure he will be much easier to work with and more reasonable.
So far Eagles have not been playing that well:
* pick civ with best starting techs, but then ignored the advantage by going worker first. If they planned to do this, should pick civ with more expensive starting techs. Or perhaps they picked their civ for Dog Soldiers? Neither option seem like an expert play
* they scouting has not been very effective so far
* we will be meeting their neighbors before them!
* they are paranoid about EP point spending, but apparently are unaware how much info we can glean from just seeing their capitol - without spending a single EP . Or perhaps it does not occur to them that we are able and willing to do the simple math necessary to convert this into knowing their in-box hammers every turn. Either way, not an expert play
* apparently, they are not aware we can exchange screenshots - or do not understand how much they could gain from it
* they also kinda act - in their last email - as if they think they are in a position of power. Why would they think so? Assumed higher skill level? Dog Soldiers? So far, we have definitely outplayed them in terms of learning about our world and they could gain a lot of useful info from being more cooperative
I put save from my testing from couple days ago on drop, they are showing turning points.
If it was up to me, I would go Mining->AH-> Sailing
and Workboat-Warrior-Settler - using mostly mine and MM cow sometimes for fastest production of WB.
I would road with worker towards Jovan's city, worker and/or settler would be always accompanied by warrior outside our cultural borders. Settler can take slower path towards "Jovan's city" through the hill in our cultural borders, that way city should be settled T42 with settler and worker always protected by a warrior. I would also build lighthouse in capitol soon to use coast.
I understand that you are responsible for playing the turns and micro decisions.
Wrt diplomacy, I would send Eagles modified version of answer A, have not time to post it yet. With Lord Parkin, I would wait for their greeting message and avoid chatting with them in-game. I would also like to get asap to the spot on the Eastern side of their capitol that would let us have a look inside, then continue scouting East. The capitols are very symmetrically positioned exactly the way we thought, so I would race to the next one while trying to keep the scout alive.
EDIT: Now that we have seen Eagles capitols, it is also important to take a screen shot of the EP screen every turn (I taken it already this turn).
Slaze, remember to put all our EP on Lord Parkin immediately after we meet.
YossarianLives Wrote:Score is made up of four factors: Population, Land, Technologies and Wonders. We can see this on the very first turn by mousing over our score.
There are 5000 possible points for population. The game determines a theoretical “max population” based on the map, and then determines how many points you get per pop based on that. The equation is (5000/max pop)*current pop. See this example in the Scoring explained link. It is showing the score includes 2613 points from population (426/815). That is, (5000/815)*426=2613.49 rounded down. You can also see how much each pop is worth. In this example, (5000/815)*1=6.13 points per pop.
There are 2000 possible points for land. The game shows you how many total land tiles there are on the map, and how many of those you own. The equation is the same as for pop: (2000/total tiles)*owned tiles. Again, using the example from the same link, there are 1069 points from land (479/896). That is, (2000/896)*479=1069.19 rounded down. You can also see how much each land tile is worth. In this example, (2000/896)*1=2.23 points per land tile. Land tiles only count once they have been owned for 20 turns, so we should mark ahead when we expect land score increases so they don’t throw us off.
Technologies are worth 5.99*Tech Era Value. Ancient is worth 1, Classical is 2 and so on.
There are 1000 possible points for wonders. There are 62 wonders in the game, so we get 1000/62=16.13 points per wonder (including National wonders)
In our case:
1 pop point is worth 5000/1845 = 2.71
1 land tile is worth 2000/2178 = 0.92
1 tech is worth 5.99
1 wonder is worth 16.13 (including National Wonders)
...
. But I would not give them any more valuable info right now. It is their time to show some goodwill now - we do not want a one-sided relationship with them 
. At least not now, although of course our perspective may change if our other neighbor will be an aggressive Rome 
. Thank you.
keeping fingers crossed they are not our neighbors 
. Or perhaps it does not occur to them that we are able and willing to do the simple math necessary to convert this into knowing their in-box hammers every turn. Either way, not an expert play