RBP3 - [SPOILERS] - Team DIM (Mehmed of HRE)

[meatbalz]

conversation via PM...
they're preparing a formal response, but so far so good. i think given the lack of animals until now, we're pretty safe moving up onto that hill so i'll go ahead and do that.

am curious to see the surroundings... will try to work out where that warrior came from, as it's a bit weird he was traveling on flat land. he may well have come off the hill we're standing on now. anyway the bad news is that warrior has moved next to the gold. our only realistic shot at securing that site was they'd miss it until it was too late.

Originally Posted by meatbalz
the funny thing is i could see your thread was busy and i was thinking "what's taking them so long to answer, did i offend them by unwittingly calling conan a pansy or something"

Conan a Pansy? Well did you? And seeing as your thread spamming is 2.5 times greater than our I felt I had to do some spamming myself to catch up :neenernee and updating these thing is not really my strong point - seems to take me ages

anyway, i did have a question for you guys. i'd like to move our scout to the hill NW of his current position + was wondering if you'd seen any animals around that might make that a risky move. FYI - we haven't seen a single animal yet.

I am going to prepare a formal reply to your team, but please understand team A4 are playing this game in a shared capacity (we are all trying to share and enjoy all the in game functions), as opposed to having a dedicated player to each individual function so there may be a slight delay as we confirm our messages.

As a gesture from me though, and as you have been open to us, I can confirm we too have yet to see any animals around as yet, and moving to the hill (regardless of animals) is always a safe option in my book Have you come a long way to meet us and have you met anyone else or are we your first contacts?

On a personal level, I am pleased to meet team DIM and welcome a long and prosperous friendship. I am fairly certian Team A4 will be equally as welcoming, but like I said, we play as a team, and I hope to get a formal reply ASAP.

[Ilios]

Nice job MB! I have a good feeling with these guys, and it would seem they are another team without a lot of MP experience.

Dazed, I know it can be hard starting next to a CRE civ, but I'm gathering we have more than enough room to expand, so I don't think we will have trouble with our first 4-6 cities.

All in all I'm quite happy with our first neighbour, as it isn't an early rush civ (AGG Rome comes to mind), or a horribly experienced MP team (Sunrise et al, Krill).

That said, we've only met our neighbour to the west, who knows what surprises the other directions will bring us...

Awaiting their formal response, I was thinking how much information we want to give them, for example regarding our starting location. What are your thoughts? Exchanging information builds trust, and trust makes for good allies... We've all seen what an overly formal diplomatic style combined with playing zero sum games with opposing factions does to building trust... (PB2 anyone?)

[meatbalz]

ilios, my position would be we're open and straightforward with them about all information we would consider not to be vital (as long as we feel we're getting equally useful information in return).

hey' i'm sure you've already seen from the extremely limited diplo we've engaged in, i think you can call my style anything but overly formal

the location of our capital however IS vital information, particularly this early, so i wouldn't be comfortable giving that away. if they find it themselves, more power to them. small detail but the only diagonal that would allow visibility is the NE one.

with a 2-move scout, we have the advantage when it comes to map info so let's leverage that. i definitely agree we should be open with our neighbours (the ones we don't suspect of having short-term hostile intentions anyway). i would, for example, probably answer their query - once we get a formal reply - by letting them know they're our first contact.

i'd like to talk to these guys more. they seem ok but i'm a bit concerned diplomacy might be slow with them if they continue to run each diplo response by all 4 team members. i have some more thoughts on where negotiations could go in the short term but it's purely speculative for now so let's see how things go. any word back from them? i can't access googlemail from work...

[Ilios]

They have replied:

Well met indeed!

Greetings to the mighty DIM triumvirate! We tremble in fear before your mighty scout. What you report sounds very much like what Conan has seen, we fear we do not live in the land of milk and honey. We look forward to many years of peace between our two mighty civilizations. Has Hernan by chance happened to meet any other civilizations? If so would you be so kind to let us know and possibly give us directions so that we might meet them also? We would also be willing to do the same in return. We're also wondering if you had any thoughts regarding NAPs, we're happy to discuss this further if you are interested

Good they haven't asked for the location of our capital. I think we can tell them we will share information on meeting other teams.

Considering the NAP, I would prefer we answer something in the likes of "we'd prefer to see what our relations in the future would be", before signing something as binding as a NAP. Actions speak louder than words! I think that, considering our Leader/CIv choice, they can rest assured we are NOT an early rush team...

[meatbalz]

will edit this in a sec. i'm sending pegasus + co a PM now acknowledging receipt. we'll prepare a response but this is something we need to get dazed's input on so we draft something all 3 of us are happy with.

edit: ok, i've acknowledged receipt. now onto the nitty-gritty.

my thoughts
1) we should not agree to the information exchange straight-up. our information-gathering ability is approx. 2x theirs and will remain that way for some time. i'd like to make this point clear to them in a friendly way

i'd be very interested in hearing suggestions on what we can ask in return to make the agreement a fair one. i'm leaning towards just asking them what they think would be fair.

2) we should agree to a NAP
but it's too early. i WOULD like a NAP with them, as long as (and this is the key point) a settling plan is built in. there's a simple reason for this - they are CRE as well as EXP. a settling race with them is a losing proposition for us. if we're able to come to an agreement we're happy with regarding settling, with clear locations for city sites, then it's in our favour to lock it up.

for now it's too early though - we need to get a better feel for the lay of the land. a possible path this could go down is, we agree with them that they scout the area for us, providing us with edited screenshots showing the area but hiding their capital (allowed under the game rules). this could be the counterweight in the negotiations over point 1) above.

basically, i think it IS in our interests to get a NAP done with them as soon as we have a clear idea of what the land around us looks like. the NAP must go hand-in-hand with a settling agreement though.

just throwing thoughts out there, would be great to hear what you guys think. it's very early days but it's always good to have a direction you'd like to take negotiations in so you can work towards that goal.

[Ilios]

By the way, I've just PM'ed our game password to Sullla, in case we all mysteriously disappear after declaring war on an opposing team... 8)

[Ilios]

1) we should not agree to the information exchange straight-up. our information-gathering ability is approx. 2x theirs and will remain that way for some time. i'd like to make this point clear to them in a friendly way

I don't think there's a lot of harm in mentioning we met team X or Y to them.

i'd be very interested in hearing suggestions on what we can ask in return to make the agreement a fair one. i'm leaning towards just asking them what they think would be fair.

I'm not sure what you could ask them in return at this stage of the game

2) we should agree to a NAP
but it's too early. i WOULD like a NAP with them, as long as (and this is the key point) a settling plan is built in. +

I wouldn't mention a settler plan just yet, as it is too early start drawing lines between or teams (we don't even know where they are). We can start discussing an NAP as soon as we explore a bit more and we've started feeling each other out on where we'd like to settle.

there's a simple reason for this - they are CRE as well as EXP.

I think they're playing with Zara, so that would make it CRE and ORG

a settling race with them is a losing proposition for us. if we're able to come to an agreement we're happy with regarding settling, with clear locations for city sites, then it's in our favour to lock it up.

We should be able to outgrow them city/worker wise. So it would be in THEIR interest...

for now it's too early though - we need to get a better feel for the lay of the land. a possible path this could go down is, we agree with them that they scout the area for us, providing us with edited screenshots showing the area but hiding their capital (allowed under the game rules). this could be the counterweight in the negotiations over point 1) above.

I think we need to wait before we start exchanging screenshots. Like you said, we can cover a lot more ground than they can, especially once our warrior starts exploring as well. And they haven't proposed it yet, so I'd say mums the word...

basically, i think it IS in our interests to get a NAP done with them as soon as we have a clear idea of what the land around us looks like. the NAP must go hand-in-hand with a settling agreement though.

That will be part of the discussion. We'll see how things go diplomatically. Don't forget, this is only 1 of 16 other teams.

We should turn our disadvantage (starting with a hunter, crappy starting techs) into an advantage. As long as Hernan is alive we'll be able to scout the area much more extensively than the opposing teams (especially if they went worker first) and we should use this valuable information to the greater glory of the Principality!

[meatbalz]

I don't think there's a lot of harm in mentioning we met team X or Y to them.



I'm not sure what you could ask them in return at this stage of the game



I wouldn't mention a settler plan just yet, as it is too early start drawing lines between or teams (we don't even know where they are). We can start discussing an NAP as soon as we explore a bit more and we've started feeling each other out on where we'd like to settle.



I think they're playing with Zara, so that would make it CRE and ORG



We should be able to outgrow them city/worker wise. So it would be in THEIR interest...



I think we need to wait before we start exchanging screenshots. Like you said, we can cover a lot more ground than they can, especially once our warrior starts exploring as well. And they haven't proposed it yet, so I'd say mums the word...



That will be part of the discussion. We'll see how things go diplomatically. Don't forget, this is only 1 of 16 other teams.

We should turn our disadvantage (starting with a hunter, crappy starting techs) into an advantage. As long as Hernan is alive we'll be able to scout the area much more extensively than the opposing teams (especially if they went worker first) and we should use this valuable information to the greater glory of the Principality!

i think we're on the same page but i don't really understand a couple of your objections? starting from your last point - how do we turn our scouting info to our advantage if we tell other civs [who we meet + how to meet them] for free? that's valuable info and we should be entitled to something in return.

working upwards - i didn't mention exchange of screenshots. i said that a possible way to even up the information sharing would be for THEM to share their screenshots with us

you're very correct on zara's traits nevertheless i stand by my prior statement that getting into a settler race with a CRE opponents is a losing proposition. even if you settle your desired location first, they can plop a city next to it and win the culture battle.

as far as a settler plan - the very first thing i said was it's too early, so we're in agreement there i think i mentioned a couple of times i'd like to see how things go diplomatically before progressing negotiations. but again i stand by my thinking that if - at some point in the next 20-30 turns - we're able to extract info on the land between our civs and their NAP offer is still on the table, it would be in our interests to agree to it in conjunction with a settlement plan.

i think the first diplo message following the standard official greetings sets the tone for the relationship so it's very important (and a great sign of cooperation) that we're discussing it in depth among us since we're the ones who initiated discussions, we can use our message to set the tone.

[meatbalz]

turn rolled over. it looks like our scout can move to a forested hill tile. that gets my vote so dazed or ilios if you agree, feel free to move it. everything else was left unchanged for now, ag in 1 cap grows in 2



edit: FYI a/k have 5 production/turn now, not sure why they'd abandon the 3 food tile. either that or someone founded on a plains hill and has now decided to work a 0/3/0...

[Ilios]

Status Report from Hernan Cortes, Explorer Extraordinary

We have recently discovered two hitherto unknown animals. The first look friendly enough, and my personal chef is telling me that their meat, between two slices of bread, would taste heavenly! The second animal looks rather less friendly, in a large-fanged sort of way. I'm not sure I appreciate the way it's looking at us...


PS Give my regards to the missus, I'm sure I'll be back in two to three thousand years at most.



Well, let's pray to the Gods of DIM and hope for triumph... or a quick death...


I ended the turn, warrior is staying close to the city to fend off potentially hostile invaders!