OK, so we have a new player (finally) taking over for IKZ. I actually know slaze a bit, as he was the turnplayer for Cavaleiros for a while in the CivFanatics Demogame. From my limited contact, he seemed like a pretty capable player; at the very least, he took the reigns of a team in a strong position and kept them at the top of the rankings. Check out this thread for some very fine turnplayer reporting:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread...339&page=8
Where do we go next from here? Obviously the main goal in the immediate future will be crushing the remaining Jowy, Kathlete, and Dantski units within our territory. (Speaker is the man with the plan for that dirty work!
) Longer term, here's what I'm thinking about diplomacy for the other teams in the game:
- Kathlete: we will likely kill all of their remaining horse units in our territory within the next two turns. At that point, we'll offer them peace so that we can "get back to friendly relations." If Kathlete are serious about having a desire for future peace, and are only being opportunistic, they'll sign with us. If they are lying, and marching in lockstep with Jowy despite the fact that they gain nothing from the fighting, they'll stay at war. I strongly suspect the latter... But we have to at least try to get peace from their team.
Needless to say, a steady stream of horse units running halfway around the globe to attack a non-offending team would be pretty insane play from this team.
- Jowy: assuming we kill his phalanx stack off in the near future, I'm in favor of offering him a white peace as well. We can even make noise about signing a new NAP and restoring friendly relations, blah blah. Again, I expect Jowy to decline, but we'll see what we can do. He's going to be pretty short on military after this stack goes down, after all.
Why do we want peace with Jowy? Civ4 enforces 10 turns of guaranteed peace if you sign a treaty, which would give us time to smash Dantski and recapture Shiloh. Even if Jowy comes back later, we'll have cats on hand, plus surviving (highly-promoted) horse archers, and be in much better shape for a potential round #2.
- Dantski: not a lot to do here, I think. He's got to know that signing peace with us would only seal his doom. Still, I'll probably send some kind of message if/when we manage to defeat his stack. At the very least, we can pass on the lying messages that Nakor sent us, and ask "do you really trust this guy? He went out of his way to stab another team in the back. And this is your ally?!?" Basically, try to sow as much FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) between these guys as possible.
- Nakor: I'm going to lean on Nakor hard to switch sides again and join our side in the war. I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to compose such a message this week, and we can write a pretty good message to that effect. Now we'll never trust Nakor even one iota ever again, but if we could get him and Dantski to fight one another even a little bit, that would obviously be a dream result. We can make a good sales pitch here because Nakor really doesn't get a whole lot out of his current alliance. Once we do all the hard work of killing the Kathlete/Jowy/Dantski armies, Nakor can slip in the back door like a snake and take some of the spoils of war from Dantski. All he has to do is betray his allies once again... ensuring that no one ever trusts him again, anywhere in the world.
We can serve as the perfect allies for as long as it takes to deal with Dantski and Jowy, and then afterwards....
Whosit: If we can't work something out with Nakor, then we do the reverse and team up with Whosit. It wouldn't be very hard either: "hey, did you know that Nakor has most of his army off attacking us? And his army was pretty pathetic to begin with. Why not grab some of those Praetorians and have some more fun? Even if you can't afford to keep the cities, it's in your best interest to cripple another team by razing the HRE core to the ground..." If the whole world wants to leave themselves open to invasion by running off to fight us, they'd better be prepared to accept the consequences!
slaze: Pretty much the same thing, only with Kathlete instead of Nakor. We can make a strong case here that as soon as we're dealt with, the Kathlete + Jowy alliance will turn and head east, going after IKZ. slaze is a natural partner for our team, since the teams in between us seem to be joined at the hip.
Broker: unfortunately, there's not much they can do. We'll keep writing emails and stay on good terms, in case they're something we can work out together in the future.
Of course, all this turns on Speaker being able to continue the defensive juggling act that we've been pulling off thus far. If we can't hold onto Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, all the text in the world won't do much to save our bacon!
