[SPOILERS] Willem of Portugal (Dantski + Mukha)

[Mukha]

That score increase was a tech I think. Babylon traded them HBR, they asked us first. As they can't really use it offensively vs us for a long time, both Babylon and I viewed it as a test of Babylon's relations with us so we didn't see any point in confirming their suspicions.

[Mukha]

Dear Mukha & Dantski,

I guess I cannot blame you for lying to us seeing as we did infact extend the discussions regarding us joining CAN a few turns beyond the point where we actually decided not to. I thought it was fair of us to do so from a moral standpoint though, since we were basically up against a group of bullies, but at this point I wish we would have been more open about our intentions as then maybe you would have answered in kind. Oh well, live and learn.

It is a shame that you simply did not confront us once our attack plan was leaked to you. I would have happily discussed settling things at the negotiating table even before mobilization began, rather than ending up in a situation where a large shunk of our population was sacrificed to build units we didn't really want and where one third of our cities now lie in ruins. Granted, you could have been much more successful had we not sniffed out you pushing Yaz for the Hunting-clause, but did you really expect that we would not find out?

As things stand now, Team SsS have no hopes of winning this game. We have been bullied by the CANT and betrayed by some of our allies, which have lead to our game plan being destroyed as a result (kudos for that btw, I surely was not expecting those Chariots to be there). We are one of the weakest civs currently and are only being kept sort of up to date in the tech race by virtue of the few loyal friends that have not yet been swayed against us. You say that we have both been evenly handicapped by this war - but I beg to differ. Your position remains a strong one, while ours went from stable with hopes of fast progress through war of conquest into being clearly left behind the rest of the pack. That bilateral tech deals are being signed outside of the alliances gives us no comfort what so ever, seeing as we have no techs of our own to offer in such deals.

You are now fighting an enemy that do not have much left to live for other than what glory we can potentially achieve on the fields of battle, before we are evidently runned down by medieval units. While I am sure your cities will be adequatly protected once we reach them, I am equally sure that there is not much you can do to protect your infrastructure against our dual-promo units for the time being. If SsS gets into the history books as the civ that ruined Cath Bruig's chances of winning I would consider that a victory at this point, seeing as we have had so much working against us in this game. I'm not saying peace is completely out of question, but you would have to somehow sweeten the deal to a degree where SsS can once again feel competitive post-war for us to even consider it - and I'm not sure you could achieve that even if you wanted to.

Regards,
Sandover
Team SsS

[Mukha]

Ok, we need to organize our defenses a bit better. Those 2 workers roading the hill 1E of Madrigal should cross the river somewhere but stay out of visible range. When the 2 axes complete in Madrigal we could then road to their Axe/spear combo, hit the axe with our axe then the spear will defend against our other axe then we can take out the remaining axe with our chariot.

I also swapped the build to an axe in llan and rearranged tiles to produce 4 hammers. We can whip next turn but then swap back to a barracks before completing. Scales was also swapped to a barracks, and can whip in 2 turns. Scales badly needs the whip as it's working a ton of unimproved tiles.

[novice]

What happened at your horse city?

I think you've played a good game so far, even if the outcome may not have been optimal.

I'll admit I didn't quite understand why peace with Sumeria was out of the question. However, I file that under "diplo game", which can screw any player over, regardless of civ skills, as far as I can tell.

[Mukha]

Our horse city was razed

Here's the situation and what I think we should do about it this turn:



Pull some workers off roading and chopping to road to the axe spear north of Madrigal then we can hit it with 2 axes and a chariot. Odds with our first axe are around 29%. Not sure if it's a great idea attacking them though. It all depends on how much damage our first axe manages to do. There's the possibility that our 2 axes will die without killing their axe or the second one will be so injured that it can't defend against the spear, these are unlikely outcomes but it means we would lose 2 workers. Heh, this paragraph was just one sentence before the first edit and now for another. If the spear is left alone at full health and our axe is too injured to defend we can just move the chariot to sacrifice itself defending the workers.

There isn't much we can do about the axe and 2 spears near our capital this turn, just hope they move to flatland so we can whack em.

[Dantski]

Attack went ahead

Axe lost to Roman axe (2.2/5)
Axe killed Roman spear (4.4?/5)
Chariot killed Roman axe (4)

Roman warrior can pillage a farm if it likes but will be killed almost certainly next turn if it does. It can retreat to a forest if he wants to keep it alive.

At Llan we'll probably lose the silver but the city is safe.

Guess we'll see if we can scare Rome off pillaging anymore by emailing them

[Mukha]

Killed the rest of the pillagers and sent a reply to Rome:

Dear Rome,

We're sick and tired of this totally uncommital diplomacy that you throw our way. You blame us for not talking to you then when we do you give extremely vague answers that mean jackshit. This war is completely and utterly your fault and if you continue it or try to negotiate unfairly (play kingmaker like templars)
we will simply wipe your civ out. Time for you to accept that CBE is in the stronger position and not be spiteful bitches trying to ruin our game when you have already ruined your own.

Here's how any peace deal will go down.

Not settling agreements, if you settle an area before us good for you, if we settle it first good for us.
NAP for a an agreed length of time. We've been laughing our asses off about your NAP's breed paranoia remark, you think having an aggressive rome next door made us feel safe?
We would possibly gift you sailing as a small good will gesture.

We have been sincere in that we'd prefer peace to war, now its time for you to make your choice, so what will it be, peace or extinction?

Mukha and Dantski of the Cath Bruig Empire

[Dantski]

heh hope you didn't accidentally send rome that version

[Mukha]

I haven't posted much on the geopolitical situation lately so I thought I would feed the lurkers with a quick summary of the latest round of diplo shuffling.

We're fucked.

That is all.

Actually not quite all. We're not as fucked as Byzantium, but it's hard to tell whether we are more or less fucked than India. I'm going with slightly more fucked.

[Mukha]

So, the other thing we need to do, is come up with the formal terms of what we're agreeing to do. I'm intentionally distinguishing the pre-Currency and post-Currency situation; the game changes a lot with Currency.

England's proposal:

1) Sharing of techs and gold in an equitable manner:
- Researchers will be chosen based on the following criteria:
a) Maximum Beaker Rate
b) Beaker-Gold Skew (For example, at current rates, England can convert 43 gold into 51 beakers, for a 51/43 = 1.19 skew; Babylon's is certainly significantly high)
c) Gold availability/costs per turn: If we can't fund everybody's research, then this will be quite relevant
d) Availability to start a new tech (not likely to be an issue long-term; this is more for the pre-Currency situation. For example, since Carthage has the highest max beaker rate at the moment, and has finished Construction, so can save some gold now, it's expected they'll start one of the next rounds of tech as soon as they're available)

Funders:
As long as a funder is sufficiently supporting research, they are owed all techs researched upon request. If a civ is not meeting the definition of "sufficiently supporting research", then gifting the researcher tech is at the discretion of the researcher.
A definition of "sufficiently supporting research":
a) Supporting, in gold, at least 60% of the cheapest researcher's costs OR supporting at least 50% of the most expensive researcher's costs, whichever is lower. At the moment, this is a very low value (England's costs are 28gpt, because of our large army, so 14 gold would be "50% of the most expensive", but for, say, Babylon, whose costs are around 15-18gpt, 60% of that is only 10-12gpt). Essentially, if we get to 8 civs, we're guaranteed 3 researchers, and hopefully can get up to 4, or at least mostly-fund the 4th researcher.
- Subclause: Temporary exemptions for war-related reasons. This is for either large offensive operations, or for defensive conflicts where you need to whip your economy into the ground to survive.
b) If the current researchers are not being fully funded, and a funders' civ has gold available, it needs to go to fund the researchers.
- Subclause: Possible exemption: If you can justify that an upgrade is needed to prevent damage to your civ.

Lightbulbs:
Also owed to everybody, as if researched. First-civ bonuses are still your own (Liberalism's free tech is considered a lightbulbed tech).

Wonders:
All reasonable steps should be taken to avoid wonder races within PAT members. If an agreement can't be reached, one option is to have a third civ use a random number generator like random.org to decide who gets to go for the wonder; the civ researching the tech would get 2 chances, every one else interested would get one. Or you can race.

2) Bilateral relations:
- NAPs are considered amongst all PAT members to be in effect for the duration of this alliance, with a 10t cooldown.
- No obligations for mutual defense. While we want everyone to ensure the mutual safety of all PAT members, England does not believe it's fair to force you to defend your neighbor if it puts yourself at risk. Mutual defense is strongly encouraged.
- Settling: be reasonable. Again, we're not going to dictate terms, but when in doubt, tiles closer to a players' capital should belong to that player.
-Offensive operations: That is fully at the discretion of your own civ. Except for gold, as previously mentioned, any and all benefits of offensive war are fully yours.

3) Outside tech trades
Any tech researched after Currency is finished cannot be traded to non-PAT members without at least majority approval.

4) Dissolution:
So, while ideally this organization will last until the game end, we all know that there's a chance someone would want to leave. However, we'd also like to ensure that anyone who does leave isn't leaving their allies who funded their research in the cold without the techs that their soon-to-be-ex-allies paid for.

Our dissolution proposal:
No warfare within 10t of announcing your desire to leave PAT.
Any techs researched or lightbulbed within that cooldown period are still owed to PAT members (letting a tech sit at 99% finished on the 10th turn would be in very bad faith). However, any techs researched by the remaining PAT teams during that time are NOT owed to any civs leaving PAT. Also, during that 10t dissolution, a civ leaving PAT is under no obligation or expectation to fund research.

--
Cyneheard, Haphazard1, Antisocialmunky
Lords of Avalon
Suryavarman II of England

Dear All,

Firstly, many thanks to the Lords of Avalon for coming up with a comprehensive agreement! Secondly, please accept our apologies for the delay in providing feedback but we had much to ponder...

One fundamental change we would propose is that we make more like a WTO Trade round: because we're looking at one set of techs at a time, we can set the targets (tech ETAs, amount of funding) and review at the end of each round to see whether everyone is happy with how things went.

Funding: one danger we see is that techers could fall behind funders when it comes to reasonable, peaceful expansion because a funder, by running 100% gold, can absorb extra expenses without needing to request cash from a third party. Techers, running 100% research, will have to ask for cash, so some kind of expense forecasting will have to take place.

Non-performance: we think this needs to be a wee bit tougher than as outlined below. If a civ is not performing (too little funding, too slow research) then they can be ejected from the group at the end of round review stage, and can be further penalised by losing out on techs pro-rata to their non-performance.

Lightbulbs: we think that requiring bulbed techs to be shared is a bit much. We think civs should be free to choose whether to gift them, or to trade them within the group (as an extra or as part of an agreed research plan).

Liberalism: is a group goal, so the free tech should be shared.

Kind Regards

Emperor Capac

Nothing really that interesting, all pretty much as expected and all sounds reasonable.