[SPOILERS] Team Orgynized: Parkin/Arki/Magno embark on a kinky adventure

[Arkipeller]

Parkin. Do you got any kind of chatting program I can reach you with?

[Lord Parkin]

BTW: I am so freeking curious what happens in the lurkers-thread... I have to read it when this game is done.

You can always read the lurker threads for past games to get a general idea of the sorts of things that are discussed. Usually it's either pointing out blunders players have unwittingly made or discussing how someone could have played a situation better. Plus there's often a sizeable portion of unrelated spam. I note that Krill is by far the most frequent poster in this lurker thread, which means you can probably expect some quantity of abuse directed towards me as well.

Parkin. Do you got any kind of chatting program I can reach you with?

Sorry, thought I'd already let you know my details... PM'd you now. Maga just emailed me with her details as well. Will post the email I was planning on sending her in a minute after I've tidied it up a bit.

[Lord Parkin]

Proposed response to Maga:

Dear Maga,

We're delighted to have signed a NAP to T183! This will give us plenty of time to party together and become much more intimate friends.

For the record, you can have confidence in the fact that we respect all agreements we make and take our NAP commitments seriously. Across all my years of playing Civ4 online I've never broken a single NAP - we trust you take your agreements seriously too.

As long-term allies we'd be happy to regularly exchange information about the world and our dealings with other nations, provided we have an agreement that this information would be held in the strictest confidence between us. After all, if we are both sharing information on all of our various NAP's and assorted deals with other civs, that is a lot of valuable information which could be very damaging if revealed to the wrong team at the wrong time. As such it's best to either agree in advance to keep all this shared information completely secret between us, or else to avoid sharing it in the first place.

We think it would be best to keep the details of our own long-term partnership secret from all other nations - for instance, we should agree never to tell anyone the true length of our NAP arrangement. It's rather unusual around these parts for folks to want to agree to NAP's past T100 near the start of the game, let alone close to T200... and if they hear we have a NAP until T183 then they'll know we're close allies, which will make future arrangements harder for both of us. For example, if in the future we were to plan for war together against a third party, we'd lose a significant element of surprise if our target already knew that we were close allies, rather than if we pretended to be distant.

We still have not met anyone else, largely due to the unfortunate loss of our Scout a few turns ago. Our Hugh G. Rection encountered rotten luck and lost a battle with a Lion when he had 80% odds to win - we were very sad to see him disappear. However we did find a Gold resource to our east before he died which we assume means that we were only a few tiles from the capital of our eastern neighbour. The resources we've seen to date are Silk, Sheep, Cow, Wheat, Pig, Crab, Fish, Deer, Silver, and Gold. Our capital has Fish and Sheep, in addition to the Deer you saw.

The Native Americans signed a short NAP with us of only 40 turns duration. We hope they're not intending on rushing us with Dog Soldiers immediately after it ends. Let us know how your own NAP negotiation with them goes.

Regarding the map, we're reasonably sure it's not an Inland Sea because that can only really be balanced on a Flat map. With a Toroidal map an Inland Sea would mean some civs would have more connections to neighbours than others, which is inherently unbalanced. Maps at RB tend to be fairly strict on balance, so we suspect that either everyone has a connection to their vertical neighbour both in the north and the south (in which case a single large sea is impossible), or else everyone has one connection either in the north or the south (in which case there could a single large sea or several large lakes). The map script in general does seem to be some sort of Lakes variant, as you suspect.

If we're to be long-term allies sharing information with one another, there's going to be little point in spending espionage points on each other beyond the minimum required to keep track of graphs. Any additional EP's would be much better spent on other nations so we can each gather more intel to share with each other. As such, we suggest an agreement limiting our espionage ratio to 43/43 for as long as our NAP is in effect, with the possibility of negotiating minor increments later if one of us loses graphs due to EP imbalances (e.g. from different numbers of Courthouses).

We'd be happy to discuss this and more via chat if you'd prefer - these emails do take rather a while to write out and reply to after all. I've added you to my Skype contacts (###), though you'll find me more regularly on Gmail chat (###). I believe you're already in contact with Arki. If you wish to chat, please do let us know what time(s) of the day suit you best for chatting (I believe your time zone is CST?), so that hopefully as many of our team as possible can arrange to be online with you together.

Sincerely,
Your frisky friends at Team Orgy

As always, feel free to suggest improvements.

[Arkipeller]

First sign the NAP and afterwards share intel. I like it

[Lord Parkin]

Slightly edited (as above), and sent to Maga.

[Lord Parkin]

Magno, are you still around? I've PM'd you my details if you want to be involved in chats.

[Lord Parkin]

Turn 25

Continued building the Warrior after our growth to size 3, since it's the most efficient build if we're planning to go double Worker on T26 - and if we're planning on going for a Settler instead then we still need a Warrior built first to protect it.

Demographics

More points from land all around, as it's 20 turns after the first border expansion for most of us (except the two Creative teams - Margarita and EggHeads - and Care Bears who settled on turn 1). EggHeads had a capital growth.

[Lord Parkin]

Quick response from Maga:

Rather busy now, so just a brief note that my Scoutess continued East and just met Eggheads this turn - they are your Eastern neighbors, but apparently you have not met yet.

So we have DMOC, TeddyKGB, Dhalpir and Dick76 for our eastern neighbours. Glad it's not aggressive Rome!

Looks like DMOC and TeddyKGB are by far the most vocal members of the team from the post counts, and Dick76 is almost a no-show. I'm only familiar with DMOC, who I've chatted and played with on several occasions over the years. As they're playing with Sury of Byzantium, they'll probably have little interest in war prior to Cataphracts, so we shouldn't have to worry too much about them early on provided we can get a good border agreement in place. The mid-game is far enough away at this point not to get too worried about - fortunately we're guaranteed to research faster than them, so that's something.

We should try to make contact at some stage in the next couple of dozen turns. It's a real shame we lost our Scout... perhaps Maga will direct their Scout to us instead.

[Magno_uy]

Magno, are you still around? I've PM'd you my details if you want to be involved in chats.

I guys! sorry I had been missed in action for a while... It had been a heavy weeks at work plus a couple of days ill at bed... hope get back soon into the game and start the diplo work....

Keep Maga calm meanwhile :D

[Lord Parkin]

Turn 26

Domestics

Honey Rider finished hooking up the Deer, so we switched to building a Worker.

I tested several combinations of Settler first in the sim, and none came out ahead of building the second Worker first in the long run - mostly because the second Worker can be built while our Warrior is still partly done, but we have to finish the Warrior before we can build a Settler (too risky to go into the wilderness alone). The earliest I could get the second Settler was T38/39 (only 3-4 turns earlier compared to the double Worker version), and we only had 1 Worker between 2 cities instead of 2-3. As a result we were far behind in our improvements.

The next big decision will be how to order our Stonehenge, Settler, and Worker/Warrior builds - plus the order on Wheel/Mysticism. We'll have to decide that by T33.

Demographics

Margarita finished a tech, Eagles & Condors grew to size 4, Dinosaurs got a tech and a growth, and Care Bears got a score increase from land. Soldiers went up by 12000, so one of the techs was probably Bronze Working.