Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[Cyneheard]

Raze and resettle is an option but we would probably have to supply the settlers or something.

They'll probably want Wismar too and we can probably save Huron if we felt like it. So that is ~5.

Definitely not paying settler hammers for them to claim those cities. If they can whip an army, you can whip a settler.

[antisocialmunky]

Raze and resettle is an option but we would probably have to supply the settlers or something.

They'll probably want Wismar too and we can probably save Huron if we felt like it. So that is ~5.

Definitely not paying settler hammers for them to claim those cities. If they can whip an army, you can whip a settler.

Yeah, I agree but WPC's sense of realism is creatively flawed. I'd say this would be a worst case scenario that we would have to consider.

[mostly_harmless]

I think it is clear that WPC will not be able to contribute anything to the war anymore. They will be lucky to fend off the German counter attack.
So us attacking the remaining 4 cities as fast as possible, is a given, I think.
The question is are we satisfied with what we have now and raze all four and tell WPC they have free reign to re-settle. Or do we want maybe the north-western Tundra spot?
Once we have figured that out, (I can maybe do a map of that later) we should inform WPC immediately of that offer.
If they are unhappy with it, we change gears and continue marching eastwards with our army.

I am not sold on the idea of gifting them settlers to re-settle, although a WPC that recovers more quickly, is probably of more use to us, so maybe we can gift them one settler if we have the resources to spare and WPC needs a deal sweetener.

mh

[scooter]

I think out of the 4 remaining cities, we really want Wilhelm. The other 3 are less critical, though still useful in their own way.

[Sullla]

Call me crazy, but I think razing and resettling any city we can capture is completely insane. If we're strong enough to take the land, we shouldn't feel bad about it. WPC is a joke of a team at this point - you guys saw that they are researching Monarchy tech, right? I could care less what they think. They are going to get swallowed up by someone else down the road anyway. If they get pissed at us, then we run them over with cavs in 30 turns while they are still struggling to reach longbows. Good riddance.

Look, I know that I'm someone who tends to fail at the whole diplomacy side of things, and that this is an insensitive position. I'm just not sure of how WPC coming away from the war with virtually nothing and being upset really hurts us. Does it really impair us diplomatically? Most of the other teams seem to hate us already. It's not like we've broken our word, we did exactly what we said in our initial agreement. I would have been happy to let WPC have some cities if they could have captured them. But they didn't; they were totally incompetent and were nothing more than a distraction in this war. We shouldn't feel bad if WPC was too pitiful to get any rewards. I view them as completely irrelevant at this point. If I thought that giving them a German city would actually matter, then sure, but I simply don't see the point. And I hate the notion of fighting and capturing cities only to raze the spot and let another team resettle it. That completely rubs me the wrong way.

If you're looking at victory conditions, Space is the only realistic one available. The map is too big for Conquest or Domination; the game will end in some other fashion first. Culture is possible, but no teams seem to be pursuing it. I could also see someone doing something with Diplo or AP victory, hopefully we can get enough population to block that off. Space is by far the most likely if the game actually lasts that long.

How much land do we need to win? Not much more if we've absorbed all the German lands, and we can settle much of the polar icecap islands. We'll be at 35 cities if we take the rest of the German cities, and we can easily get another 10 down in the extreme south / on the islands. I doubt we need more than that. Running over WPC and absorbing them would take us into the 50-60 range, although that's a pipe dream for the moment. There's little need to invade any other team at this point. We might do it, but it's not necessary. Every other team has right around ~20 cities or fewer currently, and only CFC and CivFr have any prospects for expansion into the vacated Spanish zone.

Well, we don't have to decide anything this turn, but it's going to be mighty interesting next turn if there's two empty German cities and our knights are in position to strike them both. As always, I urge us to go for the kill first and sort out the diplo ramifications later.

[Brian Shanahan]

Sort of. They've pretty frequently updated us on what they see and where they are at, but stuff like turning around from Warendorf and heading towards the tundra was done seemingly on a whim with a "oh btw yeah we can't do that so we moved north" note. That was the main surprise. They did let us know pre-war what they planned - basically throw everything at Warendorf.

IIRC their original pre-war plan was feint at Warendorf, while sending their main stack north to the tundra on the faulty assumtions of, a) the Germans would be thrown off by that attack, b) the Germans wouldn't see the stack going north, and c) it would be the best way to capture "their" six cities.

We persuaded them that with their tech going all in on Warendorf was best. And then they FUBARred it up before reverting back to plan A.

[Zargon]

It's a difficult problem. First, all the downsides of just taking everything are theoretical and may or may not actually happen. More precisely, they might happen either way. For example, yes, people might look at how this war turned out and see that we got everything and WPC got nothing and therefore we're not to be trusted. But what if we bend over backwards and get WPC say 3 cities. Well, people might still look at that and see that we got a dozen amazing cities while WPC got table scraps and therefore we're not to be trusted.

I'm inclined more and more to not care about the diplomatic angle, because at some point very soon, people are going to scroll on over and see that holy shit, RB has 40 cities, at which point they're not going much care if WPC got 3 cities out of this war or 0.

The upsides on the other hand are obvious and guaranteed. We get 4 cities, 2 of which are really good and all of which can pay for themselves straight out of the gate, and we can end the war on the fastest possible timetable.

I'd be in favor of giving WPC back their 40 gold for the stone, I can't believe we charged them for it, even if it was their idea to buy it. It can be our way of saying "sorry it turned out this way".

I think it'll be entirely reasonable to take over WPC on turn 200. We could simply send half our outdated junk to run them over while our modern army defends. They probably won't even make feudalism by then.

[sunrise089]

@Sullla - First, I only want to consider the notion of yielding German land to WPC if they are actually able to settle it (with their own settlers!) and if they're on-board (even grateful) with the plan. That said, the success of WPC as a civ isn't close to the only diplomatic factor in play. You're very right they can't (directly, 1v1) hurt us, we could kill them, and if we don't someone else will. However what matters here is how much a "RB faced none of the German army and took every city for themselves despite an agreement not to" diplo statement from WPC influences other civs. Mardoc a page up stated the pros and cons of better WPC diplo in-game, so we just need to factor that in along with the possible out-of-game diplo benefits. I fall on the side of thinking those benefits are non-trivial and worth a few cities.

The crux of the issue to me is:

Does it really impair us diplomatically? Most of the other teams seem to hate us already. It's not like we've broken our word, we did exactly what we said in our initial agreement.

That's one reading. Another is some teams are on the fence about how much to work with us going forward (for instance, we have an active NAP renewal negotiation) and it's valuable to try and tip the balance our way. In terms of our word, my understanding is we had a city capture split deal. Capturing all of the cities doesn't exactly require a stretch of logic to see as an RB over-reach. Yes WPC isn't going to capture the cities, but isn't then the letter of the deal to then leave them uncaptured? I definitely see room for compromise, like RB expends hammers razing the cities so WPC gets fewer than originally planned, but us running roughshod past the limits of the deal and over the corpse of the WPC army (which tied down the German one) seems very likely to have diplo consequences, relative team in-game capabilities be-damned.

In terms of Space victory VS Domination, I have no idea how many tiles wide the map is, so Dom may indeed be impossible. I just want to note that end-game military provides a lot more mobility, so depending on how much tech parity there is, how many civs are left, and how the diplo situation sits it's not a given that every team will be able to turtle in place and play SimSpaceship.

[antisocialmunky]

I think we should point out in a diplo-email at some point if WPC are ungrateful that without RB's help they'd be dead because the Germans were approaching people about carving WPC up. Honestly, we'll have to see if WPC responds in a sane way. How this turn out is up to them and we should tell them that before negotiations go too far ahead. Heck, maybe they won't care because they know they are dead and would rather us have the cities and watch their 'friends' win the game?

As far as victory conditions go, we should probably take it to the long term thread. I also hope no one is seriously considering domination, it would literally take longer than it took to fight WWII to play through all those turns. I think the only real options for ingame victory are culture/space/UN cheese but what's probably going to happen is we fight the combined armies of the world and they vote to surrender if they can't do enough damage for one of them (probably CivFR) to win.

EDIT: Wait WPC has some old Templars don't they? If so, I can see where this is headed.

[Merovech]

We also should take into consideration any future intersite games and the diplo ramifications onto those games. Will those tundra cities really help us that much? Throwing WPC two cities, or maybe three, should be fine, along with the reminder that ASM just pointed out.