Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[kjn]

CFC and the Germans are SPI.

Yes please on the civic spy missions.

Here are WPC's images:

By my counts there are the following in the four stacks: 13 WE's, 5 HA's, 4 LB's, 9 cats, 3 axes, 3 chariots, 1 speear, 2 quechua, and 4 workers. Of these 7 WE's, 2 HA's, 1 LB, 2 cats, 1 axe, 1 chariot, 1 spear, and 1 quechua can attack Huron River next turn. Ie, I doubt WPC can hold the city.

[NobleHelium]

Thanks for updating the diplo message thread, LP.

[SevenSpirits]

I see I am late, but I think the GSpy plan is very silly in one respect. It doesn't make any sense for univers to steal techs from us, as we are not their neighbor.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I was totally against floating the GSpy plan because while it does let us gauge their attitude towards us, it also degrades that attitude as they'll think "These assholes can't be serious, I'm barely getting anything out of the deal. Ugh, any deals I make with them will be completely weighted against us." It'd be like them floating 5000 gold and not spending them on any deficit research for dozens of turns. Right now they're desperate to snowball ahead, not delay the snowball for some unspecified reason to help some team they barely trust.

If I wanted to gauge their attitude I'd have floated an attack on Apolyton, or a hands-off attitude towards WPC (aka selling WPC out).

[SleepingMoogle]

That could be something to put on the table if they don't want to go with the communism plan. Do we know what the diplo situation between Apolyton and UniversCiv is though? A two-front attack would require both of us to not have an active NAP with Apolyton.

[Zargon]

I'll throw out that we probably want to be careful about signing an agreement restricting our use of spy missions. If we agree not to use civic changes against everybody except CFC, and then CFC messes with our civics, everybody else gets a pass and we can't do anything about it.

Could propose to put teeth in it to lessen the effects of that. Such as: If a party not in the agreement uses such a mission against somebody who is, everybody in the agreement ceases all trades with them.

I forget, do we always know who launched offensive spy missions like we do tech stealing missions? If not, such an agreement is almost impossible.

[scooter]

I was totally against floating the GSpy plan because while it does let us gauge their attitude towards us, it also degrades that attitude as they'll think "These assholes can't be serious, I'm barely getting anything out of the deal. Ugh, any deals I make with them will be completely weighted against us." It'd be like them floating 5000 gold and not spending them on any deficit research for dozens of turns. Right now they're desperate to snowball ahead, not delay the snowball for some unspecified reason to help some team they barely trust.

If I wanted to gauge their attitude I'd have floated an attack on Apolyton, or a hands-off attitude towards WPC (aka selling WPC out).

Do you have the slightest clue how tech stealing works and how efficient it is?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

3000 EP gets them say 6000 beakers. The problem is, how much gold will it take to fund us straight to Communism? And while that gold is sitting in our deficit research, UCiv is not getting any immediate benefit from those techs they could have instead invested that gold into. And then we need to walk the GSpy how many tiles at 6/turn from our capital to the UCiv borders, and they'll need to build how many spies and walk them at 3/turn into our cities or Apolyton's cities?

I did plenty of tech stealing last game I played, and yes, while it's efficient in terms of commerce:beakers, it's inefficient in the sense that there is a long lag time between getting EPs and getting something concrete out of it (aka techs).

If UCiv were a direct neighbour, then yes, this proposal might be worth considering, but then they wouldn't be trying to work with us.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

In summary, it's like taking a loan: In this game, we need a very high interest rate, something like a doubling every 10 turns or so according to Seven's snowballing algorithm. A single GSpy is not going to be enough for all the gold that UCiv would have sunk into us.

I've had a think about it, and I think if we really, honestly want them to take the deal, then we need to throw in a sweetener. And that will be a full repayment of gold AND the great spy. So we could do what CPers and Apolyton are doing: ask them when they will tech Education. While they are building the requisite Universities and Oxford, they send us the gold to tech to communism (so that way their gold isn't floating there while they work on hammering out their science multipliers). Once we've made use of their gold, we send it back plus the great spy, and then they get the science multiplier boosts on all that gold worth of deficit research.

[Qgqqqqq]

I'm pretty sure repayed gold plus spy was what was on offer.