Welcome to the Diplomacy Master Thread for Team RB
"Diplomacy is not something you can learn at school or in the foreign service. A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell and actually make you look forward to the journey." -- Dan Gillerman
Roster:
Why is Diplomacy Important?
Diplomacy allows you to do many things that you would not be able to do through the usual inputs of food, commerce or hammers. Unless you give them something in exchange an A.I. is unlikely to lend you a resource. They are unlikely to go to war on your behalf or step in to save you. They are unlikely to offer you a secure border so you can safely expand. They decide your strength based upon the number of military units or technologies you have at your disposal. An A.I. acts according to how you spend your inputs. If you spend hammers on units, they are less likely to attack you. If you gift them gold, technology or resources regularly, they may attack someone for you.
Diplomacy allows you to achieve these things and many more without as high a cost on the original inputs. An NAP (Non-Aggression Pact) is something that newer or less inexperienced players are often very eager to sign. They are here to enjoy the game, have fun and they want a chance to experience the game. Furthermore, they're often scared that declining the NAP would be inviting war upon them. As a result, they often cost nothing and yet gain you an entire safe border. Better yet, get them with all your immediate neighbours and you can skip building much military at all! That's a huge gain in hammers for very little/nothing. The downside is they can do the same. In this case it would come down to which team was better at sandboxing and micro. I would bet a lot of money that we would win any such contest.
Diplomacy is important because you can catch people by surprise. For example, if you sign an NAP early, the other party is often willing to sign it because at that time, they fore-see the advantage as being joint. That NAP lasts though and as you then pull away from the pack, where their best option is to attack- their hands will be tied by the NAP.
There is far more to diplomacy than NAPs. We can organise dogpiles, prevent them from occuring towards us. Resource trades could be used if we are not at an Always War setting. Land agreements can be made if necessary (note: I am unlikely to be a huge supporter of these as I feel we will likely be able to out-expand any other team).
What Makes Diplomacy Work?
Trust and information. This is where you guys come in. A successful diplomat has as much information as possible. Any intel you can get on our opponents is worthwhile having. I propose that once the settings are done, we create a dossier and sub-thread for each opposing team. The dossiers would be included here and in the relevant sub-thread. This thread would be used for deciding our goals and for a grand strategic overview.
Any information is good. If, for example, CFC's chief diplomat is Summerswerd, I want to know any examples of his diplomacy from previous games:
Has he ever broken a deal? (examples?)
Has he ever lied in diplomacy? (examples?)
Has he used diplomacy to win a game before? (examples?)
What kind of things is he into if possible? Does he sometimes do roleplay threads over at CFC? Does he talk about a love for cricket or golf?
All these little things are useful because we can use them to tailor our diplomacy. If he has lied, for example, we can convince our opponents not to trust him and this acts as counter-espionage. I know he's won games before largely thanks to diplomacy. Hopefully, we can convince folk not to let that happen again. Once bitten, twice shy. His like and dislikes are useful for building rapport. If he's a big golf buff, i'd advise casually slipping something into conversation that alludes to golf. It sounds ridiculous but if people like us, they're less likely to backstab us. This is key because we need to know if we can trust people. By checking their previous games, we can find this out.
If Summer has carried out a massive obvious backstab in the last game, we know not to trust him. The obvious answer is to therefore not engage in diplo with him. That would be incorrect. Allow him to think we've been seduced and, if possible, encourage the backstab- all along being aware of the possibility and having a plan in place to deal with the inevitable.
Organisation:
I'm not in charge. I'm happy to keep things moving and i've started this thread to: a) get things moving; b) get some of my ideas down.
If you feel you would like to run the diplomacy department, then please explain your reasons why and the community can decide.
I'll start by explaining why I feel I can contribute to this role. Firstly, I can be very organised. I'm a bank manager and deal directly with customer complaints which have been escalated and am therefore used to dealing with all kinds of people, be that irate customers or employees. My background in civ-related diplomacy starts on this very forum.
I feel diplomacy was the cornerstone of my victories in PBEM4, PBEM12, and FfHPBEM VII. Furthermore, in Pitboss 3, I used diplomacy to create an anti-tech bloc to compete with the originally created one (which my civ was left out of due to not having met people yet). I then successfully shattered the original bloc and created a new premier bloc including my civilization and all it's immediate neighbours giving me a safe, secure border in which to expand.
My proposal is to run this alongside Scooter as I feel he can offer significant help and together we can control the metagame scene allowing our fantastic turn players, C&D'ers and micro'ers to work their magic. If you guys are happy with us looking after this, we can begin some more specific organisation.
We need guys to help us 'dig for dirt'. We need to know everything there is to know about our opponents as demonstrated above. Furthermore, we need people to proof read our letters. If they like to lawyerise, let's make sure there are no loop holes. It is very easy to have messages become very robotic so we need to be aware of this and try to get them to sound as personal and 'real' as possible.
I'll leave it there for now. We can't do much until we know who we're up against and the settings, but please let me know if you're interested in helping/organising/running/anything else.
"Diplomacy is not something you can learn at school or in the foreign service. A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell and actually make you look forward to the journey." -- Dan Gillerman
Roster:
Code:
Kyan
Scooter
Brian Shanahan
Pindicator
Catwalk
Nabaxo
you?Why is Diplomacy Important?
Diplomacy allows you to do many things that you would not be able to do through the usual inputs of food, commerce or hammers. Unless you give them something in exchange an A.I. is unlikely to lend you a resource. They are unlikely to go to war on your behalf or step in to save you. They are unlikely to offer you a secure border so you can safely expand. They decide your strength based upon the number of military units or technologies you have at your disposal. An A.I. acts according to how you spend your inputs. If you spend hammers on units, they are less likely to attack you. If you gift them gold, technology or resources regularly, they may attack someone for you.
Diplomacy allows you to achieve these things and many more without as high a cost on the original inputs. An NAP (Non-Aggression Pact) is something that newer or less inexperienced players are often very eager to sign. They are here to enjoy the game, have fun and they want a chance to experience the game. Furthermore, they're often scared that declining the NAP would be inviting war upon them. As a result, they often cost nothing and yet gain you an entire safe border. Better yet, get them with all your immediate neighbours and you can skip building much military at all! That's a huge gain in hammers for very little/nothing. The downside is they can do the same. In this case it would come down to which team was better at sandboxing and micro. I would bet a lot of money that we would win any such contest.
Diplomacy is important because you can catch people by surprise. For example, if you sign an NAP early, the other party is often willing to sign it because at that time, they fore-see the advantage as being joint. That NAP lasts though and as you then pull away from the pack, where their best option is to attack- their hands will be tied by the NAP.
There is far more to diplomacy than NAPs. We can organise dogpiles, prevent them from occuring towards us. Resource trades could be used if we are not at an Always War setting. Land agreements can be made if necessary (note: I am unlikely to be a huge supporter of these as I feel we will likely be able to out-expand any other team).
What Makes Diplomacy Work?
Trust and information. This is where you guys come in. A successful diplomat has as much information as possible. Any intel you can get on our opponents is worthwhile having. I propose that once the settings are done, we create a dossier and sub-thread for each opposing team. The dossiers would be included here and in the relevant sub-thread. This thread would be used for deciding our goals and for a grand strategic overview.
Any information is good. If, for example, CFC's chief diplomat is Summerswerd, I want to know any examples of his diplomacy from previous games:
Has he ever broken a deal? (examples?)
Has he ever lied in diplomacy? (examples?)
Has he used diplomacy to win a game before? (examples?)
What kind of things is he into if possible? Does he sometimes do roleplay threads over at CFC? Does he talk about a love for cricket or golf?
All these little things are useful because we can use them to tailor our diplomacy. If he has lied, for example, we can convince our opponents not to trust him and this acts as counter-espionage. I know he's won games before largely thanks to diplomacy. Hopefully, we can convince folk not to let that happen again. Once bitten, twice shy. His like and dislikes are useful for building rapport. If he's a big golf buff, i'd advise casually slipping something into conversation that alludes to golf. It sounds ridiculous but if people like us, they're less likely to backstab us. This is key because we need to know if we can trust people. By checking their previous games, we can find this out.
If Summer has carried out a massive obvious backstab in the last game, we know not to trust him. The obvious answer is to therefore not engage in diplo with him. That would be incorrect. Allow him to think we've been seduced and, if possible, encourage the backstab- all along being aware of the possibility and having a plan in place to deal with the inevitable.
Organisation:
I'm not in charge. I'm happy to keep things moving and i've started this thread to: a) get things moving; b) get some of my ideas down.
If you feel you would like to run the diplomacy department, then please explain your reasons why and the community can decide.
I'll start by explaining why I feel I can contribute to this role. Firstly, I can be very organised. I'm a bank manager and deal directly with customer complaints which have been escalated and am therefore used to dealing with all kinds of people, be that irate customers or employees. My background in civ-related diplomacy starts on this very forum.
I feel diplomacy was the cornerstone of my victories in PBEM4, PBEM12, and FfHPBEM VII. Furthermore, in Pitboss 3, I used diplomacy to create an anti-tech bloc to compete with the originally created one (which my civ was left out of due to not having met people yet). I then successfully shattered the original bloc and created a new premier bloc including my civilization and all it's immediate neighbours giving me a safe, secure border in which to expand.
My proposal is to run this alongside Scooter as I feel he can offer significant help and together we can control the metagame scene allowing our fantastic turn players, C&D'ers and micro'ers to work their magic. If you guys are happy with us looking after this, we can begin some more specific organisation.
We need guys to help us 'dig for dirt'. We need to know everything there is to know about our opponents as demonstrated above. Furthermore, we need people to proof read our letters. If they like to lawyerise, let's make sure there are no loop holes. It is very easy to have messages become very robotic so we need to be aware of this and try to get them to sound as personal and 'real' as possible.
I'll leave it there for now. We can't do much until we know who we're up against and the settings, but please let me know if you're interested in helping/organising/running/anything else.
