Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[scooter]

From UCiv:

Hi again Scooter!

We did not invest much time & energy into exploration... therefore we mostly know our direct neighbors, Native American to the West, Indians to the South-West and Zulu to the South. For the moment we enjoy growing on our part of the world

Bye!

[kjn]

We have a counter-offer to plain open borders from Univers:

OB and sheep from them, OB and spices from us.

I think that's a fair payment for the trade routes, but cancelled the proposal for now (man, the diplo interface in Civ 4 sucks).

[SevenSpirits]

On the one hand, recalculating trade routes this turn would be sweet.

On the other hand, I don't think we should make any lopsided OB deals. It sets a bad example to our friends that we have straight OB with.

I think we need to decline UCiv's proposal.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I don't think it's a problem in a couple of turns. Resources for resources. Not like anyone else has happy they can spare us. Just gotta hook up more spices, we just have one on our network.

I suspect that the trade routes are contingent on them getting extra happy.

The only problem is if they get too strong, especially after they absorb spanish AP. But still, I don't want the global narrative to shift too strongly towards realpolitik yet, because we'll be the ones that will be the focus of everyone's envy. I want everyone else happy with us and focusing on others, so support everyone else until it's too late to catch up.

[Shoot the Moon]

What if we say yes until we hook up our own sheep, at which time it would be just plain OB?

[kjn]

We hooked up a second spice this turn, so we have one spare to trade.

Trading away spare happy resources has another benefit: it makes other teams dependant on us, while still making us look good. And it's not like the other teams has anything to trade us, so I think it's a win-win for us.

That said, I think we should send our counter-offer as two separate ones (and preceded by a diplo note): sheep for spices, and OB for OB. That way we can cancel the trade later on once we get sheep (or they spices) without it impacting the OBs.

Univers also makes for a good team to tie closer to us - they're far away, relatively strong (but still a fair bit from the leaders), and if we go after WPC after the Germans I'd like them to like us better than they like WPC.

[SevenSpirits]

I don't think Uciv necessarily requires free happy to get OB, they just hope we want to make that deal. Which we don't, it's silly. The sheep has zero value. We could counteroffer for some reasonable amount of GPT, tell them that the sheep is useless to us because we are expansive, and also say that straight OB is still on the table.

[SevenSpirits]

That said, I think we should send our counter-offer as two separate ones (and preceded by a diplo note): sheep for spices, and OB for OB. That way we can cancel the trade later on once we get sheep (or they spices) without it impacting the OBs.

Actually you can cancel the resource part of the deal without touching OB, and vice versa, regardless.

[SevenSpirits]

Trading away spare happy resources has another benefit: it makes other teams dependant on us, while still making us look good. And it's not like the other teams has anything to trade us, so I think it's a win-win for us.

I think it would be crazy to give away free happy to a team we just met, while ignoring friendly local teams that we have been frankly taking advantage of.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Well, all they had to do was ask