Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[zakalwe]

I was under the impression we wanted to rush this so we could get the trade routes to recalculate before the turn ran out. My mistake on rushing it, then.

I can send a quick note to them accepting their initial offer and retracting the gpt offer if you'd like? Also, if you can cancel them without touching OB, then our worrying is unnecessary anyways - we could just pop in and re-offer the sheep deal they offered us.

Any objections to doing those two things?

Let's not dither anymore and see how they react to our current offer first. I don't see anything wrong with asking for some gpt, tbh. Like Seven says, agreeing to their initial offer would have been extremely generous.

[Sullla]

I guess we can see what they have to say to the offer, but I thought the whole point was that we wanted to be generous with teams like UniversCiv. We're sitting atop the score pile, and therefore teams have every incentive to work against us. Making allies through generous trade deals is exactly the metagaming that we should want to pursue.

In short, when you're the wealthy one on top of the dogpile, you want to be perceived like this:



Not like this:

[SevenSpirits]

That trade wouldn't have helped that perception at all!

It would give the following perceptions:

For UCiv:
1) RB was super quick to accept that deal, it must have been really in their favor.
2) RB must have had a use for the sheep and the trade routes, or they wouldn't have accepted.

For other civs we've met:
3) RB doesn't care about our long-standing relationship. They hooked their first duplicate happy resource and traded it away to a civ they just met before we even had a chance to talk about it. I guess they are not really our friends.
4) RB really profits from OB. They are willing to trade a lot for OB.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Haha, the moment I become a billionaire, I'm going to start campaigning for scrapping the minimum wage and putting all homeless people into poorhouses.

[scooter]

That trade wouldn't have helped that perception at all!

It would give the following perceptions:

For UCiv:
1) RB was super quick to accept that deal, it must have been really in their favor.
2) RB must have had a use for the sheep and the trade routes, or they wouldn't have accepted.

For other civs we've met:
3) RB doesn't care about our long-standing relationship. They hooked their first duplicate happy resource and traded it away to a civ they just met before we even had a chance to talk about it. I guess they are not really our friends.
4) RB really profits from OB. They are willing to trade a lot for OB.

I kind of wondered this too. I think we're assuming that UCiv was offering the sheep/spices deal as us "paying" them for OB. It's quite possible it never crossed their mind that the sheep was useless to us. I mean, if they knew it was useless, why even bother including it?

This is why I didn't see my email to them to be penny-pinching.

[Sullla]

I still say that you guys are over-analyzing things. If I saw two teams trading surplus resources, I would not see that as a slight to my team, I would simply see two teams acting proactively. Remember how everyone kept agonizing about settling a city in the desert by the oasis, when CFC apparently didn't care one way or the other? Sometimes this team can be so busy metagaming everything that we miss the obvious right in front of our faces.

I don't think CFC or WPC would have been slighted in the least by our team signing Open Borders with UniversCiv and trading a resource for one of their resources. I mean, it's not like they bothered to ask us themselves...

[SevenSpirits]

I don't think CFC or WPC would have been slighted in the least by our team signing Open Borders with UniversCiv and trading a resource for one of their resources. I mean, it's not like they bothered to ask us themselves...

We have had the surplus spice hooked for only a turn, and CFC has had a resource-trade-enabling connection to us for less than one turn!!

[kjn]

I'm with Sullla here. CFC could very well know we had spice before they made the final road connection, and the very first action they took after getting the road built was certainly to take a look at our resources.

They could easily have offered some gold for spices, if they wanted. Or even approached us about possible resource trades before getting the road up.

Every one of the teams we've met knows that we've teched Currency (they can see how much gold we have). They also know we have lots of cities. So if they stop to think for five seconds, they should also realise that we want as many OBs as possible, since we have lots of trade routes to fill. Signalling that we are willing to give a good deal to others to get them is hardly a bad thing.

[Sullla]

Look, I don't want to beat this into the ground, but here's how our exchange with UniversCiv went down:

Us: "We now have a trade connection; how about signing Open Borders?"
Them: "Well that sounds OK, but how about if we exchange spices for sheep as part of the deal?"

We could then come back with one of two responses:

1) "Great, that sounds fine with us! Looking forward to working with you in the future."
2) "We don't really need sheep right now; how about you pay us some gold/turn in exchange for those spices?"

I mean, I'm not crazy for thinking that the second response makes us look a bit like jerks, right? Because if I'm UniversCiv, I'm not too pleased with the way we responded, and I'd be thinking about blowing off the whole thing. I don't agree at all with how SevenSpirits characterized the deal:

For UCiv:
1) RB was super quick to accept that deal, it must have been really in their favor.
2) RB must have had a use for the sheep and the trade routes, or they wouldn't have accepted.

Really?! Accepting a deal that they proposed is going to make them mistrustful of us in the future? So what should we have done, waited longer to respond? Send them back a more miserly option? That's going to encourage a relationship? It's not the way that I'd approach the situation is all I'll say here.

Same thing with the other ideas here: signing deals with other teams will cause the teams we met first to mistrust us. It's... paranoid, I don't know what else to say. That's the kind of logic that the Civ5 AI employs. "If someone is acting friendly to another team, that's a sign that they are plotting against me." Nonsense. Amongst our neighbors, WPC is already in our back pocket and has reached out to us far more than we've reached out to them. German team is our planned target of attack, and we don't really care about them. CivPlayers has no contact with UniversCiv and doesn't show any interest in being friends. CFC is the only team that really matters here, and we're connecting another spices in like 4 turns anyway if they would really want a resource from us. They've shown every sign of being friendly thus far. I think it's utterly absurd that they would turn on us based on signing OB and trading spices to another team. By that logic, we should never be helping anyone at any time because we could theoretically be offering more to our neighbors.

Bleh, this is why I stay out of diplomacy. I just think we would have done better to give a team we recently met a generous offer. Sue me.

[sooooo]

I would have accepted the straight sheep for spices deal too. 1-3 gpt just seems weird.