Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[SleepingMoogle]

Best guess: they'll let us know about their new city location and may or may not inquire about the Stone resource.

[scooter]

From CFC:

Scooter/RB,

We like your suggested extension of the NAP until turn 175, and your suggested status of treating one another as preferred resource trade partners. We would like to add a few things to the table, though. Since you guys have a surplus of spices and will also soon have a surplus of stone we request that you gift us one stone resource and one spice resource for the duration of the NAP. We will be getting a surplus wine soon which will be available to you since you will be our priority resource partner.

If this sounds acceptable to you guys, we consider the NAP extended to turn 175 as soon as you send us a confirmation that all the above is okay.


Caledorn on behalf of Team CFC

I think we should do this. Thoughts? I would suggest we accept this on the condition that the surplus wine is gifted to us, so we're essentially doing a spice + stone for wine trade longterm. Slanted in their favor of course, but this would lock them up really nicely.

Discuss.

[novice]

We already have wine at BbB.

[scooter]

Ah right, good call. Anyways, Caledorn did just clarify to me that it wasn't meant to be a wine gift to us, but rather a trade.

Though they have not outright said this, I suspect they sort of feel the stone should be theirs. I don't think that's a totally unreasonable feeling either. Anyways, my opinion is this is the time to be kind of generous, moreso than upon just meeting some random team on the other side of the world. This would position us really nicely to be pretty firm towards CivPlayers, and if we get an agreement out of them, it frees us to go full-bore towards the German team conquest.

[novice]

Anyway I still think we should do it. Let's tie it up in one package:

- NAP to t175
- preferred resource trading partner - first refusal on all surplus resources
- OB
- They get stone and spices as soon as we have the extras hooked up
- we get their first surplus happy that we lack
- limit EP spending to minimum needed for seeing graphs.

We could conceal the gifts from third parties by throwing in a gpt component and gifting it back in lump sums, not sure if that's worth the hassle, though.

[novice]

Ah right, good call. Anyways, Caledorn did just clarify to me that it wasn't meant to be a wine gift to us, but rather a trade.

Though they have not outright said this, I suspect they sort of feel the stone should be theirs. I don't think that's a totally unreasonable feeling either. Anyways, my opinion is this is the time to be kind of generous, moreso than upon just meeting some random team on the other side of the world. This would position us really nicely to be pretty firm towards CivPlayers, and if we get an agreement out of them, it frees us to go full-bore towards the German team conquest.

I agree. The deal favours CFC but they're not a top dog, and it saves us the risk of having strained relations with all our neighbours.

[NobleHelium]

I'm okay with gifting them our "surplus source of stone," but I think we should make a deal for the marble that I assume they will / have already claimed. We don't need the wine, and I don't particularly want to give them the spice for nothing when we can get a useful luxury with it. Ideally we'd be able to get the marble for at least 10t in exchange for the surplus stone (which we can give them long term, as long as we have another source for ourselves), not sure if we want to be more generous than that though. We could offer the spice for 10t, but I think temporary luxuries are rather useless so that may come off negatively.

Edit: I'm generally okay with novice's list of terms. I still think we make some sort of deal for a marble loan in the future though.

[scooter]

Here's the one potential wrinkle I see. The language of this message suggests they want the stone/spice deal to go through immediately, rather than once the surplus is hooked. I believe we already have the spice surplus hooked, but we do not have the Starfall surplus stone hooked, nor will we for, what, 10-12T or so? We obviously cannot afford to give them our sole source of stone due to the Great Wall and Hanging Gardens plans that are ongoing, so the one thing we may need to (carefully) push back on is that we cannot give away stone until the surplus is hooked. If they are hurrying this back to us because they want that stone NOW so they can get started on a stone project, that could be an issue.

I think they would relent on this issue, though. Especially since it's the stone right on our border, so we're still getting it to them quicker than they likely would have gotten it themselves.

[NobleHelium]

There is absolutely no way we are giving away our only source of stone right now. Fuck that.

[kalin]

Add a clause that should we lose surplus we cancel deals. Also can we ask them to hook our stone somehow? Gift workers or some deal. Improving that stone is not a high prio for us. We should say yes to the deal, just iron out some details.

Kalin