Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[kalin]

The last email from WPC shows they are not totally out of touch. It gives us good hope to cultivate them as an ally going forward.

I like the drafts and the amendments.

Kalin

[scooter]

Sent to WPC:

Beta,

Great, glad to hear we're on the same page for the upcoming war! We've seen a lot of axes in the Incan land, so I imagine those Dog Soldiers should be pretty effective!

Yes, we definitely plan on crossing into their territory on T150 with the vast majority of our army. We should then be able to take a city of theirs on T151 barring any surprises, and we're hoping to be attacking a second city on T153. There's also another small pesky border city out west that we will likely raze right away on T150. So don't worry, they'll definitely notice our presence . I'm assuming your team will be doing the same by moving in on T150?

Also, we've got a unit or two floating around in their territory, and they seem to be shuffling a lot of unit towards us. Not surprising, but it's good news for your team. Have they contacted you recently about NAPs or anything? The German team finally asked us for a NAP extension a couple days ago, so this is probably the cause of their unit shuffling.

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

[scooter]

On the Spanish draft - the message I was trying to communicate was "we can't make promises about joining at T175, but we'll consider it." Apparently that was unclear given some of the feedback, so maybe it will confuse them too. Here's another stab at it.

Great, we've offered the ivory trade so hopefully you can put that to good use.

Our NAP with CFC goes until T175, so we definitely can't join before then. We can't make any promises about joining at T175 either because we can't do that unless all our borders are secure. We are concerned about other teams attacking us at T175, so unfortunately we can't give you an answer anytime soon. In the meantime, let me know if there's anything else I can do to help you guys!

scooter - Team RB

[kjn]

Looks quite good, Scooter.

[scooter]

I also sent WPC a quick follow-up note:

Beta,

Here is some info you may find useful. We are keeping an eye on the main group of the GWT army. They have other stray units, but this is the main force, and it's currently headed in our direction. We'll do our best to keep you posted on the location/composition of their army.

I also attached kjn's cropped screenshot from the German War thread. And yes, I downloaded, renamed, and separately attached this time.

[scooter]

In-game info request: Can I get a full list of all active deals GWT has with other teams? OB, resource deals, etc. I'm wondering if we can lean on a few teams to cut off their deals with GWT, so if I could look at a list, I think we could get a pretty good idea of who might be willing.

[scooter]

Oh boy, from CFC:

Hi Scooter,

As promised, here is a response to your question about the NAP.

We are aware that some of your NAPs, as well as some of ours, and many other Teams' NAPs with each other, are all expiring around the same time. To borrow from GRRM, we think that this potential "chaos is a ladder of opportunity" for us and we prefer to let as many NAPs as possible expire in order to leverage the uncertainty into the best possible situation for our team. To illustrate, our current extended NAP with you has necessitated that we give up numerous potential agreements that would have been much more lucrative.

So this time we want to take some time to see what new offers and opportunities will reveal themselves as the expiration of these many NAPs draws closer and then expire. We are confident that there will be much better offers on the table form many Teams, when the NAPs are at or near expiration. We welcome your thoughts on this.

More specifically, we (and you) are aware that as the current leaders (congrats on that BTW) your best strategy is to maintain the status quo with long NAPs and deepen your lead. But at the same time you (and we) are obviously aware that we want to be competitive too. So rather than just jump into another long NAP that only serves the purpose of giving you guys a more secure hold on the lead, we want to think about options that will serve our goal of making us more competitive for the lead.

We hope that is more clear. Thanks again for your patience.

CFC

HAHAHA. By the way, this was definitely written by Sommer.

[Sisu]

Well, at least he didn't call it a diplomacy sub-game of the demogame...

[scooter]

In fairness, that's an entirely logical position/message. Well sort of, it's obviously elaborate side-stepping, but their central tenant of avoiding NAPs with us is logical and should have been done sooner IMO. It just made me laugh while reading it. Game on. We have 25T to:

1) Eliminate the German team
2) Consolidate our army post-war
3) Buy out as many possible CFC allies as possible

I think we should be fine. We may have to push CivPlayers a little more than our last message did. We've all liked to think so far that they aren't in league with CFC because their communication with us has improved, but we can't count on that. We should also consider scenarios where we get "army from across the world" type stuff coming at us. Neighbors get priority though because far-away civs can't get to us without a willing participant to let them pass through their land.

[Ellimist]

Cool, now we have an honest response from them and can quit caring about what they have to say.


Edit: And also quit fooling around with trying to negotiate with them. They aren't interested, period. This message told us nothing we didn't already know.