Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[SevenSpirits]

+1 on sooooo's drafts. Speed is good here.

[NobleHelium]

Good points by sooooo.

[antisocialmunky]

I thought someone already had a few pages back. Basically propose a variety of trades, OB and Happy and Health trades to start helping them out economically and militarily, and a map trade so we both get more info on CFC.

[Ruff_Hi]

ditto

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Yeah that might have been my proposal. However, mine also had a long pissy section on how our team will never trust team CFC juuust to get team CivFR into the mindset of action.

[sooooo]

Well let's wait for scooter to have a say. I won't be sending out anything because (a) I've not logged into the diplo email account before and (b) I'm afk for 24 h.

[scooter]

Sorry, away from a computer all day. Back now and caught up.

First, I already asked Yossarian (CFC) about the war declaration the other day. He basically said there's no way he would tell us. And really, why would they. Also, I'm not even going to address the conspiracy theory crowd here.

Anyway, I think we should send CivFr something like this:

Wow, that sounds like a very dirty trick by CFC. I'm sorry to hear that - they have been very difficult to us too. We are currently bound to a NAP with CFC until T175, and we are in the middle of our own war anyway as you might have seen.

However, we could maybe gift you guys a little bit of gold... Would something like 120 gold be useful? I know it's not much, but maybe it gets you a good upgrade or something. Also, you can run the trade mission in one of our cities if you'd like. Unlike some, we are an honest team, so if you can make it that far we will not give you any trouble.

Maybe we can work together in the future - it seems to me that we may have common enemies. We do have full maps on CFC, so if you want, we could also exchange maps with you.

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

This is almost a tiny bit wordier than I would like, but I'm trying to keep it fairly succinct since these guys are not native speakers, and they don't seem to like diplo that much. Also, I know we all want some grand alliance, but I don't think these guys would respond favorably to us being too pushy. It will take time... I'm hoping trying to help them up front without asking for anything in return will be a big step forward in that regard.

The gold gift is what people are most likely to resist, which I understand. However, in complete seriousness, I really think landing these guys as allies has the potential to be a game-winning move. If you agree with that assessment (certainly debatable I guess), then 120 gold is a no-brainer investment. We can of course wait until after we finish Engineering to actually gift it.

Thoughts?

[Cyneheard]

If it was a team that was better able to negotiate by words, then I'd be less likely to offer gold: we'd have other ways to build a rapprochement with them. But without the gold, I'm not sure how we'll convince them "we really want to work with you so that one of the two of us wins". (And by "one of the two of us" we mean us, of course, but they don't have to know that).

But I'm fine with "120g on T153" + trade mission spot (if they didn't burn the GM on their Golden Age?).

[scooter]

Something I should note. I was chatting with Cyneheard about this, and he said "I don't think 120g buys us an ally." I agree with that. However, I'm willing to bet that will be the most generous thing anyone has done for them all game long. In contrast, CFC just stabbed them in the back. So if we get talking with them and propose something like, I dunno, carving up CFC with Cavs in 50 turns, they're way more likely to take that as we've proven ourselves to be friendly by helping them at no apparent gain to ourselves.

It's like when you play with the AI - it has a "best friend" and "worst enemy" setting, and one of the keys to manipulating the AI is to never be worst enemy and get one or two "best friend" statuses. I view the #1 team right now to be us, and the #2 team to be a tossup between CFC and CivFr. If we get into a world where CivFr and us have a mutual "worst enemy" and we also have been generous to them previously, that makes mutual cooperation in carving up an enemy far easier.

Also, I really don't think anyone besides us, CFC, and CivFr has a real chance of winning.

[scooter]

Ok, draft to WPC. I liked Sooooo's draft to them, so I included that as a second paragraph virtually unedited. First paragraph is geared more towards their turn player on the war status (not much worth noting).

Beta/Tatu,

Hey, checking in on a few random things. First off, the war has begun and it's started nicely. We razed one of the western cities of the German team, and we are hoping to capture their southernmost city next turn. So I would say things are proceeding nicely . Any questions/comments from your team? I don't see anything out of the ordinary yet.

Also, we've had some interesting information from CivFR about being declared on by CFC. It was a disagreement over a great merchant apparently. Needless to say, CivFR were not happy! We thought we'd check with you guys if you've had much diplo with CivFR? We haven't had much, but with this info and the fact that they seem open to working with us, we wanted to chat more with their team and see what options were available for cooperation in the future. Given our relationship with you, we just wanted to run this by you first.

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

I don't think there's much to debate in this one?