Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[novice]

I'm actually rather wary about giving gold to civ.fr without some hard assurances on their part. Telling them that we are willing to give gold with said assurances is fine by me, however.

Agreed. Asking what their purpose of the loan would be is simple prudence.

What Zak said:

Note that in my draft, we're not actually promising much. We're just playing the ball back in their court.

Also, come on guys. If you want to build an alliance you have to show some trust. And someone has to make the first step. If we act with suspicion and mistrust, CivFr will reply in kind. Just see how our relations with CivPlayers have evolved.

So we might end up losing some gold, but the potential gains are huge. And to re-repeat again for the third time, our reply does not bind us into anything. We can see how CivFr responds and go from there.

[Jabah]

No, it's not. Our agreement only forbids unit gifting. They know we're giving Zulu ivory right now, for instance, and they know it's allowed in our agreement.

Rereading, you are indeed right, now I wonder how they (or you) didn't include banning obvious assistance like research funding, trading strategic ressources (seems to be pretty standard in NAP, no ?)...
[the Zulu ivory deal being initiated before the war dec would have been safe anyway]

If you do something too obvious, you might have to get ready to have CFC do the same to the Germans.

[Mardoc]

without some hard assurances on their part.

Assurances of what, exactly? War with CFC? Eternal NAP with us? Vassalage? Put yourself in their shoes - how on earth could we afford a fair price for anything 'hard'?

No, if this is going to work, it's going to have to be some combination of common interests and irrational trust.

I think even if all we can accomplish is 'not a guaranteed safe border for CFC', that's worth a significant investment. Or 'won't attack us unless there's profit in it'. But there's hope for something significant - we might get an ally, or a partner in a CFC war, or even, maybe, some new faces around the RB forums after the game ends .

As a third angle: what's the 'worst case' here? They somehow convince us to give them too much, they get ahead, we get behind, and they end up winning the game while we come in 2nd or 3rd. Isn't that still superior to a CFC win? Yeah, I want to win and to maintain RB as the premier civ site. But it wouldn't be horrible to be merely the friendliest of the strong sites, would it?

[kalin]

However, we talked about it as a team and we'd be happy to help you guys out somehow.

Can we at least remove the final 'somehow'.

Kalin

[pindicator]

Also, come on guys. If you want to build an alliance you have to show some trust. And someone has to make the first step. If we act with suspicion and mistrust, CivFr will reply in kind. Just see how our relations with CivPlayers have evolved.

So we might end up losing some gold, but the potential gains are huge. And to re-repeat again for the third time, our reply does not bind us into anything. We can see how CivFr responds and go from there.

+1000

If we're going to throw conditions on every little thing we may as well tell CivFr to f-off now and save ourselves the trouble.

[kjn]

Also, come on guys. If you want to build an alliance you have to show some trust. And someone has to make the first step. If we act with suspicion and mistrust, CivFr will reply in kind. Just see how our relations with CivPlayers have evolved.

So we might end up losing some gold, but the potential gains are huge. And to re-repeat again for the third time, our reply does not bind us into anything. We can see how CivFr responds and go from there.

I don't think we are that far apart, if anything. But I think simply asking how they intend to use the funds shouldn't be viewed as distrust, especially since we give reasons for why we can't send them any gold until T153 (getting Engineering ASAP).

I'm a firm believer in that trust is best built slowly and in small step. If we get some trust back from CivFr (I don't really care how they use the funds, really), then a gold loan will continue to build on that.

[novice]

Kalin, Zak suggested this edit:

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 still want to do what we can to assist you. We are finishing Engineering at the end of T152 and really don't want to delay that, but after that we can spare some gold to help you in your conflict with CFC. We're making about X gold per turn at max tax. 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

I also changed "some gold If it would help you" to "some gold to help you" in the middle of the second paragraph. Kjn, I think that addition by Scooter also serves to subtly underline what we would expect the money to be used for.

[Sullla]

I'm fine with the current message, and I also think that we have every reason to be generous right now. CivFr would make an excellent ally: we have no borders to dispute, and we could work together against three different teams in a future 2 vs 1 (we could invade from opposite sides against CFC, Apolyton, or CivPlayers). I wouldn't endlessly parse a message either, what we have looks ok.

[pindicator]

I'll put it another way:

When you take a girl out for dinner, you don't hold the bill in front of her and say "Now, I'm willing to pay for this but only if you can give me some assurances that you're going to uphold your end of things."

[dazedroyalty]

Kalin, Zak suggested this edit:

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 still want to do what we can to assist you. We are finishing Engineering at the end of T152 and really don't want to delay that, but after that we can spare some gold to help you in your conflict with CFC. We're making about X gold per turn at max tax. 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

I also changed "some gold If it would help you" to "some gold to help you" in the middle of the second paragraph. Kjn, I think that addition by Scooter also serves to subtly underline what we would expect the money to be used for.

I like this one.