Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[Cyneheard]

Ahh, so that's their reasoning for why we are the bad guys.

And this is why I hate full diplo - it leads to stupid ideas of "fair" like "this is closer to my capital than yours, so I should get it": the metagame is setup to encourage giving weaker players "a chance" even when they screw up. We're here to win, not to play nice.

Much better, as a metagame: "you want this land that I paid for? Over my dead body." "That can be arranged."

That doesn't mean I won't exploit the weaknesses of the metagame, but CFC really needs to get over itself: they were VERY slow in settling in our direction, so of course they didn't get a lot of the land.

[Sullla]

CFC's belief that CivFr is not one of the strongest military teams in the game was the most interesting part of the chat for me. That's a total misreading of the situation, if they actually believe that. CivFr has more cities and more pop than nearly anyone else, they have plenty of military techs, and they have very strong leadership with lots of MP experience. If CFC genuinely believes that they could do more than snipe an exposed city off of CivFr, then they're going to be in for a rude awakening. Let's hope CFC is foolish enough to pick a grudge match with them.

[scooter]

CFC's belief that CivFr is not one of the strongest military teams in the game was the most interesting part of the chat for me. That's a total misreading of the situation, if they actually believe that. CivFr has more cities and more pop than nearly anyone else, they have plenty of military techs, and they have very strong leadership with lots of MP experience. If CFC genuinely believes that they could do more than snipe an exposed city off of CivFr, then they're going to be in for a rude awakening. Let's hope CFC is foolish enough to pick a grudge match with them.

Yeah I started to correct that statement because it seemed dumb to me, and then I quickly backtracked with a "I see what you mean" because I didn't want to help them . I wanted to point out "uh, you guys were way behind in military and then suddenly you were #2, you think they can't do the same?!?"

[scooter]

That doesn't mean I won't exploit the weaknesses of the metagame, but CFC really needs to get over itself: they were VERY slow in settling in our direction, so of course they didn't get a lot of the land.

He acknowledged that in the chat. His only comment was that we said we'd get back to them on how to settle that area, and then we didn't do that. And that's true. We discussed it when it happened, and we agreed it would probably irritate CFC, but we were okay with that risk. I don't think he said anything there that was invalid. In return I made it clear that regardless we were giving nothing back, and he understood that and moved on.

If I were in his shoes, I'd bring that up too to try to play on guilt. It didn't work, but it was worth a shot.

[Ruff_Hi]

I got home to find 2 solid pages of diplo chat. This is going to take me a while to read through. Then I hit the dating scenario and flew through it.

Anyway - very interesting chat. I actually think that CFC may have more land than us at the end of our wars (see below). If so, they should be paying us for a NAP and not us paying them (ie a NAP might be in there interest more than ours).

[Nicolae Carpathia]

That's why I'd like to agitate for getting CivFR down to snipe some recently captured cities of CFC.

[Zargon]

Wow, so it sounds like CFC is perhaps serious about the attack. I think I'm pretty on board with a relatively generous gold gift now. On the other hand, would a gold gift tip our hand to CFC that we're buddying up to CivFr and make them abort? I really really really want to see #2 and the close #3 have a bloody slugfest.

CFC is on the 2nd half of the turn. Could we perhaps disguise our gold gift by giving it on a turn they ran a high science rate the turn before, since CFC won't be able to log in to see the gold change hands, and won't see CivFr get an abnormal jump in their reserve?

[scooter]

FWIW, don't take the CFC vs CivFr bluster there too seriously. Yossarian was messing around the other day when I asked him about it because he obviously wasn't allowed to tell me, so he was saying they were invading CivFr in a manner that was clearly not all that serious. So a couple of his comments are still along those lines. That's not to say it's impossible that they aren't taking it seriously, but my feeling is they really were being opportunistic. Foolish, but opportunistic.

[antisocialmunky]

Scooter, your chat threads are really good.

The only way they get better is if you read them while this is playing in the background.

[kjn]

CFC is on the 2nd half of the turn. Could we perhaps disguise our gold gift by giving it on a turn they ran a high science rate the turn before, since CFC won't be able to log in to see the gold change hands, and won't see CivFr get an abnormal jump in their reserve?

We can hide any loan or gift the following ways from CFC:

Interturn: CivFr holds the turn until the Germans have finished. We log in, make the offer, and they accept before ending their turn.

Pros: Exchange where they can use the gold at once.
Cons: Other teams can see it; CFC can see it on APTmod

Over turn roll: CivFr ends turn. After they have ended their turn we log in and offer the gold on the diplo screen, notify CivFr. CivFr logs in at once after turn roll and accepts the gold.

Pros: Delays the exchange 1t.
Cons: Much harder to detect, unless another team logs in really early.