Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

That's perfectly fine, BGN, but just _Not_Right_Now_ when they have basically ended their war and the German war is barely halfway done.

I just thought of how WPC can earn their keep... We use their gigantic army of trash to garrison our eastern border so we can Get Tough with CFC.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

YossarianLives
Alright, I appreciate you being straightforward with us here. I'll take this back to the team and see what I can come up with. I've said it before that I do think we can have future cooperation after T175.
I'm not going to lie, we knew that you'd notice the pillaging and you wouldn't be happy. But we also really did feel like your refusal to cancel the ivory trade was meant to signal that all bets are off, every team for themselves

We really should have called them out on this statement with "we did no such thing: stop projecting". Forcing someone else to reexplain their position will put them on the back foot.

[Brian Shanahan]

I'd be ok with offering tribute in the range of 10 gpt for CFC to stop pillaging, but I suspect Xenu et al would want my head for that .

"No, no, not a sixpence, sir!"

Or, attributed to him,

"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."

I prefer:

Millions for defense, but not one cent for survival

In all honesty given the numbers crunched, it is too petty a barb to incite a war which'll make the game not worth the candle over.

[scooter]

Irrationality is a big advantage to have in diplomacy.

I think we should be being less self-interested and more interested in rewarding friends and punishing enemies, in general, even if it's not optimal play.

You've made several cryptic/general comments like that in this thread, but I'd really like to hear a specific current example along with why you think it would be a good idea. Your input is really valuable to me when you give it, but I don't really know what to do with two fairly vague sentences like that.

[SevenSpirits]

I'm not sure we can do anything differently currently, as we have already taken a position with CFC over quite a few messages that we are trying to win and we know they are trying to win too. They now believe that we won't do anything crazy that will lower our chances of winning, so they are kind of walking all over us. (They can do this - even though they don't want conflict with us - because we've told them several times that we really don't want conflict with them, and that we think peace is worth more to us than to them.)

I would rather that our general stance was: the most important things to us in this game are our relationships with other civs. If we feel betrayed we will punish it and if we feel well-treated we will reward it. Pitting that stance against a team like CFC - assuming they believe it - means they would not want to take any risks by pillaging our hamlet.

At this point, CFC won't believe it, as we have told them repeatedly how pragmatic we are. But it's still possible with other teams, and I suggest we try to do it with them.

[scooter]

Boldly - no personal offense intended whatsoever, but I just disagree with basically every thing you wrote in that long post, and I don't know how else to express that in a new way . I don't think it's a post that's very grounded in reality. We can't grind them into dust, our whole military is far away. And even if we could, why would we want to right now? I want to win the game, not just beat CFC. They likely aren't even our biggest competition to win. Taking on the #2 civ in soldiers just for sake of a personal grudge is the kind of ludicrously stupid play that I see in games here a lot that just blows me away. Your suggestions would probably result in a CivFr victory.

YossarianLives
Alright, I appreciate you being straightforward with us here. I'll take this back to the team and see what I can come up with. I've said it before that I do think we can have future cooperation after T175.
I'm not going to lie, we knew that you'd notice the pillaging and you wouldn't be happy. But we also really did feel like your refusal to cancel the ivory trade was meant to signal that all bets are off, every team for themselves

We really should have called them out on this statement with "we did no such thing: stop projecting". Forcing someone else to reexplain their position will put them on the back foot.

...I contradicted it on the very next line, pushing back by saying we felt THEY were signalling all bets were off by trying to rally other teams against us. Forgive me for not being ridiculously hostile to someone for no reason whatsoever. :P

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Did we actually refuse to break off the marble trade? I would have pushed back, then let off by saying that yes, cancelling the ivory trade is still on the table. It seems they attributed something to us that we did not say.

[Zargon]

The contradiction that could have been pointed out for that line wasn't that they signaled all bets were off first, but rather that they never asked us to cancel the ivory trade.

[scooter]

but rather that they never asked us to cancel the ivory trade.

They did ask, and I said "nope, not unless you're willing to extend the NAP and stop trying to organize a dogpile" more or less.

[Zargon]

Ah, did something not get included in the diplo thread, or am I searching for the wrong word?