Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[kjn]

A separate peace between us and the Germans would shaft both us and WPC. WPC would have to deal with a mostly intact German army (which they can't handle), and we would have to deal with all the established German culture. Remember that Wilhelmshaven and Warendorf can be quite close to 4-ring borders, at which point Wismar and Wittenberge are next to useless.

[scooter]

A peace deal between us and the German team is 1) a violation of our war agreement and 2) insane.

[novice]

So, I'm not so good at this strategy aspect of the game. How much is a friendly WPC worth? We'd have to keep OB and place sentries in their lands to avoid sneak attacks from their neighbours, right?

OR we just capture the remaining german cities and eat WPC when we can, unless someone else does it first.

What's best? I have no idea, so it would be helpful if those having stronger opinions could voice them.

I guess the ideal solution would be to capture the remaining cities while still finding a way to keep WPC happy.

[scooter]

So, I'm not so good at this strategy aspect of the game. How much is a friendly WPC worth? We'd have to keep OB and place sentries in their lands to avoid sneak attacks from their neighbours, right?

OR we just capture the remaining german cities and eat WPC when we can, unless someone else does it first.

What's best? I have no idea, so it would be helpful if those having stronger opinions could voice them.

I guess the ideal solution would be to capture the remaining cities while still finding a way to keep WPC happy.

I'm struggling with this too, I don't have a strong opinion. It depends on what we view our path to victory to be. For instance, are we just going to want to run over WPC with Cavs in 30 turns? That really factors in.

My concern with taking everything isn't really about WPC, it's about them telling everyone we treated them unfairly. Whether that's accurate or not, it isn't hard for people to see that 2 teams declared on 1, and one of the attackers got every single city while the other walked away with nothing. That sure does look greedy. CFC literally has a chariot watching the German team empty cities and throw themselves at WPC. If that in turn makes it more difficult to make deals with neighbors, that's not very ideal. For that matter, if taking every single city makes CFC decide not to take our T200 extension for fear of our size, it's not a great deal. So in that sense, making WPC happy has real value. However, what if we can't make them happy? What if giving them Warendorf + 2 tundras still makes them feel like they got cheated? If we give up 3 cites and they still complain about us being unfair, we might as well just take them all, then. That's the dilemma we have, and to be honest I don't really know the answer because it's all educated guesswork.

Also I should note that I firmly believe the following to be true:
1) Yes WPC made our invasion go smoother, but I do believe we could have won this war completely 1v1. Casualties would be much higher, and it would be slower, but it would have worked.
2) If WPC entered this war 1v1, they would have captured 0 cities.

So while I put some value in keeping WPC happy, I don't buy the "WPC deserves X cities" argument for the above 2 reasons.

(Also, this may sound harsh, but I don't *really* care too much about personal feelings of other teams here... I want us to win as convincingly as possible because this is just a game and I'm competitive. So nah, I don't really care about helping WPC out of personal pity, but I'm halfway interested in it because there's a real chance that doing so helps our chances of victory. However, if being a bit ruthless improves our chances of victory, I'll likely support that too. I don't advocate lying, cheating, being a jerk; I just mean if the best strategy is to take everything in-game that we can get our hands on, then go for it.)

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I think the best way of getting somewhere here is to take stock of how we're going to win. The two routes people are most likely to attempt are Spaceship and Culture.

With the amount of great people we've produced and our traits, I tend to think Culture may not be the best option for us. I say that with the disclaimer that I have attempted 0 cultural victories in my life, so I'm relatively ignorant . I would assume we are generally headed towards a Spaceship victory. Realistically that's a "tech victory" since I have zero doubt we'll be able to pull together the production cities necessary to build parts quickly. So to me, the key question really is: how much more land do we need/want? If we can answer this question, I think it'll be a little easier to inform our decision.

So maybe we need to have this discussion in the long-term strategy thread. Figure out our victory condition, figure out how much land safely assures that, and go nuts. If someone wants to make and argument to "flip the switch" and go for cultural, that would be interesting to read.

edit: I made a few clarifying changes to the parenthetical section above

[Mardoc]

The worth of a friendly WPC is hard to judge, and mostly depends on what influence their example has on world opinion.

Direct, in-game differences between a friendly and unfriendly WPC:

• Maybe 5-10% more military needed to hold off a dogpile
  
• Probable warning if someone uses their land to invade us
  
• 10-12 cities worth of foreign trade routes; not currently needed but if relations elsewhere keep going down...
  
• Presumably three more cities owned by us
  

Most of the value of treating them kindly would be insubstantial. I think it would significantly decrease the odds of dogpile, and increase the odds of other teams finding opportunities to work with us. I presume Sullla et al disagree.

But I don't think this is a case where there'll be anything obvious we can point to either way. Can't measure world opinion, and we only get to try one path.

[sunrise089]

My guess is the most likely victory conditions are Space and Domination, I just don't see Cultural working out with a decent tech pace.

That said, I agree with Scooter we only need to throw any bones to WPC if they're on board and happy with what they'd be getting. If they can be satisfied, I think I like the raze+let them resettle plan best, since as others have pointed out it's too time-consuming for us to sit next to cities siegeing them while WPC walks up. If the cost of that is 2-3 bad cities and 1-2 solid ones I think that's a worthwhile trade for goodwill/reputation considering how costly new cities are in the short term and how we'll very possibly end up with the cities anyways in the medium term.

Separate question - did WPC not share their tactical plans with us?

[scooter]

My guess is the most likely victory conditions are Space and Domination, I just don't see Cultural working out with a decent tech pace.

Domination would be fun, I think we could legitimately do it. Wow would that ever would be a slog, though.

Separate question - did WPC not share their tactical plans with us?

Sort of. They've pretty frequently updated us on what they see and where they are at, but stuff like turning around from Warendorf and heading towards the tundra was done seemingly on a whim with a "oh btw yeah we can't do that so we moved north" note. That was the main surprise. They did let us know pre-war what they planned - basically throw everything at Warendorf.

[pindicator]

Raze and Resettle could be appealing because if we eliminate the German cities then we will eliminate their army

[antisocialmunky]

Raze and resettle is an option but we would probably have to supply the settlers or something.

They'll probably want Wismar too and we can probably save Huron if we felt like it. So that is ~5.

[Dantski]

Raze and Resettle could be appealing because if we eliminate the German cities then we will eliminate their army

I agree with this, of the German cities that are left, only 2 are really in decent spots. Just raze them and let WPC resettle, this assumes WPC's economy isn't totally broken and they can afford to settle though.