Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[NobleHelium]

Beaker rate at max science is the same thing as "commerce minus maintenance times science multiplier"...when you have someone else giving you gold to cover the maintenance.

Oh and also, gold to fund 10000 beakers does not mean they are giving us 10000 beakers worth of gold. They would be giving us the gold to boost our research rate from breakeven to max, until we finish Communism.

[zakalwe]

I was thinking we'd repay the gold.

So we get an earlier communism, which is huge, and they get a great spy, which is huge. Win/win.

[novice]

And beaker rate at max science means nothing, the only relevant thing is commerce minus maintenance times science multiplier.

What's the difference? IF we were funded, surely noone could beat us to Communism.

That said, after skeeping on it I see how a Communism plan may be a bit overambitious. Getting Banking and Rifling is a lower risk approach. We will not be running away with the game for the foreseeable future, but we can continueto build on our land advantage.

[kjn]

I partially agree with Nic, but mainly because the GSpy gift plan is quite complex and not certain to succeed (ie someone else beats us to Communism). I think it can be a good plan B, or one that can be raised later on, but right now I think we need a simpler and more concrete offer.

For that matter, simply having Univers neutral will be a net win for us. That said, if we can get OBs with Univer it'd be huge for our economy once Apolyton closes borders with us, but Apolyton will likely view that as a direct snub against them.

[Sullla]

I would go ahead and float that unusual Great Spy offer to UniversCiv and see what they say. I don't think it hurts us to propose interesting plans and see what reaction we get in return, while also asking them if they have anything concrete in mind. We could also simply ask us if they're willing to let us borrow gold straight-up, since that's what we need at the moment, and it will be easier to repay down the road. Gold in hand is always more valuable than gold promised in the future.

Without getting too off track here though, any notion of researching all the way to Communism before Rifling is wildly overconfident at this point. We've got a major attack coming, and that means our tech path is Gunpowder -> RP -> Rifling. As soon as we have drafted rifles on the field in sufficient number (and we can put a LOT of conscripts in the field), the whole attack falls apart. We can worry about Communism once we've secured our borders.

[MWIN]

there is a danger of informing our communism tech path too early....

[kjn]

Another idea. Right now our maces are mostly a drag, especially if Apolyton plans to bring some janissaries along. What about trading some of the maces to WPC for catapults, to be delivered circa T170?

It converts throwaway units of little use to throwaway units of more use, moves some of our unit costs into the future, and gives WPC a decent boost in power. It's not like WPC can use the maces against us anyway.

[pindicator]

We may need those maces if we are attacked on t170

[kjn]

That's true, but if Apolyton attacks us on T170 it won't be with rifles but with a good amount of janissaries.

It comes down to what we think will be more useful come T170 - 5-10 maces or a similar number of catapults?

[pindicator]

I'm assuming we are going to have a good number of catapults from the german war. We haven't really used them.
Now it may be a good idea to exchange maces for cats just from a hammer perspective: We can build maces by drafting 1 population. We have to manually build catapults. But don't think maces are useless, even against janissaries.