Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[scooter]

@Scooter - I'm sure you've thought of this, but we can effectively offer CFC a carrot and a stick. GPs or other concessions to sign a NAP, but if they don't we might remind them that our border city on their side is very important to us, and that we're likely to concentrate our defenses there. Anything we can do to make them think Apolyton has more to gain from the war going forward than they do...

Yeah, I'm keeping this in mind. I'm not ready to do that yet, but that's the next step probably.

Not sure if you saw it before scooter, but I suggested that we try to buy/ask for Poly and Civplayers graphs from another team. Do you think that's possible? Maybe ask UCiv and WPC if they have those.

Yeah I saw. Two issues: 1) We can't afford to part with any gold at all really, so I'm not sure what we would give up as payment. 2) I don't even know if it's valuable. All that matters is there's a strong chance more is coming than we can handle, so our only job right now is to just accumulate as many units as humanly possible and hope it's enough. I don't think graph knowledge will impact any strategic decisions, so I don't want to pay for it.

[Bigger]

If we want some roads pillaged within our territory, can we persuade another team to do it for us? I know we're not on the best terms with WPC, but maybe we could offer to pay them, say, 10 gold per pillaged road tile?

well we'd have to go to war with them, and those roads aren't close to their territory either. thats not practical at all (we'd lose too much trade route income, for instance)

[scooter]

Suggested draft to UCiv

Yuufo,

Okay great! Well whenever you confirm with your team, we can go ahead and start working together on this. So yeah to keep it simple - for every 2g you send us, we will send you 3g as soon as we finish Rifling (we'll shut off research until you are paid back).

We do have quite a few excess resources right now. Do you want any of them? We'd be happy to gift you guys a couple if it would help your cities. Just let me know . If you guys work with us here, we'll do everything we can to boost your position.

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

Time to be really generous with these guys I think. They are our most likely chance for a friend right now. If we can cultivate them into playing the "PB2 Plako" role for us, that would be awesome.

[scooter]

I usually like to leave more time, but if I don't get any comments at all pretty soon, I'm going to take that as an assumed "okay" and send this. UCiv is notoriously slow and unresponsive, so I think the quicker we follow-up on this the better.

I would try to catch them on chat instead, but I haven't seen them on there in quite awhile, and he did say in his last email that he doesn't really have the time for chatting.

[Qgqqqqq]

Send it.

[Ichabod]

Sounds good to me. I agree about the graphs too, if we could get them for free or a gesture of good will from someone, that'd be great, but paying for it is out of the question.

[scooter]

Sounds good to me. I agree about the graphs too, if we could get them for free or a gesture of good will from someone, that'd be great, but paying for it is out of the question.

Yeah, I'm sort of thinking if they say yes to this and request a resource gift or something, that might be an opportune time to say "hey would you mind sending us a screenshot of their power graphs?" or something. I'd rather get to a point where we're doing favors for each other rather than bartering for everything. We'll see.

edit: also, sent that draft to UCiv

[antisocialmunky]

@Scooter - I'm sure you've thought of this, but we can effectively offer CFC a carrot and a stick. GPs or other concessions to sign a NAP, but if they don't we might remind them that our border city on their side is very important to us, and that we're likely to concentrate our defenses there. Anything we can do to make them think Apolyton has more to gain from the war going forward than they do...

Yeah, I'm keeping this in mind. I'm not ready to do that yet, but that's the next step probably.

Not sure if you saw it before scooter, but I suggested that we try to buy/ask for Poly and Civplayers graphs from another team. Do you think that's possible? Maybe ask UCiv and WPC if they have those.

Yeah I saw. Two issues: 1) We can't afford to part with any gold at all really, so I'm not sure what we would give up as payment. 2) I don't even know if it's valuable. All that matters is there's a strong chance more is coming than we can handle, so our only job right now is to just accumulate as many units as humanly possible and hope it's enough. I don't think graph knowledge will impact any strategic decisions, so I don't want to pay for it.

Graphs for +5% on loan interest.

[fluffyflyingpig]

Funny how we put the Globe and the Statue of Zeus in the two cities we otherwise could use to buy off invaders.

Not that I want to interrupt scooter, but I do have another topic for discussion: assume the war goes relatively well. How do we exit?

I can see a few possibilities:

• Destroy invading stacks after losing a few cities. Offer peace in place. Just looking to minimize the damage here and get back to infrastructure.
  
• Destroy invading stacks, offer status quo ante bellum, plus NAP of some kind. We end up having wasted a bunch of hammers, possibly lost a city or two, but so did the invader. We probably can still win from here if we can get that long period of peace.
  
• Forever war. Destroy invaders, don't retaliate, but make them live for the rest of the game with Statue of Zeus war weariness.
  
• Destroy invaders, attempt to get part of the invading civ in recompense. Either concessions for peace, or we go conquering a few border cities and then make peace. Likely costs more, but our position afterward is better.
  
• Carthago delenda est! Don't stop fighting until the dogpilers are all destroyed. We're on the conqueror's plateau, so we can profit from conquest. This probably requires we stay in total war mode for a long long time. CivFr at least, and possibly others, tech in peace ahead of us. On the other hand, we probably can force NAPs on the rest of the world, or straight up go onward for domination, if we can pull this off.

I'm ignoring 'lose', because we don't get peace if that happens .

I know a lot of this depends on how the war goes, so I don't think we can decide now, I just want people to have it on their mind.

Some things that cross my mind:
Emotionally, I want to destroy them all! But I'm not convinced that'll be possible, and even if it is, it probably requires we spend so much time in total war that the uninvolved civs get way ahead. Realistically, if we want to destroy these teams, it'll be easier to take peace, tech ahead an era, and then come back for round 2.

CFC is probably the easiest to convince to take status quo. They can still win without taking land from us, as long as we're slowed enough by fighting. On the other hand, they're the easiest target for UniverseCiv if we get them to join in.

CivPlayers is probably the only civ we can realistically destroy in this war, because they're the only ones we're ahead of in tech. But then we'd border CivFr. I suspect this one depends on how the other fronts are going and if anyone else has taken peace.

Apolyton is the tricky one. They've invested a lot into the war, they're likely to take at least one city from us, and advancing against rifles will be very difficult unless they make a mistake. I'm afraid we may have to go with one of 'you can keep those two ex-German cities' or forever war.

If we do go with one of the forever war type options we should consider switching over to a EE at some point and leverage our empire size.

[novice]

If we can avert the entire dogpile I suppose two GPs is worth it. But if we do that I'd rather give one to Apolyton, one to CivPlayers, and hang CFC out to dry.