Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[Zargon]

Why is it a bad move? It looks pretty clearly like squeezing out every last knight they can at the 11th hour before the invasion, just like we did when we slaved out knights from all our commerce cities to invade Germany.

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My first thought when I read the suggestion to offer the NAP to CP with the out if we attack others was "no way, it merely makes us look desperate".

My second thought was "wait, perhaps looking desperate would be useful".

An aura of confidence is useful for convincing people that there's nothing to gain by attacking us, and thus dissuading attacks in the first place. That's failed, so perhaps we now don an aura of desperation, in the hopes of inspiring CP to make bolder moves than they otherwise might. The tactics of their possible entry points might make it moot by making it impossible to hide a counterattack force. Just a thought.

[sunrise089]

Why is it a bad move? It looks pretty clearly like squeezing out every last knight they can at the 11th hour before the invasion, just like we did when we slaved out knights from all our commerce cities to invade Germany.

Well it would be like us drafting 5 cities per turn now but having not drafted Starfall at all last turn. You're not maximizing units, you're getting the same number of units in a more costly way. In exchange you're getting 'the element of surprise.'

The Poly way is maximizing units, doing max drafts from the turn they had rifles.

[novice]

because right now our operating assumption is we have to defend against a combined civplayers/apolyton stack starting on T170

[kjn]

Novice wrote this in the Turn Discussion thread, but it belongs here.

Well on RB it typically means that war can be declared on the turn named, although we typically play without NAPs nowadays. But this is an ISDG and if it isn't specified in the deal, then why not lawyer it to our advantage.

Here's a spin:

Hey CivPlayers

We forgot to get back to you on our interpretation of when war can legally be declared. Since you are worried about your security you'll be happy to know that we consider the NAP to last until the end of turn 170, so war cannot be declared until turn 171 at the earliest.

Peace and love,
Realms Beyond

I say we send it ASAP.

[antisocialmunky]

You might want to put in under what circumstances we discovered this. As in "One of our players had a question about when the NAP ran out. We went back through our emails and discovered that ..." Otherwise it sounds a little silly and random.

[Zargon]

I'd also tack on the quote where they defer to us for the interpretation, because it was literally a month ago. Or perhaps just a date so they can find it themselves so we don't look patronizing.

Hey CivPlayers,

In response to your query on July 12th, we forgot to get back to you on our interpretation of when war can legally be declared. We apologize for the delay. However, since you are worried about your security you'll be happy to know that we consider the NAP to last until the end of turn 170, so war cannot be declared until turn 171 at the earliest.

Love and peace,
Realms Beyond

I also inverted "peace and love" since it's more commonly thrown around like this.

[sunrise089]

We'd really like this interpretation, so while funny does the sarcasm really help? Could we go with....

Hey CivPlayers,

In response to your query on July 12th, we forgot to get back to you on our interpretation of when war can legally be declared. We apologize for the delay. We consider the NAP to last until the end of turn 170, so war cannot be declared until turn 171 at the earliest.

Peace and love,
Realms Beyond

[Zargon]

It's hard to say. It might help, because if we just say "we're interpreting it to mean 171", they might tell us to back up and they don't accept that unilateral interpretation.

If we say "we're interpreting at to mean 171 because we're taking your lies as god's honest truth", they might feel obligated/shamed into accepting our interpretation, because they did, in fact, just tell us they're not interested in attacking us. Reminding them of that fact in the same breath where we try and weasel another turn of NAP out of them might work in our favor, though I concede there might be a less snarky way to put it. OTOH, I also think speed is important, so we might want to have Scooter make an executive decision and go with that.

[regoarrarr]

I like where we're going here, but the thing that I worry about is kind of what Zargon just said - that they may not agree with us and they may not even tell us that (until they attack on T170). So unless we have something concrete from them where they agree with that interpretation, we kind of have to plan for a T170 attack anyways.

[novice]

I like where we're going here, but the thing that I worry about is kind of what Zargon just said - that they may not agree with us and they may not even tell us that (until they attack on T170). So unless we have something concrete from them where they agree with that interpretation, we kind of have to plan for a T170 attack anyways.

For sure. Delaying the attack would still be valuable though.

My draft wasn't really meant to be sent, btw. It was more an outline of what we could tell CivPlayers (and Apolyton!).