RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Peter of Byzantium

[regoarrarr]

Chariot from scratch

Axe with hammers invested, overflowed into another axe

[darrelljs]

Since the sandbox no longer precisely matches the game, its usefulness is on the wane. For example, some of the tile juggling might not be necessary. I'll log into the game to correlate the two every turn (or so), and post course corrections as needed.

@regoarrarr - Is there any way to verify that the whip was not military in nature. Sunrise was probably kidding but I remain paranoid. Actually, can we tell what they are doing with their EPs? I can't recall if espionage is off for this game...

Darrell

[regoarrarr]

It's time to play this morning's edition of Good news Bad news. To mix things up, we'll start with the good news:

Good news: Nobody has declared war on us

Bad news: Our power is (tied for) last and both the Ottomans and Incans have enough EP on us to see our demographics.

Here is a note from Kalin - they want compensation.

Hello Byzantines,

Well, I have been away for a week so I had a lot of catchup to do, and also needed to consider how to deal with your settlement. We decided as you saw to negotiate some compensation... Speaking of which...


ME: As far as compensation, we are happy to try and work something out with you, but are unsure as to what exactly you are looking for. We are happy to cede all further lands to the south and east to you (i.e. we will agree to not settle any further towards your lands). You have probably already seen the copper that is to the south of Paris - that would seem to make a good spot if you don't have copper any closer to your lands.


That's not much of a concession to be honest. It's a bit like us ceding the lands south of your capital. We are thinking about settling around that copper and we would also like the area SW of Paris.

ME: In addition we would be happy to send you a missionary or two to spread the "One True Faith" of Buddhism to your lands, should the glad tidings not make it your way naturally.


That's a mutually beneficial deal, so again not much of a compensation. Maybe you can throw in some units as well?

ME: If you are interested, we would be interested in exploring a longer-term NAP with you to assure you that we are planning on using our Copper elsewhere.


I think we both want to avoid an early war that would most likely end up hurting us both. However, before we discuss a NAP I would like us to agree on the compensation as well as some reasonable partition of the land between us.

Kalin of the Ottomans

[regoarrarr]

Another chaser to IKZ - I got worried about their quechua hanging out on the road between Athens and Paris

Hey IKZ,

I don't mean to be pushy here. I understand that real life happens and can cause delays and such, especially coming off of a holiday weekend. I also understand that when you're playing with multiple people on a team, sometimes it can be difficult to reach consensus on what exactly you want to say to other teams.

But.... (you knew there'd have to be a but, right?) :-), we have some people on our team that have whipped themselves up into quite a paranoia-induced frenzy.

Your quechua has seen the location of our 2nd city. As you might imagine, the Ottomans are not really excited about its location. They have declared peaceful intentions, but your quechua sitting on our road tile near our borders has some folks on our team a bit worried.

We're not ordering it to leave, nor really even asking it to leave, but if you could make us feel better with regards to your intentions, that would make some folks here breathe a lot easier. We remain very interested, as we have said before, with a longer-term NAP with your civ - we feel that our 2 civs are ideal allies, since we don't really border each other, and yet share some of the same neighbors.

To my mind, it seems that this is probably a non-issue. Even if you were not interested in a closer long-term relationship with us Byzantines, I can't think that you would want to make one of your direct neighbors (Ottomans) stronger by aiding them in hurting us (if they are even planning such a thing). But we have some worriers on our team, and hearing from you would let me make them sleep better at night :-)

Hope to hear from you soon

[regoarrarr]

Turn 52
Tech: Priesthood -> Archery
Athens: Worker -> Warrior
Worker #3: Move east of Wheat

Surely this should be Worker -> Oracle?

[darrelljs]

Surely this should be Worker -> Oracle?

Yup .

Darrell

[regoarrarr]

Any thoughts on what we should say back to the Ottomans?

My initial thoughts were something along the lines of well give us what you want? We offered something, you didn't like it, now it's on you.

It sounds like they vaguely want more land and some units as compensation.

How willing are we to give them the lands SW of Paris that they wanted for? If we take the sugar / copper site on the river (say 2W of the copper, which is more directly W of Paris), would we be okay with them taking lands south of that? Or would we want to potentially expand further south?

Here's a pic for reference

[regoarrarr]

A few more thoughts, as I reply to myself.

* It is probably in our best interests to stall and slow things down. Their biggest advantage is NOW, when we are last in power and have 3 warriors for defense. The longer that we can stall them, the more time it gives us to build up our defenses, allowing us to eventually reach a point where if we don't like the deal we've come up with, we can just tell them to stick it.

* It probably doesn't hurt us long-term to have them settling to the SW of Paris. #1 - will they really settle so far? #2 - if they are going to be the primary target of Operation Cataphract (and they're looking more and more likely with their -1 malus for "You have made an arrogant demand"), then let them settle far-flung cities that will be easy for us to capture.

[darrelljs]

Units? They want fricking units? How about a Kontos up the <expletive> ? Okay...now that I got that off my chest, its actually a fairly reasonable request from their end. Without tech trading their is not much else we can offer as compensation.

I guess there are two ways to go about this. We could try the North Korean approach, enter into protracted negotiations that last until we get Copper, then take an unreasonably hard line to end the talks. That leaves us in a cold war until we can get to Cataphracts. Then we have a hot war. Alternatively we could actually try and reach a deal. Say a couple of units for a 100 turn NAP with a 10 turn cancelation notice, and a clause that if they declare war on us they have to return the units. Perhaps a second clause that if someone else declares war on us, we have the option of "borrowing" the units until the end of hostilities? Delivery of units would be at a later date of course, we can't give them our first two. Even if we do negotiate in good faith, we want to take as long as we can in case things break down from THEIR side! Since they have brought division of land into the equation, it should not be that hard.

Actually, now that I think about it some more, we are Expansive. Maybe open up by offering a Worker on turn 100 and all land east of the Deer. I think we should definitely mention that we feel boxed in, and that with Mortius eliminated they should have lots of room to expand into.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

Crosspost .

I definitely don't want to see them settling W of Paris at all. They can have the site to the S, but the site to the SW should be ours.

Darrell