Rather than waste your time with BS, I am going to just lay it all out, starting with the bottom line and working backwards.
We can't be in an alliance with you right now, because we very recently made agreements with other teams, and forming an alliance with you will conflict with those agreements. Obviously I can't give you the details of the agreements with the other teams.
I would greatly, greatly prefer to be allied with you, first of all, because I know that your ability is bar-none and because, most importantly, as you say, I am much more confident that you will stick to the terms of an agreement that you enter into, instead of ditching it whenever it becomes convenient. As you can imagine, from your prior dealings with me, I made that argument mightily and thoroughly to my team, however, we met Sirius first and the team was worried that being sandwiched between two allies would make us an eventual easy target.
You know I like lists, so this is what went wrong:
1. I should have told my team from the beginning that I prefered to ally with you, but I did not want to 'poison the well' against other teams. I did not think it was fair to start off the game whining about how certain players had proven to be untrustworthy in the past. That was my fault
2. We met Sirius first, and you know how that goes... luck of the draw
3. Your location (next to us) made our team nervous... especially given that we had already met Sirius.
4. When we first arrived at Merlot's border, we sent a message to you almost immediately. This included a statement about getting some tech-trading, and other agreements going. At the time, we had no trade agreements with anyone, and it looked like you could very possibly be our ally. However, we got no response from you. This was in-part, because we neglected to send a PM with our letter, to make sure that it was recieved, and in-part because your email was different from what was posted in the UN. By the time I spotted the oversight, it was already late in the game, as so many things were happening so quickly.
5. What sealed it was the cold initial reception we got when we finally heard from you. Your message seemed so guarded, and disinterested in us that I interpreted that as a sign that you possibly already had an alliance in place, probably with your closest neighbor, which according to our intelligence at the time was CDZ. By the time we heard favorably from you, the wheels were already in motion, and agreements were already being entered into, and because of the agreements, the team had become prejudiced against Merlot... over my objections.
As you know, our team is a democracy, so we are bound by the results of polls and votes. In the end, concerns about location won out.
I agree with everything that you said. You are right about the advantages that Sirius and CDZ have, which will make them very dangerous as the game progresses. My advice to you is to try to contain CDZ and focus your efforts towards elimminating any threat they pose to you, rather than focusing on us. Obviously this is self-serving, because I don't want you to be focused on conflict with us... but I am still hopeful that we can become allies later if CDZ is made irrelevant... this will be impossible if we are having conflict with each other.
I don't know whether CDZ has the same high hopes for a relationship with you down the road. If they do, you will of course decide what is the best course of action for the benefit of your team.
That is as honest as I can be about the situation, good luck, and feel free to PM me anytime while I still have the green light to talk MTDg with you... Long live the King
Sommers