Diplomacy Central

[Paul#42]

Okay, I'll stick with sending flight with accept to GONG for now.
Please prepare a message that explains whether or not we want them to trade it to FREE.

And I'll ask SABER for Amphib along with the save. If we still don't want it, we can still decline next turn

I'll end the turn now.

 

[General_W]

Great letter to Saber requesting Amphibious War, Paul

Now there's just two outstanding letters we need to get finalized and mailed off I think…

#1: Version 2 of our counter-counter proposal to Saber:

Dear Saber (sorta) Allies,

The Council found your suggestion of a new tech plan to be both innovative and highly appealing.
We think it just needs a few rough areas ironed out – and we'd be ready to sign it.

Here's our counter-counter proposal…

We're calling it the "ExODAT" (Exchange On Demand Alliance of Technology)

Here's the rough draft:

--------------
Article 1: Nuclear Non Aggression

Saber and The Council both agree to never ever use a nuclear weapon on each other no matter what. Even the expiration of this treaty or war between The Council and Saber will not nullify this article.​

Article 2: Tech Plan

Any technology that either team researches will be available to the other team upon demand in exchange for any of the following:

1) Any single more expensive tech.
2) Any other Modern Age tech plus 50% of the difference in beaker cost.
3) 65% of the Monopoly Price in gold
​

Article 3: Exclusivity

* No modern era techs may be traded/sold/gifted outside of the alliance for any reason without express permission of the other team.
* This restriction continues to apply after the deal ends to any tech researched by the other team while the deal was in effect.
* No technology, from any era, will be traded/sold/gifted outside of the alliance to any team that is at war with either Saber or The Council​

--------------

We're looking forward to hearing back from you!
All the best,

Your favorite Allies
General_W, speaking with the voice of The Council

#2: Proposed note to GONG:

Dear PrinceMyshkin and all our Song & Dance friends,

As you'll see with the next save, The Council has voted against a Mutual Protection Pact at this time. This issue isn't totally dead over here – we just believe that any deal like that is a little premature.

However – we DO have some good news.
The Council has voted to send an emergency aid package to you, consisting of a few Council scientists, and all the drawings and technical schematics that you should need to make your very own Fighter Planes and Bombers.
We hope this is of great use to you in fighting the good fight against the invaders.
Flight is yours, no strings attached. (except for our earnest hope for some good-will with your people).

We're also seriously considering gifting Motorized Transport to you (tanks)… but some Councilors believe that before we go this far, we need to structure the deal as a trade. What we'd like to propose is this – if you'll give us your word to research Advanced Flight before you tackle any techs in the Modern Age, and then gift it to us upon discovery… we'll give you Motorized Transport next turn.

You'll be free to trade MotorTransport around, if you wish – and Advanced Flight will give you even more tools to work with against FREE.
Not to mention, getting MotorTransport right away could make a big difference in your survival!

Interested?

Let us know!

All the best,
General_W, speaking with the voice of The Council

Thoughts on both of these?

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I'm actually thinking that techs wont' help GONG - they need military action, I fear.

I think we have 3 choices:

1) Do nothing, see what happens. I think FREE may end up rolling GONG, though, with all the tanks. It sounds like GONG is fighting hard, but may be overmatched.
2) Break our treaty with FREE and give GONG support. Given earlier events, this may be a serious problem and I think we would have to talk to BABE/SABER and see how they would react to it.
3) Attack GONG ourselves and take some of their cities to keep FREE from dominating that continent. This would likely be pretty easy for our forces, especially if we are able to do it later, when more GONG cities are gone.

I don't honestly know which of these is the right choice - I'm not all that excited to attack GONG - I suspect it will make us a target for FREE after GONG is finished off - and I'm not excited at ALL to break a treaty, especially with what happened with BABE.

On looking at the treaty in our Vault, I think that we are under no obligation to wait 15 turns. We never did sign a MAAP III and the MAAP II treaty naturally expired after we exchanged IA techs, so if we wanted, we could provide immediate help to GONG.

 

[General_W]

I think we have 3 choices:

1) Do nothing, see what happens. I think FREE may end up rolling GONG, though, with all the tanks. It sounds like GONG is fighting hard, but may be overmatched.
2) Break our treaty with FREE and give GONG support. Given earlier events, this may be a serious problem and I think we would have to talk to BABE/SABER and see how they would react to it.
3) Attack GONG ourselves and take some of their cities to keep FREE from dominating that continent. This would likely be pretty easy for our forces, especially if we are able to do it later, when more GONG cities are gone.

I think you forgot option #4 … Give GONG a bunch of technology and hope for the best

GONG is in trouble… but they're doing surprisingly well, all things considered. I don't think we should rule out technological help (combined with homefield advantage, combined with gold aid from Saber, combined with who-knows-what from BABE) as a potentially winning combination for GONG.
Besides… we don't want them to clobber FREE… we want a long conflict with no outright winner or loser.

On looking at the treaty in our Vault, I think that we are under no obligation to wait 15 turns.

I'm not sure how you're getting that?
Our MAAP II treaty really clearly states that the "15 turns notice of intent to cancel" clause only goes into effect AFTER we swap Industrial era techs. So it seems kinda weak to say it expired with our exchange of Industrial era techs!

This rather flimsy argument should only be used as a worse-case, last ditch, attack FREE without notice or lose the game type effort, imo. And even then, we'd need to vote to see if everyone is comfortable with something like that.
EDIT: in fact, our original MAAP treaty with FREE expressly calls our peace treaty "indefinite" and one that can "only be canceled by 15 turns notice"

I agree with you – we don't have any excellent options here… but I think our current course of giving technology aid to GONG is the best of our options.

Maybe we could send GONG a screenshot or two of what we can see of FREE's fleet? Or is it all within sight range of GONG anyway?


Here's the newest letter we just received from GONG:

Dear General_W,
Respected Ambassador of the Council,

We are glad to hear the Council is discussing matters. You've an interesting form of government. We're quite informal here and teammates give input and help often, but are satisfied with me doing the work. I'm trying to recruit ambassadors, but no takers so far.

We've also received a communication from Saber expressing desire to know if our luxury trades might be threatened. This is impossible over the next few turns, but if our trade does become threatened we will let you know. Otherwise, we will respond only when we hear from you and be happy to provide any answers to questions you may have. We'll continue to send the accepted MPP offer each turn while you discuss matters unless your team wishes that we do not. We've other proposals, but will to hear from you first.

Thanks for the encouragement.

Best Regards,
PrinceMyshkin
Team Gong

Thoughts?

 

[Niklas]

Actually, the original MAAP states that peace will last "indefinitely" between us, and can only be cancelled with 15 turns notice, but only after swapping the MA bonus techs. MAAP II only extends that to after swapping the IA bonus techs, but the "indefinite" part certainly still holds.

 

[General_W]

Nice catch Niklas - you x-posted with my edit above! Too fast for me

I don't think attacking FREE should even be on the table for us right now... for many reasons.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

thanks guys!! I didn't read the treaties very carefully - sorry about that

I don't know that GONG can hold out indefinitely against FREE - they are clearly whipping hard. Having all the culture helps, cause it slows down the FREE advances - but I wish there was a way we could help them more. Could we send some cash, to let them upgrade MDI's, etc?

or, we could make a bunch of workers and send them, to help them whip, I suppose. Probably not, though. And, we could, conceivably, send a set of horses over to block attack routes, make it harder for FREE to take GONG out.

In response, how about something like:

"We are quite interested in helping you as we can - the main impediment is that we have a peace treaty with FREE that requires 15 turns notice to break and an MPP would cause us to declare on them, thus we would be breaking the treaty.

May we inquire as to just how many FREE units you have managed to kill? We are very impressed with the damage you are doing to them!!!"

 

[General_W]

I'd be open to that.
Does one of our MM-experts want to throw out a number that we could part with?

Advanced Flight is a more expensive tech than MotorTransport (5400 vs. 4200) - so we could certainly offer them some gold as a part of that deal.
300-400 maybe?

 

[donsig]

I guess that's what is confusing me… How can we give them Motor Transport if they lack Scientific Method – and by extension Atomic Theory and Electronics?
The question isn't really, "should we gift GONG Motor Transport… it's "Should we gift them Scientific Method, Atomic Theory, Electronics, and Motor Transport"!!

General you've got to quit looking at the tech tree. You did the same thing when we were drafting SCIAA.

@Aigburth – Thank You! I figured I must be missing something.
Hmmm… maybe it would be worth it to give GONG MotorTransport then… and in that case, we can ask them to get Advanced Flight for us

But advanced flight does require atomic theory and electronics and motorized transportation and flight.

EDIT: Why don't we send FREE our 15 turn notice now? This doesn't have to mean we are going to declare war on FREE in 15 turns. We can tie it to our public list of threats that we'll advertise will give us the right to declare war regardless of any treaty we've previously signed. We can say our notice to FREE is just to avoid any possible misunderstandings like we had with BABE so long ago. The gist of the idea is that we separate the MAAP peace clause(s) from the in-game state of peace we have with FREE. BTW, I think we should do the same with SABER. Let's face it, if it looks as though we will be invaded we need to strike first as we did with BABE. We should not tie our hands with treaties we do not want to live up to because they leave us vulnerable. FREE did not give GONG ten or fifteen turns notice of their attack. If FREE or SABER decide they need to attack us I doubt either will let MAAP or SCIAA stop them. This would be a good time to try to get both FREE and SABER in on a nuclear non-proliferation treaty, complete with a clause about attacking the rogue civ that decides to build the Manhattan Project.

EDIT 2: Shouldn't we stipulate that in article two of the SABER proposal that monopoly beaker cost is always to be used to determine the cost of techs? In article one are we willing to agree not to build Manhattan if SABER makes a similar promise?

 

[Paul#42]

war participation
I'm strongly against actively taking part in the war between GONG and FREE.
We witnessed how hard even a strong invasion force can be hit and we are in no position to do more than a little distraction to the forces there (unless we want to neglect home defense).
We would have trouble to defend our SCI. 11tilers are hard to defend in this game. And losing rubber could be a major setback to our space plans.

I see no sense in attacking GONG. We don't need the land and we won't be able to protect it later, especially with FREE being the main power there.
I see no sense in attacking FREE, that might hurt our different aims.
We have still to put together our home defense.
And even if they should finally succeed, this draws SABER closer to us.

I see most sense in supporting GONG to keep FREE busy and the war expensive (both units and happiness effort) for them.

I'd also not cancel the peace with FREE. Even if we don't dow then, it is kind of an agressive act.
It might however be usefull to make FREE focus on home defense rather than war in GONG land - but just in 14 turns.
If they should violate our defense guidelines (to be announced), we can dow them independent from the peace treaty.

GONG research
If we ask GONG to research Advanced Flight, we should also supply them with all needed technology, essentially sending them (and BABE) to Modern Times. Do we want that?

They got different priorities now and when FREE finally leaves them alone, they won't have too much power to get Advanced Flight in a decent time for us... I'd guess they'd take 50 turns from the moment they got all prerequisite techs...

I do not think that makes much sense.

If we want to help them further, we should gift tanks, maybe along with the restriction not to pass it to BABE.
BABE however would be the better partner to research Advanced Flight for us. Not sure if this is a good idea.
If we really want it, we can do it in four turns when we need to slow down research due to money problems anyway...

 

[Niklas]

If they should violate our defense guidelines (to be announced), we can dow them independent from the peace treaty.

I think this is a very sensible statement. Our defense should be primarily based on two things - technologically superior forces, and most importantly diplomacy. And an important part of the latter is to clearly state what we consider an aggressive act - transports within dropping distance of our coasts, as well as carriers within bombing distance. We should publish our defense guidelines as soon as possible.

I'm also strongly against any action against FREE. Our best chance to win this game is if we can avoid being attacked altogether, but the second best chance is to beat off an invasion, presumably with help from another team not wanting to see us conquered by a rival. And we don't want to burn any bridges, since we don't know who the potential aggressor is.

 

[tomasjj]

Diplomatic priorities as I see it:
Simplified:

1. Keep Saber in the fold for a while.
2. Do not provoke FREE.
3. Help GONG resist the FREE invasion.


Oh...and build some units asap....

 

[donsig]

GONG has the save so we should send our note to them now. Instead of advanced flight let's ask them to research espionage.

 

[donsig]

* Computers (7800)
* Miniaturization (9600)
* Recycling (7200)
* Nuclear Power (8400)
* Satellites (7800)
* The Laser (8400)
* Robotics (9600)
* Genetics (9,600)
* Rocketry (7200)
* Ecology (7800)
* Synth Fibers (8400)
* Space Flight (9000)
* Superconductor (9000)
* Stealth (9000)
* Smart Weapons (8400)
* Integrated Defense (10,800)

So, in a few turns we'll have fission, computers and miniaturization. SABER will have fission and rocketry. What could happen under the proposed agreement?

• Could SABER demand miniaturization for rocketry and over 1200g? Reading the agreement one would think so but they wouldn't have computers yet. I doubt the agreement would oblige us to hand over computers for free, but should we clarify this type of situation in the agreement?
• Would we demand rocketry from SABER? If we did, would we choose the payment? If so, what would we give them? Computers is cheapest but why give them mech infantry so fast? Do we research ecology first and give them that for rocketry? (That puts them a step closer to modern armor.) Do we research ecology then recycling so we can trade them even beakers?
• If we do get rocketry from SABER what would we research next? Do we choose something we need for the SS or something we need to trade to SABER later? Remember, we'd probably have to wait on SABER to send rocketry.
• Do we just research rocketry ourselves?

These are the kinds of questions we must ask ourselves before agreeing to SABER's proposal.

 

[Paul#42]

Could SABER demand miniaturization for rocketry and over 1200g? Reading the agreement one would think so but they wouldn't have computers yet. I doubt the agreement would oblige us to hand over computers for free, but should we clarify this type of situation in the agreement?

Keep it simple. If they make such a demand we could say: "We would but we can't. You'll have to demand computers first..."
That's a valid reaction imo.

Would we demand rocketry from SABER? If we did, would we choose the payment? If so, what would we give them? Computers is cheapest but why give them mech infantry so fast? Do we research ecology first and give them that for rocketry? (That puts them a step closer to modern armor.) Do we research ecology then recycling so we can trade them even beakers?

Good point. This demand-a-tech stuff might lead into some trouble...

If we do get rocketry from SABER what would we research next? Do we choose something we need for the SS or something we need to trade to SABER later? Remember, we'd probably have to wait on SABER to send rocketry.

That depends on our strategy imo. I'd like to get nuclear plants soon to make quicker (and cleaner ) military builds in some of our cities.

Do we just research rocketry ourselves?

Now that really spoils the spirit of the deal.
If it turns out that way, we've certainly signed the wrong deal...

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I think the idea of the deal is for both sides to be able to abandon it at some point because of the space race. I really wouldn't worry about a demand for miniaturization while they don't have computers.

Rocketry, btw, gives them TOW infantry, which are nearly as good as mechs.

 

[General_W]

GONG's got the save - we've got to send something to them asap.
Here's what I'm going to send in the next hour, if no one screams...

Dear PrinceMyshkin and all our Song & Dance friends,

As you'll see with the next save, The Council has voted against a Mutual Protection Pact at this time. This issue isn't totally dead over here – we just believe that any deal like that is a little premature.

However – we DO have some good news.
The Council has voted to send an emergency aid package to you, consisting of a few Council scientists, and all the drawings and technical schematics that you should need to make your very own Fighter Planes and Bombers.
We hope this is of great use to you in fighting the good fight against the invaders.
Flight is yours, no strings attached. (except for our earnest hope for some good-will with your people).

We're also seriously considering gifting Motorized Transport to you (tanks)… but some Councilors believe that before we go this far, we need to structure the deal as a trade. What we'd like to propose is this – if you'll give us your word to research either Espionage or Advanced Flight before you tackle any techs in the Modern Age, and then gift it to us upon discovery… we'll give you Motorized Transport next turn.

You'll be free to trade MotorTransport around, if you wish.
If you choose Espionage, we just ask that you promise to NOT trade it to anyone else.

Interested?

Let us know!

All the best,
General_W, speaking with the voice of The Council

EDIT: SENT! To GONG gmail and to PrinceMyshkin via PM

 

[peter grimes]

I'm fine with this letter, but I thought that somebody pointed out that Advanced Flight would require a few Modern techs.... implication being that the wording of the letter is off

 

[General_W]

ok - I'm sending it off now.

@Peter - you're right that Advanced Flight will require GONG to also get Atomic Theory & Electronics. But they'll need both of those techs to advance to the Modern Era anyway... not just to get Advanced Flight.

There were many Councilors (myself included) that are fine with giving GONG Motor Transport... but are a little leery of giving them anything more.

I think the letter works, as is.
And discussion on it is now over anyway

I think it's VERY likely that GONG will choose espionage (or to not trade at all)... but if they DO choose Advanced Flight, I suppose we can keep talking about giving them even more techs to speed up their time to get it.

The most pressing matter now is our response letter to Saber.
Any comments on Version 2?

 

[Niklas]

It would require quite a few Industrial techs, not Modern.

Though I think we should pull AdvFlight from the letter altogether, since it would invariably lead to questions about how they would get up there.