Diplomacy Log: Realms Beyond

[Caledorn]

This thread is for archiving incoming and outgoing diplomatic messages between our team and Realms Beyond.

Please do not post in this thread unless you are the Ambassador to Realms Beyond

Use this thread for discussing the foreign policy and messages that concerns Realms Beyond.

The current Ambassador to Realms Beyond is: Caledorn

 

[Caledorn]

Message sent to RB 07.09.2012

Greetings to Team RB from Team CFC

We are happy to make first contact with your team, and we are also happy to see that we are neighbours, as we consider you one of the strongest teams in the game. You are the first team we have met, and for now the only team we have contact with.

There was some harsh words between some of our team members in the preliminary planning of the ISDG, but that will not effect our attitude towards your team at all in this game. The planning of a game on the scale of the ISDG is expected to have some heated discussions, especially between the more experienced players. To get off on the right foot, we would like to propose a simple NAP until turn 100, to establish goodwill between our teams. This will give us ample time to build up trust and more formal agreements on going forward.

Finally, to get relations going in the right direction, we would like to hear if your team has any preliminary thoughts on setting a border between our teams.

We will follow up in a few days with some info sharing once this is discussed within the team.

Caledorn, on behalf of Team CFC

 

[Caledorn]

Message received from RB 07.09.2012

Team CFC:

Meeting Team CFC in this wilderness is a stroke of pure luck. We too are happy to see you so close. As you have freely volunteered contact information, we feel honour bound to return the favour. You are our first and only contact.

"harsh words" - bah, I don't remember any harsh words. Even if there were some ... they were just friendly discussions regarding game set up and are long forgotten. We are here to play a nice and fun game of Civ to the best of our ability.

We accept your offer of a NAP until turn 100 (which we take to mean the NAP expires at the beginning of turn 100). The term "NAP" is thrown around a lot in these games but rarely defined. For now, we will assume the narrowest definition: no actions which would cause war to be declared in-game (i.e., attacking units or violating borders).

We hope your warrior hasn't had too much trouble reaching us. We saw a lion on the tile one west of your warrior on turn 26, and there have been both lions and panthers prowling our borders.

Team RB

 

[Caledorn]

Message sent to RB 09.09.2012

With a NAP in place, we hope that we now have a foundation to build further agreements between our two teams. We agree with the interpretation of the NAP as you've suggested it, but would like to initiate discussions on how we can strengthen this agreement. We consider defining a border between our teams one of the most important short term goals we should come to an agreement upon. Our intention is to focus on settling productive cities in our home region, and not to settle provocative "pink dot" cities in your direction. In order to avoid settlement races and possible conflicting cities we'd like to share geographical information between our teams and discussing settlement plans in the land between our two nations.

On that note, we do not know how much your team has explored, but 9-East and 2-South of Adventure One is an Oasis that is equal distance from each of our capitals. As a suggestion for an initial border agreement, we propose that we will not settle West of the Oasis, and you will not settle East of the Oasis. The bottom line in our suggestion is that we talk openly with one another about settling in each others direction. What are your thoughts on this?

Also, please be advised that there is both a bear and a lion roaming just southeast of where our scouting warrior is currently located. The bear has disappeared into the fog for now, but the lion is clearly visible 1-East and 2-South of where our warrior is currently standing.

Caledorn, on behalf of Team CFC

 

[Caledorn]

Message received from RB 11.09.2012

Team CFC,

We are all very happy about the NAP agreement, and we're generally on the same page with you on the border discussions as well. I would describe our feelings as being strongly in favor of avoiding aggressive settlements. We have no interest in "pink dotting" your team, and we're glad you feel the same.

That said, we would like to wait until we have a little bit more map info before we get into specific details on the agreement. We have yet to uncover the oasis for example, so we have not had the chance to see the land between us. As a general rule, we try not to make specific border agreements on land we haven't seen, so we're just trying to exercise caution here. How about we agree to avoid aggressive settlements, tentatively agree in pencil to the oasis arrangement, and agree to revisit this in 20-30 turns when we should have better map information? We would really like working with your team, so please do understand that we're very motivated to work something out once we know more.

scooter
Team RB

 

[Caledorn]

Message sent to RB 14.09.2012

Hi scooter/RB,

Thanks for your response. We've had a chat and we respect that you don't want to commit 100% to a border agreement before you've seen the land for yourself. We're in agreement not to settle aggressively - for us that means neither team settling past the oasis. Let's revisit the specifics when you've had the chance to explore more.

We would really like working with your team too, so we look forward to hearing from you when you've had a look around. Good luck with your scouting endeavors!

Caledorn, on behalf of Team CFC

 

[Caledorn]

Message received from RB 15.09.2012

Originally Posted by Team RB
Caledorn,

Thanks for the quick response, much appreciated. Thanks for bearing with us. My teammates who watch Civstats more than me tell me that you guys settled a new city, so congrats on that . Given that it was about 4 months ago that we first started planning this game, it feels really nice to see cities start to pop up!

By the way, if a faster answer from us is ever a necessity, you can always feel free to grab me on chat. I'm not in our RB account all day since I have forwarding set up to receive the mail, but I do have a Gmail account I use frequently for other games at RB, and I'm logged into that pretty often. If you want to add me to your chat window, I'm realmsbeyondscooter@gmail.com. Also, would you guys be interested in agreeing to notify each other once we meet other players? Seems like it'd be a good idea to pool knowledge on our surroundings. Just throwing out ideas, I'm open to suggestions too.

Thanks!
scooter
Team RB

 

[Caledorn]

Message sent to RB 18.09.2012

Hi scooter/RB

Thank you for the congratulations on the new city we indeed have built, and likewise congratulations to your team for your new city as well.

As you already know, I have sent you an invitation to GTalk using the gmail you provided. If there's something you need a quick response to you are welcome to poke me there. I'm using an Android phone, so I should be available there (as long as I'm not asleep of course) even if I'm not near my computer.

We agree with your proposal that we notify each other when we meet other teams. Our suggestion, to get a clearly defined agreement, is that when one of our teams meet a new team we notify one another what team we met, the turn we met them, and in what direction they are (thus making it easier for each other to meet up with those teams).

As you've probably figured out from our warrior movements, we intend to explore northwards next. We'll be crossing a patch of open terrain next turn and wanted to ask if you had seen any barbarians or animals in the area? Have you explored much in this direction? As we're going to notify each other about contact with other teams, we think it would make sense for us to send our scouting units in different directions. What's your thoughts on this?

We have been doing some speculations about the map, based on what we have seen so far in our scouting, and we're wondering if you have come up with some speculations? We definitely agree that it would be a good idea if we pool together knowledge on our surroundings. If we do this we may both be able to explore more efficiently, as well as figure out a pattern to where the other teams are so we can discover their whereabouts as quickly as possible.

Caledorn, on behalf of Team CFC

 

[Caledorn]

GTalk chat transcript 18.09.2012

realmsbeyondscooter: FYI - message received and acknowledged. team will chat about it and all that

me: Thanks

realmsbeyondscooter: we'll definitely get you an answer on the barb thing. I don't think we've seen any in that area, but I posed the question to the guys who login more often. hopefully I'll hear something soon

realmsbeyondscooter: well, there was a couple panthers, but we defended against them and won so they're gone

realmsbeyondscooter: we also had some map guessing talk earlier in our forum. I'll have to track that down

me: Great I hope your team approves of sharing a bit.

realmsbeyondscooter: yeah. unfortunately we lost our scout to a bad dice roll barb attack so that is why our scouting info is lacking. has your barb luck been any better?

me: Ah, that makes sense in relation to the fact you guys haven't seen the oasis yet. We have taken out a couple of animals, and courageously run away from a few like Goldilocks did (that post in the public thread cracked me up btw! Great post!)

me: Thankfully we haven't lost any units, and our inital scout is the warrior who is near you guys

realmsbeyondscooter: Hah, yeah that was a fun post. after our poor scout died we didn't want that happening again!

realmsbeyondscooter: but yeah, that's why we unfortunately don't have as much info as you guys

realmsbeyondscooter: after losing it we focused on the land around us

realmsbeyondscooter: you guys seen much water? we've seen some, but not a lot... but some people on our team seem to think there'll be more out there

me: Yeah, makes perfect sense. We'd have done the same thing

me: No, we haven't seen much water at all. There is a salt water body which you'll discover just south of the oasis. Other than that just some tiny lakes here and there

realmsbeyondscooter: yeah that sounds similar to us. some minor saltwater sea to our west, but other than that, all land

realmsbeyondscooter: I think it's saltwater.

realmsbeyondscooter: Anyways, getting late in this part of the world, so I'm going to call it a night. We'll try to get an official response back to you guys soon.

me: That's interesting considering that salt water I'm talking about is to our west as well. I'll let the team map speculators know I'm sure they'll love speculating further with that info

realmsbeyondscooter: Interesting, wonder if we both have similar surroundings.

me: And okay, sleep well then I've been up all night. Completely botched sleep schedules

realmsbeyondscooter: hah! thanks, I'll talk to you later

 

[Caledorn]

Message received from RB 19.09.2012

Caledorn,

First things first, I checked on the barb thing for you guys. We've seen a couple panthers roaming around to our northwest, but that's further from you guys. There was one north of your warrior, but it's dead now and won't be bothering you anytime soon . Supposedly real barb units should start appearing soon though, so take caution to land on defensive terrain. Assuming you are still 1N of the pigs (you were as of the most recent screenshot I was shown), you can go E-NE-NW-NE. Your first move will be flat ground and will be the one risk, but after that it's all forests and/or hills. That should put you into a patch of forests/jungles, so you should be safe for awhile after that.

We agree with your suggestion to better define the agreement on meeting other teams. I'll be sure to let you know if we meet anyone, and I'll include the info on which team, direction, turn number, etc. Hopefully between our two teams we can chart the rough map shape and where everybody is at pretty quickly.

As I said last night, our map info is a bit light, so our speculation has been limited so far on map setup. We do suspect there is a fair amount of water out there, but it seems likely to be a land-dominated map overall. Your comment on the saltwater body was interesting, I'm wondering myself if there's some mild mirroring going on for everyone's starts. Have you seen any signs of explicit terrain mirroring with the land south of us and the land south of you?

Thanks,
scooter
Team RB

 

[Caledorn]

Message sent to RB 25.09.12

Thank you for your advice in regards to the barbarians. As we discussed on GTalk, we moved a different route with our warrior than the one you suggested, but our warrior has left your borders behind now. Our goal was, as I told you, to move the quickest and most efficient path out of your lands so we can continue exploring northwards.

Our exploration has so far revealed far more land than water, so the area we are in seems to be dominated by land. We are uncertain about the size of the salt water body that I mentioned in our chat about the map, as we haven't explored the southern part of it yet. It may turn out to be a fjord-like body of water connected to an ocean, or it may just be a large inland saltwater sea.

In regards to your question about explicit terrain mirroring, we have not seen signs of that. However, the general terrain seems pretty similar, although distributed differently, so there is definitely a mild mirroring present (at least for our two teams starts) as you suggest. It is highly likely that we will see that the other teams have pretty similar starts, with some variations of course.

In our early explorations we discovered a mountainrange in our east that looks somewhat similar to the mountains that are southeast of your lands. Have you seen any more of these little mountainranges?

Caledorn, on behalf of Team CFC

 

[Caledorn]

Message received from RB 01.10.12

Caledorn,

Thanks so much for the map clarifications . We'll be sure to catch up with you sometime in the future to pool further map knowledge once we both know more. Hopefully we can start meeting other teams and put together a big picture layout of where each team is.

That's the only real mountain range we've seen - that one SE of us. We do have 2 peaks to the south of us that are directly adjacent to each other horizontally, but it's not like the one SE of us at all. Let me know if you have any more questions, and I'll be happy to do what I can.

Thanks,
scooter

 

[Caledorn]

Message sent to RB 08.10.2012

scooter/RB,

Thank you for your information in regards to the mountains, and we're looking forward to when you guys have explored a bit more so we can pool even more information.

In accordance with our treaty, we want to let you know that we met Team WPC this turn (t46), and that you can meet them by sending a unit directly NE from your gold mine. At the moment there is 7 tiles from the very NE tip of your borders until you should reach their border, directly NE (moving 9 all the time). The only interesting feature worth mentioning about the land between your borders seems to be some dyes a few tiles away from WPCs borders.

Caledorn, on behalf of Team CFC

 

[cav scout]

TMI. We need to resist the urge to play this like the last MTDG where we were in effectively a permanent alliance for the first half of the game.

Yes talking is fun and all but RB is our rival... I don't think we need to make them party to all of our diplomatic efforts with other teams.

Oops...didn't realize I was posting in the log thread (why is a draft here?). Perhaps Dave or another mod can move this post....

 

[Caledorn]

Message received from RB 11.10.2012

Caledorn/CFC,

First off, sorry for the delay! Our forums at RB are having some major technical difficulties right now. I had a draft response to you saved on our internal forums, and I was about to send it when the forums went down, and they've been down close to 2 days now. The problem is pretty significant, so we're still trying to export the forums right now. Today someone created a temporary forum for us, and we're in the process of setting up a place for us to discuss. Hopefully we can restore our old forums sometime soon. In the meantime, I'll try to rewrite the draft I had for you guys as best as I can.

Thanks so much for the notification of meeting WPC. If you could give them directions on how to reach us too, that would be wonderful. Do you have much of a read on these guys? I personally don't really know them at all, but I believe a few members of my team have at least heard of their forums before.

Thanks!
scooter

 

[Caledorn]

Message sent to RB 30.10.2012

scooter/RB,

Congratulations on founding Hinduism and completing the Stonehenge. We hope your forums are back up and running smoothly, and that your team is fully back in business again.

Luckily, we can report that our relationships with WPC have been established smoothly, considering their scary UU that can be built without the need for any strategic resource. They have shared some info about their surroundings, which seems similar to ours based on their descriptions.

We met Team Spanish Apolyton on turn 54, and they are located east of our lands, so quite a distance away for you to travel if you want to go eastwards to meet them. As we do not yet know how the toroidal map wraps, they may be the team that are located west of you though, so we hope you can scout westwards of your lands to see what team may be located there. If you actively want to scout for the Spanish team, you should go a bit south of where we met you (like 8 tiles or so) and directly west.

We have also met a warrior from Team UCiv in the middle of the wilderness this turn (T56) - we will get back to you as soon as we have gotten in touch with them and know more.

Caledorn, on behalf of Team CFC

 

[Caledorn]

GTalk Transcript 30.10.2012

me: You have mail

realmsbeyondscooter:
thanks! got it
wait, I'm a little confused if you don't mind clarifying something
so you are southeast of us, and Spanish apolyton are east of you, correct?
Oh, I think I understand the geography now, just had to re-read it a little more carefully
I'll post the message for my team and try to get a message back to you within a couple days. I'm hoping the German team will respond to our email sometime - no word from them yet.

me: Oh, sorry. I'm sitting with my headset on, so didn't hear the sound from the phone

realmsbeyondscooter: oh no it's fine

me: Your assessment is correct. We are southeast of you, while SPAP might be either to your direct west, or slightly southwest

realmsbeyondscooter: ok, thanks! we obviously have a lot of work to do to meet everyone

me: It seems that we are played out as a chessboard perhaps, with a team on A1, C3, E5, A5, E1 and so forth

realmsbeyondscooter: and thanks for the congrats on stonehenge. now we just gotta make sure we don't get too many prophets . one is always useful, but too many can be a hassle
yeah that would make a lot of sense

me: Good point on that. If I may be so bold: Did the centering of the map reveal anything useful that we can use in the map theorizing department?

realmsbeyondscooter: let me take a look at our forums. I think somebody posted a screenshot of it once we centered the map, but I don't remember off-hand what it looked like

me: Great, thanks

realmsbeyondscooter: Hm, well it's hard to say with our lack of map knowledge
we appear to be close to the equator in the west side
probably in the southwest quadrant if you divide it into 4ths

me: Well, that's definitely something I'm sure the map theorizers will appreciate to hear. With the chessboard theory that seems likely, we only need to know whether SPAP is your western neighbors now and we have the map figured out I think?

realmsbeyondscooter: yeah that would be good. maybe between our teams we can plot out a rough placement of where everybody is in paint or something

me: I was thinking something along the same lines.

realmsbeyondscooter: hopefully we can confirm for you soon where the German team is. not sure why we haven't heard back from them yet

me: You haven't heard anything from them? O.o

realmsbeyondscooter: nope. it's been a few days now.
I'm not sure if it's a language thing or they aren't checking their email or what

me: Gee.. That's not going to make them any friends if they spend days with initial diplomacy..

realmsbeyondscooter: we do have a German team member if need be, but they haven't even responded at all yet so who knows what's going on
yeah, agreed.
Anyways, if we can get their location to you, maybe you could share with us your guesses on where everyone is.
i've got the rough idea from talking to you. looks like WPC to your north and our norhteast

me: Correct

realmsbeyondscooter: spanish team to your east, possibly our southwest. german team possibly to our north, though we don't know for sure yet
any signs of true oceans? or just big lakes?

me: I am not sure if the Spanish are directly to our east, or if we have encountered a southwestern colony. Logic dictates the latter

realmsbeyondscooter: ah I see. you found a city of theirs?

me: Yes, although we can't see the actual city. We arrived at one of their borders

realmsbeyondscooter: ah I see
worried about them at all? Boudica as a neighbor can easily make one nervous

me: Weeeelll.. The Impis doesn't help either

realmsbeyondscooter: yeah. not a happy thing to be neighbors with.

me: Definitely not our primary candidate for a neighbor no. On the bright side we met you guys first, which has led to a good cooperation that I hope will just grow stronger

realmsbeyondscooter: Yeah, agreed. it helps a lot if both of us can rely on a safe border! with a toroidal map like this, you end up having a lot of neighbors

me: I'm working on diplomacy with them these days (which is the reason for the delay of that mail until today), but I have very little idea about how I'm faring with them. The language barrier also is a bit of a challenge as they are not very fluent with English

realmsbeyondscooter: yeah I wondered how that was going. hopefully you can reach agreements with them. It helps that you found them and not vice versa

me: I will keep you updated on the progress with them

realmsbeyondscooter: sounds good! hopefully I have something to update on the German team if they ever decide to write us back

me: Great It's a bit worrisome that they haven't responded at all to you guys yet. Do you know if they have contact with any other teams, based on espy points?

realmsbeyondscooter: I'll have to ask the team on that one. I'm not quite sure.

me: Roger that

realmsbeyondscooter: I'll get you guys a message in the next few days. I'm going to hold off and see if we can hear something from the German team so we'll have something useful to pass onto you. If your chessboard idea is right, I'm guessing they're probably NW of us so maybe SE of you would wrap around to them, not sure
and on that note, I'm going to call it a night. thanks for the message!

me: Sounds good. No real rush atm anyways, and we'll talk here if urgent

realmsbeyondscooter: sounds good!

me: Sleep well, and talk to you soon

realmsbeyondscooter: you too!

 

[Caledorn]

Message received from RB 03.11.2012

Caledorn/CFC,

Wanted to notify you that we have finally met WePlayCiv. Also, I did hear back from the German team finally. They said they are roughly to our north, and they have met Apolyton who is to their west. Our very basic guess on placement looks something like this:

oo1ooo2ooo3o
4ooo5ooo6ooo
oo7ooo8ooo9o

1 - Germans
2 - WPC
3 - Apolyton
5 - RB
8 - CFC
9 - Spanish Apolyton

How does that match up with what you guys have seen? The exact positioning is really rough and not completely confirmed, but that's our best guess at the moment. How are things going with UCiv? Learn anything interesting from them?

Thanks!
scooter - RB

 

[YossarianLives]

Message sent to RB 13.11.2012

Scooter/RB,

Thanks for sharing the map speculation. That looks a lot like we were thinking, too. UCiv is West of WPC and Northwest of us. We're the first team that they met.

How are things going with WPC and the Germans? We seem to be getting along with most of our neighbors so far, though the Spaniards are rather enigmatic. If only we could open up diplomacy with the Barbs, but they're just not as cooperative! Have you guys seen anything stronger than Barb Warriors yet?

How have your scouting efforts have been going? Our eastern cities have been coming along nicely, and so we wanted to resume border talks with you as we start to look to the west. Have you been able to explore around the Oasis location we mentioned earlier?

 

[YossarianLives]

Message received from RB 16.11.2012

Caledorn/CFC,

Quick clarification - you said UCiv is west of WPC and Northwest of you. Are you mixing up east and west? We are northwest of you and the German team is west of WPC, so that part was a tiny bit confusing.

Things are going well with WPC and the German team. The German team is a bit slow to respond, but they seem very cordial. I tried sending a message to the barbarians, but they just told me my head would look better on a pole. None too thrilled about that, so we declared war on them.

Scouting efforts have been OK, but now that barbarians are making their presence known, we're trying to exercise caution by keeping more units home. We've easily been able to kill them so far, but I suspect they'll start getting stronger soon. We did find the Oasis, but we didn't really go past it so that we could get back in time for barbarians. Is there any specific location you're looking at settling?

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB