Embassy to Team Sirius

[Sommerswerd]

Sirius captured Injiya (Mavs city)

 

[Sommerswerd]

Our response to the last letter from Sirius:

Sirian Allies:

We thank you for presenting us with options on how to proceed with the ETTT. Of the options you have presented to us, we choose Option (A). The only caveat is that if you choose to put your money towards espionage, we would obviously prefer that you direct it towards someone other than us.

A) Simply save cash and perform espionage as you suggest, until such time as M&M are crippled to the point of having no potential relevance (which probably means eliminated entirely).

We congratulate you on the sucess you are enjoying in your invasion of Mavs. It seems that you will eradicate them soon. We appreciate your point that our espionage efforts may have helped ourselves a little more than Sirius, however, we are glad you agree that halting M&M's tech has helped everyone. We would also point out that Mavs vast dye resouces (along with all the commerce they would have gotten from them) remain un-claimed to-date, precisely because we never allowed them to tech Calendar. We hope this has been of some measure of help as well.

Ironically, the amount of time to eliminate Merlot has been adversely affected by your invasion of Mavs. One turn prior to your combined invasion with the Q, Merlot was on the verge of a strike which would have killed off, or forced disbanding of many of their units. We were waiting for the strike to attack. However, all the Mavs units that have been destroyed by your invasion has given the Mavs gold to prevent Merlot's impending strike. Consequently, we can not begin our invasion until you have completed yours.

Additionally, we would welcome a loan to fund our upgrades. We would like a loan of 2000 gold, which we propose to pay back in the form of immediately starting to pay you 50 gold per turn for 40 turns. Please let us know if such an arrangement is acceptable to you. Once you have elimminated Mavs, Merlot will strike, and then we will invade and destroy them.

We look forward to the next time we hear from our friends the Sirians.

nabaxo, Special Envoy to Sirius

I asked them for 2000 in order to cover our base. If we get the Merchants we are after, we can do our upgrades and pay them back right away. If we dont get the Merchants, we can use their money to get our upgrades anyway, and pay them back over time... Another possibility,if they give us the money AND we get multiple Merchants, we can upgrade ALL of our obsolete units, drastically improving our defense. As I said before, taking a large loan from Sirius will give us alot of security with them, because they will be unlikely to attack us when we are giving them gold per turn.

 

[2metraninja]

Last night I had an in-game chat with AlphaShard. The main topics was the destruction of Meavs, Merlot and the behavior of Q.

He said most probably that they have 2-3 turns to kill-off Mavs.

He asked me how soon we expect to destroy Merlots and I throwed the 10 turns conception at them, which I think is about the most probable time for real anyway.

Then he asked me do we communicate with Q. I used the old "I'm just a soldiers, you should ask the politicians and the diplomats". Then I made a guess that the attack of Q on Mavs wasnt coordinated with them and he answered "yes". He said they tried a lot of times to communicate with Q with no result. Then I said that Q are either too reticent or on autopilt. Se said that most likely the second.

At the end we both agreed that King Slaze fought brave and we gave him credit for his manly stance. Then we wished us both teams luck and departed.

 

[damnrunner]

Do we have a sense of how large the Sirius army is and what casualties they took in taking out Mavericks? Would be good info to know.

It also may make sense to send a follow-up message to Sirius in preparation for the elimination of M&M. Something to indicate that we plan on remaining peaceful towards them. I could see them being a bit freaked by our recent aggressive border expansion. And it would suck if they feel pushed to launch a preemptive strike. I'll draft something up tomorrow.

 

[2metraninja]

Their armies are almost unharmed while capturing Mavs home island, so I can make a wild guess that their operational army it is something like 10 cavalries, 15 rifles and few cannons 6-7-8.

We already told them that we are not plotting against them and we both teams agreed that M&M must be elliminated before thinking what to do after.
With our assurance that Merlots will be gone in less than 10 turns, I think they will just wait the ETTT to come to its natural end.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Mavs are dead... finally Sirius finally elimminated them.

Rest in peace

 

[2metraninja]

Rest in peace, Mavericks.

Bravo for the worthy foe and shame on those, who deserted them.

 

[damnrunner]

Draft message to Sirius

Congratulations on the destruction of the Mavericks. We will soon be inflicting a similar fate on Merlot.

We seek to begin dialogue to ensure stability with respect to the post M&M war and post ETTT world we will soon be entering. We fear potential conflict may arise between old partners, yet hope that relations can be maintained. For the time being we believe our vast armies and powerful navy ensure our safety - but we can take nothing for granted. We have already secured a large empire and once Merlot is finished, we hope to rest our armies and peacefully grow and develop our cities.

Do our Sirian friends likewise seek development and growth or has the conquest of the Mavericks whetted your armies' appetite for blood spoils?

We certainly look forward to a continued partnership and seek to develop a framework that aligns our teams goals and objectives moving forward.

 

[2metraninja]

I think it is not a good idea to tell them we want peace and only it THEY so desire we will go to war.

Until now we've been respected and chosen for allies from Sirius not because we are smart, but because we are strong and because we have spirit. It is OK to congratulate them on the destruction of Mavs and tell them that we will be doing the same to Merlots soon and remind them that we possess strong army, but that's all for now. I think we must vote how to proceed in the Grand politics and just then start to use diplomacy to aid our goals.

 

[damnrunner]

I don't think what I said locks us in one way or the other. Resting our armies may only take a few turns after all. However, I think we certainly want to imply that we want peace and hope they do as well. No matter what outcome (war/peace) we want Sirius taking it easy and not expanding.

 

[Sommerswerd]

The last thing we want Sirius to do is stop fighting and settle back into teching and building infrastructure... Sirius has a HUGE Army. At least twice, maybe three times a large as ours... Probably larger than ours, Q and CDZ combined. I took a screenshot of the power graph to illustrate

We really want them to keep fighting so that gets winnowed down a little, or at least focused on somebody other than us. With Mavs gone, we are now Sirius most likely target and the SAP treaty is propbably the only thing that keeps them from attacking us right now.

As I mentioned before, they were already scouting out our Anjennida cities with a Cavalry unit... there was no reason for that unless they are planning to attack us... So now they know our Anjennida cities are basically undefended.

On top of that, they have blocked off Comet and Bode with heavily armed Forts and started upgrading their units on Comet to Rifles. We would be fools to not realize that they are preparing themselves for a War with us.

Plus already said they want to attack Q next and then CDZ. I seriously doubt we can soothe the savage Sirius beast with soft music about "resting our armies." If we rest, the best we can hope for is they will claim the rest of the map for themselves and we will be smaller and weaker for good.... At worse, they take advantage of our poorly defended cities and take all of Comet and Anjennida in one fell swoop.

 

[damnrunner]

Their armies are almost unharmed while capturing Mavs home island, so I can make a wild guess that their operational army it is something like 10 cavalries, 15 rifles and few cannons 6-7-8.

So while their operational army is smaller than our MHI invasion stack they must have have a lot more units elsewhere which are be boosting their mill power.

 

[damnrunner]

If they are scouting us we should scout them while we have OB. We also could consider Suggesting we agree to dissolve the ETTT for a x turn non-aggression pact. We need to ensure we don't get back stabbed while we invade the MHI.

If they want to go after Q next that is great - what can we suggest to help make this happen.

 

[Sommerswerd]

So while their operational army is smaller than our MHI invasion stack they must have have a lot more units elsewhere which are be boosting their mill power.

Im not sure their invasion stack is smaller than ours. I caught a glimpse of part it in INJIYA this turn, and I saw about 10 Cavalry and 10 Rifles and that is only what was visible. They also have like 3 times as many Frigates as we do, plus way more Cannons. They also maintain 2 Garrisons in two forts (1 blocking Bode, the othe blocking Comet) It also seems like they are upgrading all their defensive city Garrison units to Rifles. They have alot of d@mn military

If they are scouting us we should scout them while we have OB. We also could consider Suggesting we agree to dissolve the ETTT for a x turn non-aggression pact. We need to ensure we don't get back stabbed while we invade the MHI.

If they want to go after Q next that is great - what can we suggest to help make this happen.

I'm not worried about what they say to us (ie, that they want to attack Q). Im worried about what they are thinking/saying privately. If they want to attack us they sure arent going to tell us about it. As far as a non-agression pact goes, we already have that (the SAP treaty) until 1500AD (20 turns). That should be enough to finish off Merlot. After that, they will probably not want to renew it... If anything, they might want to throw the old treaty out and make a new one that lets them drop out of the ETTT.

I agree that scouting them... especially on Anjennida, is a good idea... but better still is to start upgrading our defensive Garrisons to Rifles. If we just rut Rifles in all our cities we will make a much less attractive target... With Border cities defended by Warriors and Archers, it may be too easy to resist...

 

[Sommerswerd]

My best guess is that they are showing muscles making any thought about attacking them unacceptable or just preparing to be ready if this happens.

If I was them, I would wait while the moment we just won the battle for the MHI, while still we cant benefit from the cities there and our army is exhausted to the maximum and on the other side of the world and just then attack us. If we are slow and by any chance this happens to coincide with the end of the SAP, it will be bad for us. So we must hurry.

We should be fine defeating Merlot before SAP ends ... the only thing is we need a few more spies, as now that we have lost a few, our spy missions can barely keep pace with their city growth. As their cites grow their economy improves. They are only losing 16 gpt at the moment with 56 gold left I have a mind to just start stealing gold 10 pieces at a time. We just need to force them to start deleting units...

Anyway, that's off topic... the more I think about it, the more I agree that they are showing muscles. They would be unwise to attack us, as it would force us to join the others against them. They can win easily if they just remain peaceful. So they probably are just getting in position to defend themselves from any attacks from the other teams.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Latest message from Sirius... apparently one of their spies was caught in out territory...

Hi, just a short note.

One of our spies was captured in your territory recently. I'm just letting you know, he was on route from Alberdan to Alcor, with intention to head to Quatronian lands. However he made a rather unfortunate choice of route to do so. We're not sure whether you can see the location where the spy was from the message you would have received about it in game - some have said though that if you click on the message in the event log it moves the screen to the appropriate location.

We have no ESP for missions, and could simply send an ordinary unit with open borders if we wanted visibility of your tiles, so I hope you can believe this was simply a poor bit of micro by our turn player (caused by a poor route-choice by the game engine). We apologise for any concern this may have caused you.

Irgy, on behalf of Team Sirius

 

[nabaxo]

Seems like they really want to keep us close as allies. I am glad they made this choice.

 

[2metraninja]

Yes, they think of us like best allies. Also, our and their army combined makes for 80-90% of all the ETTT army at present.

 

[2metraninja]

VERY, very troublesome news team!

So the Sirians have actually declare war to Q before even ETTT is finished!

What a surprise!

And what a drama!

I never took the time to read through the whole ETTT alliance documentation, but I am quite sure Sirius attacking Q before Merlots are dead is outright violation of the agreement and breaking of their word.

Those ba$tards have chosen the time quite good - We have yet to deal with Merlot and just then we can think of another war. Also the SAP ends in about 12 turns or so, so Sirius thinks we cant do anything about this.

BUT!
If they are straight forward breaking their word and declaring war to Q, are we bound to keep our agreement with Sirius? I think no. And this is the time we to act. The army we gathered to attack Merlots, I think we can well use to defend Q from the Sirius treachery!

Since Merlot is not dead, they are still a factor in the game. I can say we must bribe them on our side before Sirius do so, because they are going to play a role now when the3 ETTT is broken for sure.

What you think?
What we are going to do?

 

[2metraninja]

If there is any doubt about this, they actually declared war to Q: