Embassy to Team Sirius

[nabaxo]

Why are we avoiding just asking for an alliance? Why do we have to wait so long? Just be quick about it! The longer we wait, the less are the chances for it to happen...

 

[Sommerswerd]

This is a fine reply. Lets go ahead and send this right away, while we start working on a trade proposal for our next letter to them.

In the future, I suggest referring to ourselves as "The AMAZON" (as in The Alliance of Matriarchal And Zenobian Omnipotent Nations), or "The Alliance", or Zenobians, or AMAZONs when speaking to other Civs, as opposed to "Team AMAZON." It just adds a little roleplaying character.

I would also suggest ASKING Sirius what they would like to be called, as opposed to addressing them as "Team Sirius." They may have put some thought and effort into their team name/theme, and asking them about it early on (rather than waiting for them to tell us) will be a sign of respect.

Hopefully the letter can go out soon, as I just ended the turn and updated the turn log. Mavs still have to go, but once they end the turn Sirius will log in again, and they should have the letter before then...

I did not want to hold the turn up again for diplo, since DaveMCW was just complaining about it, but I am concerned that his comment might be a reflection of complaining that was going on in the other teams' forums. We don't want to irritate and frustrate our rivals by taking unnecessarily long turns.

 

[SilentConfusion]

@wideyed: I agree completely about the Han Solo comment. That was right on. That's why it felt wrong to me. Perfect comparison. Made me laugh. As it is no overly direct questions. And I think there's enough AMAZONification for now and I agree with Sommer that speed is of the essence.

@Sommer: Easy to change Team AMAZON to The AMAZON. I will also add a sentence asking what we should call them, since it is courteous and deferential in a way that isn't important.

I will send now.

EDIT: Actually I don't want to change Team Sirius in the greeting. And since Irgy singed his letter with "Irgy on behalf of Team Sirius" I guess that's what they call themselves.

 

[Sommerswerd]

@ wideyedwanderer - yes you are correct about the references slowing things down... That's why I said "In future communications" rather than "In this one"... because this one needs to go out quickly.

@ nabaxo - Check out the Post Game Map Write-Up for the last game and pay particular attention to the comments that LP makes about the arrogance of Team Kaz. You might also check out Saturn's Kaz embassy for more insight into this.

What you seem to be suggesting we do is almost exactly what I tried to do in the last game... just ask LP directly for an alliance and ask directly for what we want. That approach just offended and infuriated LP. He wants to be sweet-talked and romanced and we need to try to establish regular communications over the next few days before we ask for an alliance. Maybe even try to let Sirius/LP suggest it first, so he feels like it was his idea.

A direct approach might be better for CDZ or Merlot, but I have serious concerns about using it with Sirius. LP's grudge against Kaz for our "arrogance" and "bluntness" and lack of "niceties" lasted the whole game. We should avoid making that mistake...

Excerpts from this comment (from the last post-game discussion) say it all about how to deal with Sirius:

to me diplomacy is more than saying "hey, do you want an alliance?" and replying "yep, let's go!"... just like real life, you can't expect to become instant bestest buddies with someone with a one-liner... You've got to work up to requests like this, building trust and stuff... Things need to be talked out first before you can expect a friendly partnership.

We should Steer the discussion toward an alliance, of course, but NOT come off as blunt or arrogant.

 

[SilentConfusion]

After all of the collaboration this letter was sent to Team Sirius from our team gmail account:

Greetings to Irgy and Team Sirius,

Thank you for your prompt reply. Your letter was met with excitement, drinking, and displays of AMAZON prowess. We are happy to find that there is intelligent life out there in the universe.

You previously received a welcome letter from Sommerswerd, Captain of the AMAZONs. I wanted to officially introduce myself, SilentConfusion, the foreign relations correspondent to Team Sirius.

I will be working to facilitate the communication between our two nations, so feel free to address future emails to myself, or simply just to The AMAZON.

The AMAZON people wish to extend our warmest welcome to Team Sirius. We hope to bring our two nations closer together by learning about each other, sharing information, and forming mutually beneficial trade agreements.

As a gesture of goodwill and in an effort to establish a trust between us, we would like to share some information with you. Voyager is skirting the coast of what we call Jennilund. The land turns sharply south just beyond where Voyager can see and continues going south past more desert. On turn 40, if Voyager continues it's present course, our cultural borders will be within sight. We wish the Voyager good luck as it continues it's journey of exploration. Has Voyager voyaged very far to get here?

We haven't met our other neighbors yet and are curious to know if we are the first civilization that you've met. We would like to discuss ways our two nations can work together and assist one another for the betterment of both of our people. We look forward to hearing more from you.

Sincerely yours,

SilentConfusion, AMAZON Diplomat

 

[wideyedwanderer]

@ Sommerswerd - Yes I understand what you meant, but my point is maybe we should have some sort of "History and Mythology" thread we can draw from. Some sort of thread where we can hammer out and write the AMAZON mythology. Just so there's some sort of organization to our story. In situations like these we don't have time to take our time looking for the right spices to make our meal perfect, so maybe we should make a spice cabinet. If you get my analogy. Plus I think it'd be fun.

(We have the Timeline thread, but that's different. That is a record of all events happening in-game, starting at 4000 BCE. But what about everything that happened prior to that? With Zenobia, Hippolyta, the other goddesses and heroes, Diana, ect.)

I dunno. What do you think?

 

[Sommerswerd]

In situations like these we don't have time to take our time looking for the right spices to make our meal perfect, so maybe we should make a spice cabinet. If you get my analogy. Plus I think it'd be fun.

(We have the Timeline thread, but that's different. That is a record of all events happening in-game, starting at 4000 BCE. But what about everything that happened prior to that? With Zenobia, Hippolyta, the other goddesses and heroes, Diana, ect.

OK gotcha. I love cooking, so That makes sense to me. I think that would be a great topic for an 'investigative reporter' for the Tribune to tackle. I thought I saw Lois Lane in the same world ad Diana at some point...

 

[damnrunner]

I'd give them intel as they will get that info soon anyway.

Lets not get too far in promising an alliance though as we may want to go with someone else later. Alliances won't really come into play until we start devising a plan to get Alpah and start tech trading. For the time being (next 20 turns or so), every team will tech all of the basic tech on their own - so making a tech sharing plan is not useful. 20 turns form now we should have contact with other teams as well.

 

[SilentConfusion]

We got a response from The Sirians:

Greetings SilentConfusion and peoples of The AMAZON

Thank you for your communication. We Sirians have unanimously agreed that close co-operation between our two nations will be of great benefit to both of us.

Firstly, thank you for your geographic information. We are happy to share our own geography as well. It appears that this desert peninsula is symmetric, as on our side it also continues to the south, and Jenny will shortly reach our cultural borders as well. We sense that the all-mighty creators have a love of symmetry, and have imbued our world with a great amount of it.

You are indeed the first civilisation we have met. Indeed, we believe that we have met at an unusually early date, by way of our two exploring vessels heading in complementary directions. This early contact is something that it would be good to take advantage of.

There are a number of ways in which we may co-operate, which you have already mentioned, and I think it is time to look at these in more detail.

A non-aggression pact is an excellent idea. Indeed we are eager to get along peacefully, and believe that aggression will benefit no-one. It would be very difficult for anyone to invade our homeland, as it is protected by a stretch of waters too dangerous to cross without a local guide (i.e. the help of our cultural borders). The creators love of symmetry leads us to believe the same is likely to be true of yours. This means that aggression would always be limited to needless harassment and destruction of each other's offshore assets, with true conquest impossible to acheive. This kind of aggression cannot truely be beneficial for either party, so it is clear that we are both best off avoiding it before it ever starts. Although the details of a non-aggression pact would need to be worked out, the general spirit of non-aggression should be clear, and we are happy to begin our part of that immediately.

Opening of borders to begin trade would benefit both parties, and we are happy to enter into such an agreement as soon as we can figure out a way to encode such a treaty. Our greatest minds are currently experimenting with means of making markings to represent speech, which they call "Writing", and we expect some results from this very soon.

Trading of technology would be of immense benefit to both of us, and in that regard we think it would be wise to divert each of our researchers in different directions, so that we will have more different ideas to share in the future. As we have said, we are currently looking into ways of Writing down language. To trade ideas, we will need to much better formalise our language (with an Alphabet). We previously had no plans to do so, but it is worth talking about what we may be able to get in return for this idea of an Alphabet.

We hope that all is going well in The AMAZON and look forward to hearing from you again.

 

[SilentConfusion]

This is good news indeed. It seems they are very willing to work together, as we thought they would be and even better, it sounds like they will be teching Writing and Alphabet and not us which is good because they have a much higher tech rate.

How do trade routes work across ocean tiles that are within your culture? You need Astro normally to trade across ocean, but it seems possible that your culture would allow trade across the gap. Anyway, they seem to think that OBs would allow trade. We need to double check this.

It's a good point about not being able to conquer home islands early. I hadn't thought of the safety aspect of culture bridges. Because of this it is clearly better to work together.

What we learn:
-They haven't met anyone else and were surprised (as we were) to meet someone so early)
-They think the map has many symmetrical properties.
-They want to cooperate.
-They want OBs and are teching Writing as we speak.
-They plan to tech Alphabet.
-They want to work out a tech trading plan.

EDIT: One thing they didn't mention was the settling of Jennilund. If we get a foothold there before they can, we can somewhat dictate our position in that regard within reason. If we settle somewhere they'd rather we hadn't, will they resort to what they call "needless harassment of offshore assets"? I think instead we'd come to some kind of understanding at that point, but we'd have an advantage getting to pick our spot first. This depends largely on what the rest of the land looks like, so we'll see, but we should definitely keep Sirius in mind when contemplating settling Jennilund.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Great progress. I think we can take a little time now to try to draft a ROUGH treaty proposal. A few things to include... (Section 1 is a must have IMO, Section 2 is more about sharing info if we want to build more trust, so we can leave it out if AMAZONs feel it is unnecessary):

1. "The Zenobians are intrigued by this "Alphabet" concept you mentioned. If you mean to say that it will allow our nations to share knowledge and ideas across great distances then we would gladly exchange all of our accumulated knowledge for yours once your wise men have unlocked the secrets of this mysterious "Alphabet."

We would very much like to talk about making such an arrangement a long-term practice between our peoples, whereby Sirians and the AMAZON agree to freely exchange knowledge on an ongoing basis. Do you expect that the Sirian people would find such an arrangement beneficial? If so, we would look forward to discussing the details of how such a plan might work.

2. As soon as your Sirian wisemen have mastered the art of making symbols, we too would like to make a testament to our agreement to give all of our peoples safe passage through each others land. If you are in need of tools to make marks, our intrepid Jenny has found that broken clam shells are sharp indeed. We have used them to cut deer-skins for our boat-sails, and we are currently refining this art. We hope to have bigger boats with much larger sails soon.

I say ROUGH, because they obviously will not accept word-for-word whatever we suggest. Better to get the general concept out to them so that they see we want a tech alliance ASAP while we have the advanage over our rivals. If we truly are the first to make contact, we may have an opportunity to warp WAY ahead of the other teams in tech... If we start tech trading ASAP. That is why the MOST important part is to get them teching Alphabet right away.


It is great that we are on our way to getting one of the games' Naval powers on our side as opposed to having to face off aginst them. Once Sirius gets their dikes up and running, they will be a tough opponent. The only thing that would make this better is if the teams ARE trly arranged Alphabetically afterall, and thus CDZ (Vikings) are to our East. With any luck we can make friends with both naval threats and turn them against the other teams... At any rate I would rather have the potential naval threats on our side early on...

Lastly, I would say we should not mention the settlement of Jennilund for now. Let's pick out the best spot for our City 3 and talk about Jennilund later. If we get well established there we will be in a better position to negotiate the land-rights. As long as we stay on 'our side' of the desert hills, they should have no cause to complain.

 

[SilentConfusion]

Not only have we met one of the naval powers early and should build a strong bond with them, they're also currently one of the best techers. That is about as good as we could have hoped.

I like the first section very much. Getting them to tech Alphabet ASAP could be a huge advantage for us. It also helps them too so they're right to want it. I'm almost positive they have the highest GNP and so probably the highest techrate. If we met before other teams and have Sirius teching Alphabet so we can trade techs it could lead to a tech advantage for both of us. I like the way it is worded too. It echoes the language that they use in their letter (I think it was Irgy who sent this too even though it doesn't say).

I am ok with sharing what resources we have. They already know as much about the clams as we do, but telling them that we have deer, sheep, and silver I feel doesn't give them an advantage. I am positive they have at least 1 coastal fish resource (which they hooked up on T6) possibly more, and I would guess that they have riverside gold resources by the amount of jump in their GNP (those things are 8 commerce). Gems and silver are less, but not positive about that.

I would be hesitant to mention Sailing just in case it brings up talk of settling Jennilund too early because the obvious reason to get sailing is to ferry settlers.

One thing we may want to talk about is wonder plans, but I'm not sure we're ready to tip our hand yet. Since they don't (I think) have Myst yet, they shouldn't be our competition for SH. But the Mavs are going to want SH with their fast worker and now needing a GPro for their religious shrine.

Can those who have played these games before give me some kind of idea of what a normal sounding NAP would be like? I've heard the terms auto-renewing and cool down periods used in regards to NAPs, but I'd be curious what people though sounded like a good NAP.

 

[nabaxo]

This is great news! Let the backroom bargains begin!

 

[Sommerswerd]

@ SilCon - Good point about how telling them about Sailing would reveal our settlement plans. However, they did reveal what they are teching, so we should also reveal something... maybe telling them about our resources if good enough...

As for SH, since Sirius is CRE (+2/city) I doubt they would waste time with Myst, monuments, religions or SH. They just don't need any of that. The only reason for them to get Myst is as part of a plan to get Oracle.

 

[SilentConfusion]

@ SilCon - Good point about how telling them about Sailing would reveal our settlement plans. However, they did reveal what they are teching, so we should also reveal something... maybe telling them about our resources if good enough...

As for SH, since Sirius is CRE (+2/city) I doubt they would waste time with Myst, monuments, religions or SH. They just don't need any of that. The only reason for them to get Myst is as part of a plan to get Oracle.

Thats a good point about SH. They won't want it. So that's something we can tell them. I think we could tell them about our resources and about our plan to get a wonder they won't want.

I think we should ask for a NAP and a promise for OBs when Writing is discovered.

We should definitely confirm our interest in trading with them when they get Alphabet as Sommerswerd already said and we should probably give them some sort of idea what we will be teching next. We'll have to at some point tech something they don't have, so we can inquire about which techs they have since they suggested focusing our research efforts in different places.

I'll type up some sample language. I'll include Sommers "Section 1" and try to build a basic framework that we can work off of, when we decide what exactly we want to say.

 

[Norton I]

1. The Sirians write:

We previously had no plans to do so, but it is worth talking about what we may be able to get in return for this idea of an Alphabet.

so instead of just telling them we are interested in a tech trading treaty, we might want to come up with an actual offer. We can for example offer them to tech towards Monarchy or Mathematics, so that we will be able to make good trades. Another advantage of talking about a "research direction" is that we don't have to talk about our present research.... for I agree completely that we shouldn't talk about settling Jennilund when they don't bring up the subject.

2. If they bring up the subject of Jennilund we might have to choose our words carefully. In the end, I think we can appeal to common sense. We could just tell them that out traits (unlike their) push us into a rapid expansion, and that their FIN will make sure we will still be equal partners even if we get slightly more land. Again, this requires careful wording, but after we have build up trust we might be able to talk like this.... for now a "don't ask, don't tell"-policy would be best.

3. I think we can start revealing some or all of our resources to them. Probably they have different ones, so setting up a trade route would be very beneficial for us both. Will we get a TR with sailing and the culture bridges? Or will we only get a TR once we both have a city on jennilund?

 

[SilentConfusion]

1. The Sirians write:

so instead of just telling them we are interested in a tech trading treaty, we might want to come up with an actual offer. We can for example offer them to tech towards Monarchy or Mathematics, so that we will be able to make good trades. Another advantage of talking about a "research direction" is that we don't have to talk about our present research.... for I agree completely that we shouldn't talk about settling Jennilund when they don't bring up the subject.

2. If they bring up the subject of Jennilund we might have to choose our words carefully. In the end, I think we can appeal to common sense. We could just tell them that out traits (unlike their) push us into a rapid expansion, and that their FIN will make sure we will still be equal partners even if we get slightly more land. Again, this requires careful wording, but after we have build up trust we might be able to talk like this.... for now a "don't ask, don't tell"-policy would be best.

3. I think we can start revealing some or all of our resources to them. Probably they have different ones, so setting up a trade route would be very beneficial for us both. Will we get a TR with sailing and the culture bridges? Or will we only get a TR once we both have a city on jennilund?

I completely agree with all of those points.

I will try to test the TR issue today and will report back unless someone chimes in who knows.

I originally thought that Oceans can't be traded across before Astro, but now I am leaning the other way. I think that I've read somewhere that culture can be a trading bridge too.

 

[damnrunner]

While I agree that we should be considering a tech treaty with them - keep in mind that we have strong war based traits. Our comparative advantage in this game will be beating up on our neighbors. If we are not at war what is the point of having a boost to xp and GG production? Unlike Financial this benefit is not a passive trait - we only benefit from it if we actively take certain in game actions - namely war.

We will need allies in the game but will be better served by alliances with civs that are not our immediate neighbors. In the early to mid game one can only go to war with nearby civs as the distances to fight far away battles are just impractical. Thus, if we are to be a true warlike amazons we need to look at our immediate neighbors are prey, not partners.

That said, I am 100% ok with playing nice for now. These initial talks really mean nothing as both sides will make recalculations once we both start to meet other teams. From the Sirus perspective, I imagine they are pretty freaked out to be next to us as we would be expected to be a war monger team. That makes playing nice right now even more important as it will make them feel more secure and potentially give us a chance to really give them a killer early blow.

 

[damnrunner]

@ SilCon - Good point about how telling them about Sailing would reveal our settlement plans. However, they did reveal what they are teching, so we should also reveal something... maybe telling them about our resources if good enough...

As for SH, since Sirius is CRE (+2/city) I doubt they would waste time with Myst, monuments, religions or SH. They just don't need any of that. The only reason for them to get Myst is as part of a plan to get Oracle.

They still could pass the SH info onto other teams. Though playing up that we are going for an SH gambit might distract from our fast settlement plans. And could be a good excuse not to reveal sailing as our next tech.

 

[SilentConfusion]

While I agree that we should be considering a tech treaty with them - keep in mind that we have strong war based traits. Our comparative advantage in this game will be beating up on our neighbors. If we are not at war what is the point of having a boost to xp and GG production? Unlike Financial this benefit is not a passive trait - we only benefit from it if we actively take certain in game actions - namely war.

We will need allies in the game but will be better served by alliances with civs that are not our immediate neighbors. In the early to mid game one can only go to war with nearby civs as the distances to fight far away battles are just impractical. Thus, if we are to be a true warlike amazons we need to look at our immediate neighbors are prey, not partners.

That said, I am 100% ok with playing nice for now. These initial talks really mean nothing as both sides will make recalculations once we both start to meet other teams. From the Sirus perspective, I imagine they are pretty freaked out to be next to us as we would be expected to be a war monger team. That makes playing nice right now even more important as it will make them feel more secure and potentially give us a chance to really give them a killer early blow.

I don't agree that an early war is the way to go.

We can't get to their island before Astro, so we won't be able to take their ~4 core/strongest cities, only the ones that they put on the main continent. This way we can stifle them, but never really weaken them to a non-dangerous level (if their island is as good as ours they'll be able to keep building troops). With no hope of early defeat or capturing capitols, I think we're much better served to use them as our tech-engine while we focus on fully utilizing our expansive traits. I like our traits even if we choose to not conduct an early war. I think expansion and growth are what we need and IMP should help us expand faster than the others. CHA is free happiness. If we get SH every one of those settlers we crank out will build cities with 2 free happiness.

I think the GG bonus and lower XP for promotions is nice to have, but not the main strength of those traits. In fact both of those make it easier to focus on military later and catch up. True in some situations we could fully leverage those military benefits and have the strongest military, but I don't think this situation lends itself to early warfare.