Foreign Policy and General Diplomacy

[Aivoturso]

With those leaders, I'm pretty sure both WPC and Spanish intend to fight as well. I'm not convinced though that they are going for an early rush, though. After re-reading my message, I realize that my point was not very clear. We should of course prepare for the case, but we should not be taken by surprise if they push a REX instead and only go to war later.

 

[Bowsling]

All this talk abbout unit exchanges had me thinking the other day, and an idea popped into my mind: ancient-age warfare is basically glorified rock-paper-scissors: axemen beat spearmen and lose to chariots, spearmen beat chariots and lose to axemen, and chariots beat axemen and lose to spearmen. Conveniently enough, we are surrounded by the rock, the paper, and the scissors. War Chariots will beat Dog Soldiers and lose to Impis, Dog Soldiers will beat Impis and lose to War Chariots, and Impis will beat War Chariots and lose to Dog Soldiers. With Fast Workers, we have the bargaining power we need to acquire any of these units. If we negotiate with the three teams, we could have an arrangement where we end up acquiring all three units.

This makes an even more powerful bargaining tool. If we can subtly show our newly-acquired units to the teams whose UU we can beat, this may reduce their appetite for attacking us. If we show off our shiny new Dog Soldiers to Spanish Apolyton, for example, they will think "Oh no! CFC has allied themselves with WPC, and has gotten Dog Soldiers! If we attack them, they will be able to beat of Impis!" This logic will apply to every team, and the hopeful end result is that none of them attack us out of fear of the other guy's unique units.

 

[talonschild]

We'd need Writing, but that's in the works anyway. And I love the idea of our rivals building our army. If our diplomats are able to pull this off, HELL YES.

 

[1889]

The only problem is that our units remain valuable throughout the game while thires have a small window of effectivness. I don't mind oppenning discussions with the other teams about gifting to se were it goes but I doubt any of them would agree to a price I am likely to ask.

Personally I am dubious about the possability of an early rush anyway.

 

[Aivoturso]

Don't forget that if we can get the units from WPC and Spanish they also have the free promotion and Impi have the mobility as well. We could also argue that given the Fast Worker's pure awesomeness, it would be fair to give a barrack produced units in exchange. And of course the exchange rate is not 1 to 1 since the fast workers take so much longer to produce.

However, let's not forget offensive capabilities of the Fast Worker. We obviously don't want to give this to someone who might be liable to attack us later on.

 

[Aivoturso]

I've been thinking. Our diplomacy seems to go rather well so far. However, we still lack the overall diplomacy strategy. Since we now have quite good understanding of the map I believe the time is ripe to start seriously thinking of who we want to ally with and start seriously working towards that goal. I'll start the discussion with couple of observations and my conclusions of them:

1) I'm starting to think that most critical asset we can have with other teams is trust. Number of ways we can cooperate with our allies goes up, more there is mutual trust. E.g. we could try to work out three way tech stealing deal or focus our military techs and trade units to get early advantage on a mutual target. Or if we have a neighbouring ally we can trust, we could leave a border virtually undefended and focus our forces elsewhere.

2) We must not ally for too long with a team we can't beat in the end. This means that we must plan when to get rid of our most feared rivals. IMO, RB and German team and mabye Apolyton as well are the teams we need to be most wary of.

Based on these principles, I believe most desirable long term allies out of teams whose location we know would be UCiv and WPC. This is by simple process of elimination. Spanish team seems a bit too unknown to me. I believe they likely will keep the agreements they make, but since they don't want to agree on a NAP I think making complex deals with them might prove difficult. On the other hand RB and Germans might be the most dangerous rivals we have.

At the moment, I'm thinking that an alliance with us, WPC and UCiv in the core and at least two more additional teams could work rather well. Before making any too permanent moves, though, I'd like to see if we can reach the remaingn teams by going south.

 

[2metraninja]

I am not sure we are ready to start "plotting" yet. We must play our game, stay strong and look for opportunities.

We have land and we have our chances. Wars must be fought for a good reason.

One of those good reasons you name right - you will want to kill/cripple those who you think you cant outtech/outgrow. Those are clearly RB at that moment. Apolyton come as other good candidate. I still have to see some good moves from The Germans to consider them serious threat to us in the future ( I do believe that what is German is good by presumption, but here we might have different case, who knows). Apolyton will play very strong and it will be very difficult to get them to ally with us. Or maybe exactly the opposite? I know the 3-4 moving figures at their team (at least I suppose that they are these in the high echelon of command) and they all had played with me and have opinion on me and they will link the team with me despite I never log in with my name in the game, have no doubt. Some of them call me master of puppets, while other consider me just too strong. Even from pure statistics from past games they had seen that whoever ally with me lives, whoever opposes me dies. Though on the other hand, some of them are looking for a way to set the score with me from few games already without much success so far So I dont know if we can at all look for alliance with Apolyton at some stage. But lets hope that game situation and game reality will have more weight when they decide on alliances.

 

[2metraninja]

I guess we will see in just few turns if Ze Germans are worth their salt and their name. WPC are not arming for masquerade only.

 

[1889]

I didn't see many happy recources on the map so potential allies might be eager to spread our religion for us. A trade route or a missionary from us could be valuable bargaining chips.

 

[classical_hero]

Wrong thread.

 

[YossarianLives]

Just putting this here for easy reference:

CURRENT DEALS

REALMS BEYOND
NAP to T100

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).

Notification Agreement without end date

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).

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.

Open Borders - PENDING

Are you guys interested in signing Open Borders so that we can eventually get trade routes between us?
...
We were thinking full open borders would be nice. Is that OK with you?

WEPLAYCIV
NAP to T100 with No Scouting clause

We accept your initial non-aggression prior to turn 100 on a condition that you remain 1 square away from our borders with your units, and we shall do the same when our scouting units travel near your borders. You can see the edge of the border in the dark. We shall stay 1 square away from purple borders.

Notification Agreement - STATUS UNCLEAR but note that they have notified us of all teams met so far

I might be good to share that information when finding other nations near us. You are the first and only one we have made contact with up to this point. I will discuss this matter with the elders of our nation and try to reach some kind of agreement.

SPANISH APOLYTON
No NAP in place
City Reservation Agreement - Should only be considered as a way to avoid Settler races

That is why we offer you a deal for a coordinated expansion. This works like this, when you want to create a new city you just make the announcement of where you are planning to colonize and this announcement its enough for a 15 turns to book that place and the 3 squares round. So, city by city, we take the respect for each other and orderly growth.
If the deadline expires after 15 turns and the city announced has not been created, then you lose the chance to make the booking and it's up to the other to make his booking and begin their 15 shifts to book a place. Each nation can only have a maximum of one place booked at the same time.

UNIVERSCIV
30-Turn NAP expiring about T92 ~ T95

We would be delighted to sign a 30-turn if you still want.

We will gladly accept your offer of a thirty-turn non-aggression pact!

Clauses to NAP that we do not approach their borders and we inform each other about other teams we meet

If you want a treaty of non-aggression you may follow some clauses listed below:

not come too close from our borders
inform us about the approximate distance between our civs and your geographic location
inform us about the known existence of others civilizations on our continent
...
It goes without saying that if we encounter another civ we will keep you informed.

GERMANS
No formal diplomacy initiated, but informal inroads seem very friendly

 

[vranasm]

I am kinda confused about the WAR WPC x Germans... can someone summarize for whom we hold fingers?

actually if anyone would like to invest some time...some drawing similar to F4 from Civilization with some more descriptions would be very nice... (like who we have nap, who we consider friendly etc etc)

Would make a bit more pleasure for me to watch/read then .

 

[2metraninja]

It is hard to tell who we cross fingers for. Or at least to which degree We dont want WPC dogpiled by RB and eliminated, but we dont want WPC killing off Germans either. This will means that some teams get more lebensraum, while we dont. Which is not good for us. In this unpleasant scenario, at best we can hope that it will be solely WPC who will get all German land and grow powerful, so we have a powerful ally.

We must dig in to this kind of diplomacy-politics thing more though.

And the idea where we put diplomacy-stance "labels" or "statut" to teams is also good.

 

[Caledorn]

I can make an F4-like image in Photoshop that can be added to as we go along. I will try to make one later tonight, and you guys can help me fill in the details Great idea, btw!

 

[Caledorn]

Here's an initial (and quite boring) suggestion for such a diplowheel. If the team likes it, even though it's both plain and boring, I can stick it in the first post of this thread and do my very best at keeping it updated.

I am uncertain about the turns on our deals at the moment, so a little help would be appreciated to fill in the XXX's.

 

[cav scout]

Looks nice Cal Any way to have it depict the spatial relationships of the teams?

 

[Caledorn]

Looks nice Cal Any way to have it depict the spatial relationships of the teams?

Thank you

I must confess that I am uncertain what you mean by the term "spatial relationship". It's not often I don't understand an English term, but this one I have to admit I have no clue about. Would you please clarify that for me?

 

[talonschild]

I would assume he means "map location".

My only concern is that it would need a fundamental revision if we want to depict deals between two rival teams. There may be a way that I'm not seeing, that would use a system other than using connecting lines - because connecting lines are a problem if we want to show a deal between Apolyton and WPC.

 

[Caledorn]

I would assume he means "map location".

My only concern is that it would need a fundamental revision if we want to depict deals between two rival teams. There may be a way that I'm not seeing, that would use a system other than using connecting lines - because connecting lines are a problem if we want to show a deal between Apolyton and WPC.

Ah, yes. That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that. I can revise it to show team locations (although not right away) - that's a pretty good idea.

On the second subject you raise, talon, I've already thought about it. The design on the actual F4 screen is needed for that, and it would also require the use of colorcoded lines to keep it somewhat neat. One idea is to use the actual F4-screen and just link it in the first post here and ask the turnplayers/turnloggers to regularly take new screens of it, overwriting the old one. That would not take any knowledge we have about NAPs, alliances, and other deals we would know about (like active resource trades) into account though, so it has a limited lifespan and would need to be replaced with a custom made one eventually.

In any case, I believe we need to have two different images regardless of how we do it. This also keeps it easy to see our actual deals in one image, while referring to the other for other team deals.

 

[Maga_R]

Very nice and clear way to summarize diplo, Cal. I was about to suggest the same thing as cav_scout, if you just arrange the teams roughly in the way they are located on the map, it will be even better. Since wars are most likely to happen between neighboring civs, you should be able to include that info, too. For full information - who has open bordes with whom, etc, F4 screen seems the best.