Glad to have you back in the team, Cal.
And yes, good point about emptying cities being circumventing the rule of no-city-gifting.
As of now, I think we must not send them anything ourselves, but leave our cause to be presented by Ot4e. We tried to be reasonable with the French, but we got only cold words and more threats or simply no answer. Somehow, ot4e believes he can make the French consider peace. I dont know if this is false and last-stand hope on his side or he has some levers to use on them, but I would give the word to him, just letting him what we are willing to consess to French for peace.
I think a smart move would be to not specify exact tiles and numbers initially, as to the greedy one, 2 and 200 looks the same - always small. I would suggest we tell ot4e that we are willing to divide the available zulu land in half with French. And then we see if they even start to talk. Maybe the curiosity and greediness in them will speak? If they start to talk about deal, asking questions, making demands, etc, we know we have almost got that peace. The rest will be boring bargaining and complaining from what each of us costs that zulu affair and how much each of us deserves the spoils. IF they say something like: we want from the zulu cities you occupy now, we will just then tell then it is against the rules.
Realistically, there is land for 4 good cities on green land in the clear borders of the ex-zulu lands. We give them 2 cities land, eventually ask for 1-2 resources which are left in their hands and we get peace. Not bad a deal. Ideally would have been if we keep all the zulu land, but we must try this variant too.
As parallel/consequent move, we can ask ot4e to wore off from French his support and admit if they dont get that fair deal (remember - we offer split in half of the available spoil, where we did ALL the fighting), so if they refuse this fair deal, it must be clear they dont plan on helping ot4e in the big picture versus RB, thus breaking their promises, so he owe them no more friendship and we will ask him to start planning with us their demise. We can tell him this in advance, so he will be extra motivated to try and get peace, as otherwise he will be forced to be good ally to us and drop French, which can mean 1 more not safe border for him or even we asking him for joining us on wiping out French. I will remind him what we talk about French back in the time when he was trying to recruit us for anti-RB plot. I had told him back then that we know French will be troubles. And I will remind him that he was hesitating to agree to us declaring together war to French to get rid of them with the excuse that French will help us actually, and that we will have no time for that before we are forced to face RB. Well, there is opportunity which arises. We can tell him (and MZ) that we can try to get NAP with RB till t200 or t210 and then we 3 jump on French and partition them between us 3. CP and Poly will get their so much needed land to become bigger and have better perspectives in future. We will get rid of French (me and Bistrita believe that we can conquer French in just 40-50 turns from now, even faster if we get Poly on board - their NAP with French ends at t180 and having NAP with RB, they will be happy to attack French, and also having the help of CP - their NAP with French ends on t190). So, we will have some more land, our allies will be bigger and better prepared for war, and then we can think more easy for tackling RB.
What you guys and gals think about this whole thing?
Or than that, I like it!
So, my thinking starts to change to that we will just keep RB at bay. We wont march in RB lands with banners flying and fanfare music. We wont be able to really deal quick with RB. And here is where this comes in conflict with giving Civfr all they want. Because they will develop these lands in this time, where we will not gain other lands to develop.
