Foreign Policy: The CivPlayers League

You are welcome to contribute as much as you like and in the sphere you might feel interested. I dont think we played together, but the high opinion Bistrita have about you is an indicator of itself.

As for your 1,2 and 3 points, I think they pretty much cover my 2 and 3, I dont see big difference in principle.

I personally dont feel comfortable explaining to CP where they did wrong and then asking them "please, we hope you wont do this again to us", but if team wants this, then we must go this way.

Talons, we are in need of an official vote. For now we will prepare army as if we are going to hit CP on all fronts with full power and in the meantime we will have vote to see what is the will of the team how to proceed.

 

Sorry should have posted this here... And FTR I am against giving them any warning of our attack. They violated the NAP, so they are not entitled to sh!t from us:

Sorry for not responding to this, I have been very busy with new job.

Bottom line: CP has blatantly broken the NAP. There is no defense they can raise to say they have not violated. We can attack them without mercy or remorse immediately if we choose with not even a slight smudge to our honor.

Explanation: "not exceed 100 espionage spending" can mean 1 of 2 things:

1. That you can't build more than a total of 100 points on the other team; or
2. That you can't run espionage missions that cost a total of more than 100 points on the other team

If it is #1, then you have violated as soon as the total amount of points that you have built is more than 100. It does not matter if you build up 50 points then sabototage a tile to spend them, then another 50 then spend them, then another 50 and again spend them. It is no defense to say "my espionage ratio with you never read more than 100" because your "spending" (ie, your slider usage/ points allocation) caused you to build up a total of over 100 points. Therefore you have violated the NAP.

On the other hand, if it is #2, then you have violated as soon as the total amount of points that you have used (by running spy missions) is greater than 100. In that case, you could theoretically "build up" thousands of points on the other team as long as you never "spend" them by running spy missions. But once you have run a total of 100 points worth of spy missions, you have violated the NAP, regardless of what the espionage ratio says your current point total is.

So either way, CP has broken the NAP and we can attack them at our pleasure

Additionally, CP has broken the spirit of the NAP, because the whole point of setting the limit so low is to allow demographics reading, and maybe tech choice knowledge, not to allow constant spy mission attacks. CP knows this, so again, any way you slice it, they have broken the NAP. If they try to say

then we can reply

 

Just throwing this out there. CivPlayers has placed a total of 295 espionage against us. We have placed a total of 0 espionage points against them.

 

We had long chat with Bistrita last night and we both somehow agreed that making war with CP right now will be not good for us.

I wanted to wait to see how technology stealing from Uciv will go, and it went awful. Only 1 out of 5 spies got the thing done, so we ended with the bare minimum of Liberalism. We still have the espionage points against them, but we need to produce new spies, to send them there, to wait 5 turns for max discount, etc, etc, which will take good 8-10 turns. Main thing is we dont have Rifling, so we cant produce, nor draft rifles, we are miles away from Cavalries too. Having said all that, we are not in great position to wage successful war against CP. Yes, we can bleed their noses with surprising preemptive hit, and whoever hits first he hits double, but after this it will be a total mess.

What I think will be best to do is to position armies as if we are to launch attack on CP, and then go tell ot4e when they are locked out of the game by the mod, that we consider they broke the NAP and we are about to attack. When he panics then we allow the idea that we might agree to not attack if he confirm he understand already the clause as it was intended to be and he promises to not make any more missions against us.

BTW, there was an AP vote to stop the war against CP. Ot4e wants out of this messy conflict and to make sure no one can declare him a war by game mechanics in the next 10 turns, so he might be suspicious that we prepare to attack him already, after we did not said even the smallest thing to comment his poisoning.

 

Do you guys think I should go ahead and put this plan in action?

 

seems reasonable to me

 

When I looked in the game I noticed that all the spies were parked in the same city. Next time, it might be good to spread them out over 2-3 cities so fewer spies get the penalty for another spy being in their space? It didn't look to me like this would be too onerous.

 

What is the chance that CP did not do it? Only for having complete picture?

What if RB did it? Can we have information from our new members who are ex- Team RB members in the same way we had information from Magno about their deals with CivFR when he joined the team?

 

I did not know that you put all 5 spies in the same city. If I had known I would have told you that you must NEVER do this. In my experience it is always a bloodbath with spies when you try to stack them all in the same city. Even 2 spies in one city is a huge risk that you will lose them both. I am suprised we did not lose all 5 TBH. You must do a SS says and put 1 spy in each city with the lowest espy cost. Never put 2 spies in the same city.

 

This is transcript from our chat with Ot4e from this morning:

 

I stopped reading around half of the chat, sorry to not read any further... but it seems that the thought of them thinking that they are right with using espy and us thinking getting cheated is completely what happened.

there is no way this can be repaired and the reason why i said our turnplayers shouldn't be distracted by this

 

I have a feeling that only their turn-player, mostly_harmless, would have that information. I don't think they were really discussing turn by turn events at the very end.

But if RB gave us a perfect excuse to strongarm CP into agreeing not to perform any more espy missions against us, that would be a pretty nice parting gift

 

Of everything that was said between you (2metra and Ot4e), this is the most telling and where Ot4e is caught red-handed in his lies.

classic...

So he has no good reason for keeping the espionage at exactly 100 other than "I like round numbers" What???

No... we are not born-yesterday infant children. Obviously you have been keeping the espy at 100 because you considered the clause still in effect. Checkmate... well done 2metra. He has broken the NAP and he knows it... no matter what excuses he comes up with.

 

Whatever the case is (I checked and CP have like 250+ espionage points against us already as of this turn) why CP kept their points at 100 ( I also believe they were keeping those to be on the safer side and not being called NAP breakers), the current realities are that we were not in position to harm CP at all this turn (Slight critical nod to Bistrita, who did not moved any units towards CP's cities last turn, despite we discussed we must do this to be prepared to put in use extensions to our diplomacy).

So, did CP broke the NAP or not is not of great importance, because we wont be able to smash trough them anymore, as they will reinforce their cities and we wont be able to take 4-5 empty cities, few workers and 1 GG, (or we could not be able to declare war to CP from next turn at all for the next 10 turns, as there was AP resolution to stop the war against CP from the current AP resident CivFR, which if pass - which will happen unless WPC veto it - will put game-mechanic-forced 10-turns peace with CP for everyone).

So, we had lost the element of surprise and the "first blow" advantage. Speaking of which, I think we are better to agree to a compromise reading of the clause, which CP proposes:

And he provides us with a screenshot of their espionage activities from the APT mod site:

Spoiler :

I examined the screenshot from close and it looks genuine. Only one thing made me suspicious, but there might be good explanation about google recreating the images sent as attachments. The clock on ot4e's desctop shows 14:07, windows say it is created 14:06 and modified 14:07, but the the xml data says in photoshop "modified 14:47". I asked ot4e about this and he said it is strange and proposed that he make me a new screenshot and send immediately to make sure it is true what he shows. I took it as enough evidence and accept that they did not poisoned our water. BTW, he said he would go with unhappiness mission instead if it was him, but they never ever discussed using "bad" missions on us.

So, whoever it was, he almost put us in war with CP Well done, mysterious water poisoner

Now when we know it was not CP who poisoned our water and since our wording was not 100% bulletproof about espionage clause duration and meaning (my mistake I guess) , do we agree on accepting the reading of "no limits on espionage spending, but not running the harmful missions until the beginning of t217"? (We must tell which missions are forbidden for clarity.)

WHy I would prefer if we simply let this be is because we will be able to focus on attacking CIvFR with Poly. MZ told me yesterday he will most probably have MGs by then and this is some serious advantage, which rises the chances of quick and successful war against CivFR substantially. I think we will only benefit from being one of those who conquer CivFR, besides the obvious benefit of having ruined CP's strategic ally/puppet. MZ said also (after working on him from me) that he will most probably be OK with him sending the bulk of the army as long as we do send army at all against CivFR. I boldened well that we dont want to feel like the "poor relative" when going for the spoils.

 

I say we accept these terms about espionage with CP. Bistrita said he is OK with those too. Other opinions?

 

Sounds good to me!

 

I wanted to ask earlier, but got distracted and burryed with work and other stuff. Why is bad to stack spies? I never thought about this? Can you guys give more detailed explanation?

 

I posted this in the Skullduggery thread:

Check out the link for the code and further discussion.

 

stacking spies directly influences the chance of success of the mission and pretty drastically

the bolded sentence doesn't say this directly, so I wanted to clarify a bit... even though "increasing chance of getting caught" can be interpreted as "the chance of success of mission is lower"

the recommended number of spies per city is around 2-3 best is using only 1 spies, but if you are in hurry it will cost you time if you go with only one and wait for max discount

or another method is swarming enemy with spies... we talk here about sending cca 100 spies in city... it's used in the new way of doing culture victory type... but I guess this is more SP tactic then Mp

 

With spies there are 3 variables to consider

1. Chance the spy will get caught just moving around or standing on a tile
2. Chance the spy will get caught doing a mission
3. The chance the mission will succeed

When you put > 1 spy on a tile, the chances of #1 goes up a lot. I dont have the statistics, but I just know from experience that its not worth it to put multiple spies on the same tile. They just get caught way too often.