The ETTT

[galdarian]

The only problem will be war weariness. As soon as this starts to put a dampner on our expansion then we should consider discussions to declare peace.

 

[CharlemagneXLII]

The problem is Merlot won't go to peace with us and not with Amazon- going to peace with just us has no benefit for them, so why help us? I don't think we want to give them anything for peace either.

 

[Earthling]

Well, we actually shouldn't get any real war weariness to worry about. IIRC, it doesn't happen over time, it only depends on combat with units. So if we're not going to be doing much combat against MERLOT - and we won't, we could be at war another 50-100 turns and not build up war weariness.

(For that matter, you also don't get war weariness for combats within your own territory, sure most of you know this though, and likely won't matter too much this game, at least for a while, perhaps something for us to know when we go against Mavericks though).

In general I am still very pleased AMAZON is so intent on this grand strategy/military alliance though. It makes it easy for us to go along, as we want to go along for a while and make gains against Mavericks, and otherwise sets up good situations like encouraging CDZ not to do a backstab/we can keep out of their way until we have a clear upper edge.

 

[CharlemagneXLII]

I will send this in the next few hours:

To our fellow alliance members:
Quatronia agrees with Sirius' choice of researching astronomy. We will be researching drama shortly, followed by music.

 

[Earthling]

ah ok that's fine as well, know we've been talking about this in different threads. Little shorter than the message in the Sirius Embassy I guess but whatever works.

 

[galdarian]

Just send that. It's doesn't have to be overly formal. The less attention that we draw to the message the more likely other teams will read it and move on.

 

[CharlemagneXLII]

I just realized something- CDZ had agreed to research feudalism, Sirius even switched to paper to allow for that. If they complain about the music thing, we can just say "We thought you were researching paper..."

 

[Earthling]

You mean feudalism in that last quote, but hmm, I forgot about that I guess.

Do you have the link to the post/thread on our forum here for that by the way? Just for reference, refresh everyone's memories, thanks.

But yes I thought I remembered something like that, but I thought it might have been AMAZONs. Maybe the AMAZONs are still on Theology (thought they'd finished Theo but I haven't been ingame to check that yet).

 

[CharlemagneXLII]

I sent the message.

Amazon has theo (and Christianity) and will be getting construction soon:

Last, we can confirm that we are pursuing Construction, however, we are in the midst of political and religious upheaval as we have thrown out the Barbarous, Pagan government and replaced them with a strong Bureaucratic government

CDZ intends to go for feudalism:

Greetings fellow ETTA members,

Team CDZ will we finishing Machinary in a couple of turns. We were planning to do Feudalism but if Sirus wishes to take this task on then we will need some feedback so we don't end up doubling up on a tech.

Regards
Robi, Team CDZ

Sirius goes for paper instead:

Fellow ETTA members,

Based on feedback from other teams, we will pursue Paper next to enable trade map trading. This is not necessarily a high priority for us, but other members seem to have the immediate tech needs covered. Our current understanding of the research plans are:

Sirius: Paper
Amazon: Theology > Construction
Quatronia: HBR (partial) > Optics
CDZ: Machinery > Feudalism

We are always open to discussions of alternatives.

Quatronia alerted us to a Holken at the eastern end of the arm between us and Mavericks. Our settlement on this arm has been under constant barb attack, so we have not been able to fully scout this arm. We are even uncertain of the location of the Mavericks city. The only unit we have nearby is a wounded archer, which is far enough away that it is doubtful it could prevent the Merlot unit from contacting Mavericks, and is likely to be ineffective. If the Holken takes an indirect route (i.e. it heads north) we could intercept it with an axeman.

Sincerely,

Trystero, Team Sirius

 

[RegentMan]

In an effort to keep things together, I'll post this here too.

Sent this:

To our fellow ETTT members,

Quatronia agrees to hold off on our plans to further settle the peninsula designated as 'Hoag.' We will gladly suspend our expansion for the time being if this will help strengthen the ETTT and allow us to constructively resolve our recent differences. However, the Continuum can not continue with these negotiations until we've had full disclosure regarding CDZ's financier(s).

Respectfully,

Team Quatronia

 

[CharlemagneXLII]

We've got a reply:

Dear members of the ETTT,

your messages deserve a longer answer than this, the people of the CDZ like to give you a quick answer including the main points, hopefully there is time to draft a longer answer later.

Probably most of the misunderstandings occured because the people of CDZ assumed that the value of strategic locations would be based on our common technological level and expertise in the ETTT. We would like to apologise for setting our strategic levels on other teams. If you keep this in mind, you might understand, why the people of CDZ chose to settle 'ereh rO'. It was not really meant as a retaliation, but more like: "Hey, if they'd rather settle close to our cities giving us cultural pressure and ignoring the clearly better spot, then why not settle it ourselves while it's still free." Our city location experts still can't understand why Quatronia settled those two spots first, but it was our fault assuming that location values could be universally applied.

But Quatronia showed us once again that we shouldn't apply our standards on them. Accusing an ally of getting money from a common enemy is one of the worst things you can do, especially as the answer is available to their Intelligence Department. The CDZ people are still shocked. But as a quick answer to all those that obviously abolished their Intelligence Department: The heroic CDZ forces were able to free innocent people in the city of Bulgar from their Barbarian oppressors.

The CDZ people never decided on how to use the 'gun' (as Amazon liked to call it), the CDZ people would only clearly be relieved if they see that the 'gun' is not in the hands of someone who clearly showed that he likes to use culture as a weapon against us before. We do not wish to see any further escalation therefore we pledge not to use a cultural bomb on the "hoag".

The CDZ people like to sort these things out for the prosperity of the ETTT as well, therefore not settling on that peninsula while looking for an agreement is perfectly fine.

Greetings,
the CDZ Kleptocracy

I think that's a pretty plausible reason. Granted, it doesn't explain both times they received gold, but I don't think pressing the issue is going to accomplish anything right now, especially as we don't have the screens. If they're going to betray us, we'll have to wait for them to do it, and then pull some diplomatic maneuvers.

So does this mean we're ready for war? We should aim to sink those Maverick boats ASAP. Also, are we in agreement over a golden age?

I've compiled a reply, though if you disagree with anything above, you'll have issues with it, this is just to get discussion moving.

Greetings to our fellow allies

We apologize for our query about the money, but since we did not have a map of that region, we were unaware of your liberation of Bulgar. Since that money was therefore unaccounted as far as we could tell, we were quite nervous. We hope you can understand our concerns, and understand that we meant no slight against CDZ, we simply felt we could not move forward until our confusion was dealt with, which it has been. We've offered a map trade to rectify this.

Miles Davis has begun a golden age in Quatronia. We would have liked to use him to bulb in order to more benefit the whole ETTT, but that would have given us half of divine right, and we had no desire to research the other half.

Quatronia has declared war on the Mavericks, and encourages other members to also declare war on M&M. We will be moving against their navy shortly. We hope we can continue to communicate on military matters to quickly bring down our enemies- specifically, CDZ and Quatronia must work together to ensure there are no Maverick threats to our lands.

Quatronia looks forward to hopefully reaching an agreement with CDZ over Hoag, and we are willing to hear any proposed arrangement.

Since it has come to light that the settling of Asymptote was the spark that started this conflict, we will state that the city will become one of the highest gold producing cities on Hoag, and is a candidate for Moai. Of course it is strategically placed- we did not want the team that specializes in amphibious warfare to have a naval base so close to our capital.

-The Continuum

The part in bold I included was in case we wanted to justify Asymptote, but I think it's probably counterproductive right now. Maybe save that for later if we ever do get around to negotiating with CDZ. We should probably send a map deal, so I put that in the message.

 

[RegentMan]

Well that's that then. Should we draft an apology message? I'm unsure- we did ask a legitimate question.

Curious why they've stated they won't use a culture bomb on the peninsula. Maybe to get us to say the same thing?

 

[cav scout]

Apologize my ass... they got a gift of 50 gold several turns before they captured the barb city. I hate to say it but bad news doesnt get better with age. We should insist on an answer.

Also, we shouldn't mention what are plans for the GA are yet.

 

[RegentMan]

Fair enough- I forgot there were multiple gifts and only one barb capture.

 

[Earthling]

When was the barb capture? But that certainly doesn't look like it would explain all the gifts. Really strange how, say, *MERLOT's gold would go down* in the middle of a turn due to a barb capture eh?

 

[galdarian]

I don't think that we should be conceding that much in a message. It is also not proposing any solutions which leaves us reactive. Plus for us to DoW on Mavs means that we wouldn't be sending this for at least 5 turns. I'd wager we'll get another email from Amazons in that time (Condemning us for not following their instructions and finishing research on Music, getting the GA blah blah blah). We need to be ready to answer those accusations.

If CDZ is honest with themselves then any false accusation would just roll off their back. Just as their accusations have with us. It's more important that we've highlighted to our other allies that we have concerns. We don't have to provide complete proof, the evidence should speak for itself. Amazons & Sirius, if they aren't already, will now scrutinise CDZ's (and ours) actions to a higher degree. Furthermore, I wouldn't apologise however it would seem appropriate to at least give thanks for small concessions. Even if it isn't full disclosure.

It's a bit difficult to get an objective position on the current situation. When you weigh up all the info, I think that we're are looking like the bad guys here.

 

[CharlemagneXLII]

Does Merlot's gold go down in the middle of the turn? They could have upgraded something anyways.

I figured they were sincere since it would be easy to check if they're lying about the barb city. I thought if they were betraying us they would come back with an answer about how they are offended and such, without actually answering the question- this is a legitimate excuse, though it doesn't cover both gold increases.

I don't know what pressing them further on the issue will accomplish- if they're lying, then we won't get a straight answer, if they're not lying, then we're just going to tick them off, and their answer will be similar either way. We can't prove the first gold donation, and CDZ is just going to say to Sirius and Amazon that we're being petty and accusing them with no proof.

If they do betray us, the biggest worry is a two front war. We should be able to get the Mavs on our side though, since they would be in the same position.

Culture bombing won't do anything: If CDZ is against us, it'll come to war, and bigger culture will just encourage them to raze it, we would try to take their cities by force in any case. If they're on our side, they might decide not to be if we culture bomb them. So, having a golden age now would put our allies at ease.

I like how they pledged not to bomb after they lost the race.

 

[cav scout]

We dont necessarily want to culture bomb. But the possibility that we might give us considerable leverage- CDZ might be more willing to come to the table now and trade us ereh rO.

Why don't we propose to offer Pulsar Plateau and Cygnus for ereh rO and a settler?

 

[Earthling]

First I'll agree we can never be 100% certain on this gold problem. I also wouldn't press it further or respond right now. If we need to respond to AMAZONs, firstly we have some things to point out (like our settler already being at ereh Ro's area and anything that makes sense about settling the landmass - they really don't know the history of anything here) and we need to coordinate with war on Mavericks as well. We could explain we're Golden Aging/not lightbulbing if that's necessary. But I wouldn't bother talking much to CDZ until we have a little more time/some other messages. A couple of other things though:

Did CDZ actually get the message where we provided our actual evidence of the gold dealings? The one with screenshots, where CDZ gold went up and MERLOT gold down by almost exactly the same amount in particular? I thought that went only to AMAZONs/Sirius. As it stands, if CDZ just heard through the grapevine who knows what this barb city thing they think is about. It certainly could have been on a completely different turn/just a lie.

However, I do agree it's worrisome we look like bad guys. We could have alleviated this earlier if we'd talked a while back to Sirius/AMAZONs like music but that's ok, can't change that now. Though, CDZ has a crazy sense of "honor" and doesn't quite appear to grasp how multiteam games work - see their arguments over the Pitboss game from some of their players. And AMAZONs are crowded with noobs and we don't know how much "democracy" goes into their decisions, but who knows - they clearly have some folks working very hard at things too. On the bright side, Sirius should either be indifferent or needs our help anyway against Mavericks, and we know they and AMAZONs realistically can't be looking at each to the endgame.

Why don't we propose to offer Pulsar Plateau and Cygnus for ereh rO and a settler?

I would say the trade is not actually worth it to us at this point though... We've invested more in our cities, we'll have the military to defend them, and down the line if we just end up taking CDZ's cities in the future (at least, 50-100 turns down the line we know conflict is inevitable) why not just keep what we have now.

I doubt CDZ will agree to a trade that really benefits us, and we don't gain much by trading now for "even" terms. CDZ has no improvements/workers at ereh ro, nor buildings or anything like we'll have very soon even in our newer cities. And we don't have a spot to put a new settler...and we don't want to waste time on being militarily vulnerable to Mavericks.

So any trade both wouldn't be very beneficial to us, economically or strategically, and even it was a generous trade that leaned towards CDZ's side they might view it as another insult- I don't see that helping.

 

[CharlemagneXLII]

Maybe it would make sense to organize a chat between the ETTT members, so we can bring out our concerns while all teams are listening, and we can coordinate militarily and technologically.