AlphaShard
Emperor
@Irgy: Thanks for clearing that up, yeah I thought that's what Bulb and Husch were saying.
I will go on record as the naysayer. I would be more than happy to end our alliance with Amazon, if I thought we were prepared for the potential consequences. As I argued before, I think the consequences are unclear and risky. I am not opposed to risk, but I think we should be prepared if things go badly. I am not sure that we are.
I understand that people think we are being played for fools, but I can also see that Amazon could be being completely honest with us. Their last message seems pretty reasonable. They disagree with us keeping the city, but would rather focus on our current conflicts. This seems rather pragmatic to me.
However, it seems the rest of the team thinks we have an opportunity to put ourselves in a much stronger position by risking conflict with Amazon, so I will go along with whatever the team decides.
Hell, two turns to research it... we could send a message saying "Ok, we won't get Scientific Method like we were planning, we'll switch to Economics". Send it near the end of a turn and we'll just about have it before they get around to complaining about it. And then they can't even tell us we didn't tell them we were researching it.
We'd really like to get Economics before the end of the golden age, so if we don't do this we should at least prompt them to hurry the hell up with it.
It sounds straightout blackmail, doesn't it?