Niccolò Machiavelli's Thread

[darrelljs]

They have met Menagerie, who is to their NW. I suspect diplo will pick up when we settle our second city .

Darrell

[pling]

Random speculation - is the map a donut? Sea to our east & south, coastline visible to Gillette's north but they still have a neighbour northwest. So will we meet someone fairly promptly to our NE when we start scouting there?

[darrelljs]

Donut is one of the few viable maps with an odd number of teams.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

Hmm.

Dear Brazilian Brunnmigi,

We've been thinking and discussing a question you posed to us a couple messages ago. You said this: "We agree that cooperation is key in these games, and feel your team is made up of honorable folks. Did you have something more concrete in mind, or just a generic "let's hold hands and sing Kumbayah"?"

We've given this further thought, and we'd like to push towards something more concrete between us. We strongly believe that we'd really like to be close friends with one of our neighbors. Although we also border Team Menagerie, we've come to believe that we would prefer to work closely with your team. It will take quite a bit of time to build up the kind of trust necessary for this to really work, but we'd like to start on that now.

Our first suggestion is to not settle towards each other with our first cities. We will agree to settle away from Caipirinha if you will likewise settle away from Occam's Razor. On our side, we do not want Menagerie to be able to sit and hoard wonders while the rest of us fight, and on your side we know that you'll want to leverage Sury of India into a land advantage. We're eager to hear your thoughts on this.

One last note - we've realized teams are not often logged into the team accounts for chat, so our diplomats would like to add your diplomats on chat if that works for you. It's just a much easier medium of communication sometimes. You can reach either of these accounts at any time:
realmsbeyondscooter@gmail.com
rbmerovech@gmail.com

Thanks!
Team Gillette

Three approaches:

1. Agree and settle our second city for the gold.
2. Don't agree and live with the fallout.
3. Negotiate a border and still grab gold next.

I vote #3, although we are settling so fast #1 is also viable.

Darrell

[novice]

Just say we're settling our first city west since it's our best available spot, but it's clearly in our sphere of influence?

[novice]

Ask what their GLH ETA is while you're at it.

[plako]

Their plan seem to be settling either for GLH near the coast or towards Menagerie. My guess is planting for GLH. We should not reveal immediately what we're planning to do. Maybe later when negotiations continue. After all one of our main strength is potential for very fast land grabbing. If we somehow limit it, there needs to be a very good reason for it.

Darrells options 1-2 are not my favorites and especially 1 would be very bad. Why would we want to get game long enemy at this point of the game. #2 might be option, but negotiations are definately the way to go.

I would send a quick response saying something along the lines:
* Thank you for the offer. We'll discuss about it
* Tell that our 1st settling position is still under depate in our team
* Ask what do they offer in exchange, if we limit our land grabbing machinery on their direction
* Ask about GLH - as a joke

If you get this fast out I think it is enough and ball is in their corner.

[Nydaeli]

It's important to encourage tensions between Gillette and Menagerie. We definitely want to encourage them to settle toward Menagerie. It might be worth it to postpone the gold city. If so, we probably want to settle southeast toward the copper - the northern spots aren't especially promising so far. We'll want to aim for an early GLH ourselves. I will get to work simming this possibility.

[zakalwe]

We'll never cede the gold spot to them. So what's the point in settling it third instead of second?

Just tell them straight up that our best spot is to our west, and our second best to our east, so we'll settle them in that order. Still, we're open to negotiate borders.

I wonder if all this could simply a way for them to fish for our second city location, with regards to TGL. Still, if we want to build trust I guess we will just have to give them some free information, and wait and see if they reciprocate.

[novice]

Just tell them straight up that our best spot is to our west, and our second best to our east, so we'll settle them in that order. Still, we're open to negotiate borders.

Actually our second best spot is also to our west, having copper, a river, lots of forests and two food resources. It's just awkward to settle it as our third city, I haven't found a sim for that that I'm happy with. (since it NEEDs AH but we WANT pottery).