[SPOILERS] Bismark of Sumeria (luddite + Atlas1998)

[luddite]

Talked to Mackoti a little bit more just now. He said something like "the reason I asked you not to settle in the choke point is so that I'll have access to my land down there", which implies that he would be really pissed off if i blocked the choke and claimed it all for myself. But what choice do I have? If I don't, the other civs will outexpand me, and there's a lot of nice land down there. Including my only available source of gems and ivory.

I could offer to split that land with him, I guess. But it's hard to think of any split that would work, especially with the gems and silver. It's a tricky diplomatic situation, and I need to think more about this.
edit: I guess one possibility would be to let him settle the land west of the chokepoint, but on the condition that he give or trade me the gems and ivory for a long time. That's worth thinking about.
edit 2: On the plus side, I'm negotiating from a position of strength here. I'm pretty sure I can settle the choke point before he can, and if I do that he's pretty much screwed (assuming he honors our NAP).

[Ellimist]

FWIW, I don't think it is worth giving up that land just to (maybe) get some goodwill from another team. You have to focus on what's best for you because nobody else is going to.

[luddite]

Man it's depressing looking at the demographics right now. Plako has about twice as much food yield as me. The only consolation is that I'll be able to grow quickly over the coming turns, as soon as I hook up fur and gold for happiness, while building workboats and pastures.

I'm definitely going to skip the ToA and build settlers instead. It's more expensive than I thought (350! wow) I need to expand fast. Apparently Parkin didn't actually want it though, he was just angling for the Great Library. Well too bad, I've got a lock on that one.

Still trying to think of how I should handle the situation with Mackoti. I noticed that he has a settler heading east, towards the choke point. Right now I'm thinking of stalling him for a while, and then just before I settle the choke I'll send him a message like "hey I hope this isn't a problem, but I'm settling there for the nice food". He did say it was Ok for me to settle there... And I could offer to let him settle one or 2 cities below it, if it'll mollify him.

[Lewwyn]

FWIW, I don't think it is worth giving up that land just to (maybe) get some goodwill from another team. You have to focus on what's best for you because nobody else is going to.

I agree with this statement Luddite. You have to take the game into your own hands here. Even if Mackoti becomes a bit angry, I don't see any reason to allow him to out settle you just because he thinks its "his territory". I think you can be the nice guy and miss out, or the aggressive guy who fights for a top spot. I guess it all depends on how much mackoti's goodwill is worth to you.

[luddite]

I agree with this statement Luddite. You have to take the game into your own hands here. Even if Mackoti becomes a bit angry, I don't see any reason to allow him to out settle you just because he thinks its "his territory". I think you can be the nice guy and miss out, or the aggressive guy who fights for a top spot. I guess it all depends on how much mackoti's goodwill is worth to you.

Yeah you're probably right. Even if he declared war on me immediately and broke our NAP, he'd have nowhere to attack except a hill city with high culture defended by vultures (better than axemen for high-multiplier situations). He's not getting through that very easily!

[luddite]

damn, plako has already caught up to me in score. I knew it would happen eventually, but I didn't expect it to happen quite this fast. Parkin is close behind, also. And both of them are ahead of me in GNP right now, since I'm researching fishing which has no prerequisites.

However, this is when I'm at pretty much the low ebb from building the oracle. All the sacrifices I made to speed it up are showing clearly now (-1 city, no cows, no gold) and none of the advantages have kicked in yet (no forges or collossus yet). Things will get better soon, after I've built some forges, and everyone has expanded enough that -1 city (the oracle cost me exactly 100 hammers) isn't as a big a deal.

[luddite]

Geez, plako grew again this turn! That's an 8 point increase last turn, and a 9 point increase this turn. So a classical tech and 5 pop points! He got writing, since I can now sign open borders with him. edit: actually most of that is probably land points, with his creative culture. This is exactly 20 turns after he got that city from WarriorKnight. But , he's still doing quite well.

Here's the demographics. You can see just how far ahead he is in food and production.

If this goes on much longer, it may be time to think about a Grand Alliance.

[luddite]

I managed to make contact with WarriorKnight this turn by a lucky warrior contact near Nakor.


I'm getting sailing next, which will give me trade routes with (immediately) LP and mackoti, and (as soon as I explore a little more coast) plako and Nakor.

[luddite]

I made a pretty big mistake. I set up a special email account for this game, and I forgot to check it after a while because no one was emailing me. Mackoti sent me 2 emails in the last 2 days. The first was asking me to promise that I wouldn't settle in the choke point, and the second one was pretty accusatory.

Hi,
Well from what i see until now, first you had to go from chat and second played 2 turns and no answer to my mail , i will straight with letting diplomacy aside(ye not small talking) , if you setle after the wine our NAP its void then, because when we signed the NAP until turn 100 that was the frontier between us.You can check al my games i respected all my NAP's but only if the other respected.
Why i ask you that? Because i will remain without space to setle and war be my only option, i have a strong NAP with Sleepingmoogle and he is respecting his part of agreement,and dont believe if i am a rooky here i will not fight.Probably will get both of us out of game.
I am sure that we will not get to war and find a solution but i will not negociate first thing from our NAP, that we will respect wine like frontier between us .Man imagine i go and setle near your rice, ye is same distance from my capitol to the land south , the only thing wich made me not clamiming until now is some nasty peaks(tanks krill).
Regards,
Mackoti

Now, it's true that I was hoping to stall him some more in diplomacy, but I never intended to just ignore his emails. So this is the response I've sent him:

Hey! I'm really sorry, i was busy for the last two days and I forgot to check this account. (This isn't my usual email account, I just set it up for the civ game, so I don't get much email here). I wasn't trying to dodge you earlier, I needed to meet my girlfriend so I was hurrying to finish the turn.

For now, my plan is just to settle the land directly south of me, east of the wine, which you agreed is mine. However, what you said earlier was " if its posible, to dont setle exactly the choke point(if its not posible its allright)" so I think we should negotiate where to place cities after that. I never agreed to let you have all the land past it, which is actually the same land distance away from me as it is from you.

This is a bit dishonest since I didn't admit that I'm planning to settle the choke as fast as possible. But everything here is literally true.

[Ellimist]

If your game email address is gmail(Which is also nice for chatting,) then you can have it automartically forward mail to another address. You can even customize it so it only forwards mail under certain circumstances(such as if a particular word is present.)

This way you wouldn't have to check the "extra" email account... You would only need to log into it to for outgoing mail.