Diplo with Gillette

[TheHumanHydra]

I doubt that they'll forget about NAPs with us, but overall I think this could produce a very good situation for us. I'll go check out that message.

Edit: This is a fairly substantial (proposed) revision, so I thought I'd run it by you:

Greetings Gillette,

We agree to a NAP to T175 with RoP included.

As for the gifting of Catapults, it is something we are seriously considering. The one caveat is that we need to confirm that you have researched Construction before we gift you any. The Trolls have Alphabet, so they would know if you have Construction or not. So if they see Catapults coming at them, with you not having the tech yet, they will know we gave them to you. We think it would be better if our involvement remained a secret for now, so as to be a surprise later.

We're sorry we signed such a long NAP with the Trolls; we hadn't expected you to go to war with them quite so soon! But we are eager to help in any way we can until it expires.


I omitted the part approving of them razing cities, because I thought it might give the impression that we were trying to manipulate them. I also made it a lot more eager-sounding, in hopes of spurring them on (so, I guess ... to manipulate them!). What do you think?

[HitAnyKey]

Sounds good to me.

[TheHumanHydra]

Ok, I'll send it then.

[HitAnyKey]

Message from Gillette:

Hi Menagerie,

We plan for construction to be one of our next few techs.

I'm looking at our power graphs, and I think that the ending of our old NAP could be a useful disguise for building up a Troll-fighting force. This is just an idea so tell me if you think it's dumb, but how about:
- we both build up military at a moderate rate over the next few turns
- we declare war on you at around t130, we both carry on building units - you concentrate on cats while we build Zerks (I'm hoping to have about 30 eventually, but haven't gone into details yet)
- you sit your cats on our border
- we sign peace ~t137 with whatever gifts of catapults or money for us to use against Trolls disguised somehow (not sure how to be honest)
- around t141-145 we attack Trolls
I know that Plako, Pling and Novice are still playing for Trolls, so I presume they are hot on C&D and we'll need a good disguise.

Finally I know you've been exploring Troll lands recently - any intel on defenses or screenshots would be very helpful.

All the best
Gillette

[TheHumanHydra]

Interesting how we had a similar idea. And disguising the transfer would not be as hard as they think - the lost catapults would cause a drop in our power similar to if we had suffered a military defeat. But I feel like we may need a guarantee of some kind that they aren't playing us. Any ideas?

[TheHumanHydra]

Hey HAK, I'm sorry to bother you at this time but I could really use some indication as to how I can respond to Gillette. I don't know if this is crazy, but I'm inclined to agree to their proposal.

[Lord Parkin]

From Gillette:

Hi Guys,

Just curious what you thought - too zany? Or has Plako just got too many spies in your territory for it to be convincing?

Cheers
Old Harry

I'm a bit out of touch obviously, but my response to this sort of proposal would depend on the circumstances in the game. Do we trust Gillette - especially parking Catapults in a vulnerable place? Are we happy to play for second or third place? (We may have been doing this already, I'm not sure.) Would we prefer a potential Gillette victory to a potential Troll victory?

Just a few ideas to help anyway.

[TheHumanHydra]

I sent this message in response - they're obviously anxious for an answer, so I thought I'd not waste any more time:

Hey,

Very sorry for the late response - your message caught us at a bad time; half our team (ie. HAK) has been travelling. I don't think the transfer of the catapults would be difficult to disguise from a demographics perspective - it would just look like war losses - but you're right, dancing them around the Trolls' scouts, while maintaining the appearance of active warfare, might be difficult. I at least remain interested in trying to make this work, but I need to talk with HAK to make sure this is the route we want to go. He got back this evening, so hopefully we'll be able to talk it over presently. Anyway, I just thought I'd send you this message since you were obviously and understandably waiting on a reply - I should have sent one sooner!

Talk to you very soon,

THH

I kept the idea on the table but didn't commit to anything. I was also very honest (without revealing anything we shouldn't); hopefully they'll see that and understand we're not stringing them along. I should have sent a message like this sooner for that reason.

LP, I've thought about these concerns, and here are the conclusions I came to: we can trickle the catapults to Gillette instead of giving them as a lump so as to lessen the risk of sudden betrayal, and we can make it very clear to them we consider any agreement we make to be binding and any breach of it to be cheating. Also, we're not a soft target - we're I think #1 in power - so given the choice of attacking two hard targets, I think they'd prefer to take the clear leader in the game down a notch than a trailing power. And the leader being taken down a notch can only benefit us. We definitely are a trailing power, but I think we're still playing for first - we just need the leaders to get at each other's throats so we can maneuver ourselves to an advantage. What do you think?

[Lord Parkin]

From Gillette:

Hey Chaps

We recently got research visibility on Trolls. At the moment they are 2t away from Education, so gunpowder wouldn't be far behind - at which point our Zerks are considerably less useful! If you are happy with the idea I think we need to declare on you in the next two turns in the hope they'll be reassured and skip gunpowder.

At that point you could ask Trolls for aid (either money or to declare on us themselves?), then if they ask how it's going a couple of turns into the war say you stuffed your nearest cities with enough units that we didn't attack but you think we're going to fork your back line cities from the sea (insult our inept planning as much as possible please!)

I know one Troll scout was near pigpen last turn, have they got any other units in your lands that could expose this misinformation?

If you can gift catapults to us for an attack on t141 they will need to be in Halberd (on the PigPen border) by eot138. So we could have a brief war from t130 or t131 to t136 then
- I offer peace eot136 with open borders
- you accept and gift units somewhere near Halberd t137

This won't be completely convincing as we won't have any war weariness showing up, but I think it's our best shot.

What do you think?
Old Harry

[TheHumanHydra]

Thanks, LP.

Message sent:

Hey guys,

Thank you for that information, although it is alarming. We agree that you should declare war on us as soon as possible; plako has been asking about the state of our NAP with you and a state of war would greatly simplify our attempts to deceive him! Further, it's clear he suspects you will declare war on them.

There are two Troll units in our territory right now, the scout you saw and a chariot north of there near African Safari. HAK had a thought about how to explain the transfer of catapults and phoney war: we could tell the Trolls you demanded them in exchange for peace; you would just have to show enough units on our borders for us to appear legitimately intimidated. What do you think?

Also, even if the phoney war isn't entirely convincing, hopefully the attack will be devastating enough that the Trolls won't be able to do anything about the deception. Speaking of which, how many catapults do you estimate you will require to ensure the attack's success? We're currently building them in almost all our cities.

Finally, we were wondering if you would agree to a 100-turn NAP effective from the signing of the peace in a few turns. We trust you, but we just want to have it on paper that our catapults won't be used against us in anything like the near future.

We look forward to our mutual endeavour!
THH