In light of the renewed NAP with Dazed that we agreed to today (through the end of T80) and the ensuing conversation where we agreed to beat up on both Slowwalk and Sian, I went ahead and took the gold Catwalk offered rather than waiting on a great person deal to finalize. It was a rather poor deal I swung for us, settling for 60 gold for 8 turns of marble, but no one else is going to buy the marble (I'm not offering it to Sian) because I want Catwalk to build the MoM in his Pyramids city, which he is going to do. That way when Dazed declares war on Catwalk and razes the Pyramids, he'll burn the Mausoleum at the same time. The fire will burn twice as brightly, I'm sure.
While he's doing that I'll be moving a nasty stack of bows into Sian's territory and pillaging just as many cottages as I can find. I expect he'll kill my pillaging force without
too much trouble but I can replace lost units a lot faster than he can regrow his hamlets, villages and towns (if any). The war won't really hurt too much diplomatically, Sian already knows I'm not in his corner. The danger to us and Dazed is that Sian and Catwalk put aside their differences and form a real partnership against us. I'm still not certain that Dazed and I doing separate 1v1s is the right plan, but it's worth a shot. My preference would be a 3v1 dogpile against Sian, followed by an immediate backstab of Catwalk as soon as we're done being hostile with Sian. However, Dazed has concerns about herding three teams toward the same goal and I can't blame him for that. It seems like the larger the dogpile, the less everyone contributes.
The method of attack that seems most likely to succeed for Dazed would be a quick two move strike at the pyramids city. Build a bunch of chariots (he says he's far from HBR) and throw bodies at the city to burn it. One problem we face with Catwalk is that they can put Hwachas in the field soon, which is one more reason to use mounted units against them. Building catapults? OK, we'll have to try flanking them away.
Another option I'm discussing with Dazed is doing a 2v1 vs. either Sian or Slowwalk first, so we can concentrate our forces and bring more pressure to one spot than the opponent can. This would maximize our production advantage, such as we have. I'm currently last in MFG so this would be useful for me. However, that would require me to declare war on Catwalk, which I'm loathe to do for the loss of the trade routes. In the end, though, it's likely to happen anyway once he realizes that Dazed and I have some kind of deal working together (our NAPs have been secret for this reason).
One question, though. Since Catwalk is already in representation, razing the Pyramids won't actually hurt him that much since he'll just stay in that civic. All he would lose is the engineer points and flexibility to change to another civic if he wanted to. So the question is, what is the best way to hurt a PHI nation already in representation, at the least cost to yourself? Clearly burning cities is desirable, but it's not like a pillage war would do much. I pillaged a farm...great, he'll build another, no loss. Burning cities costs more unit and requires more dedication to the task. I'm not sure of Dazed's level of commitment to the job at this point. It's a tenuous alliance we have at best since I see him as a rather Machiavellian player. This seems to be an alliance based on utility for both of us, not on trust, not the best basis for a working relationship. He could prove me wrong, though, and if so -- when you read this, sorry Dazed! Of course, he should probably be saying the same about me. Someone else in this forum has previously been called a "naked opportunist"; I'm not sure if I'd want that for myself, but this is a diplo game, right?
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