Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Any knowledge about if they have any Dogs (axes) out?

The danger is if they get some Agg Dogs out, because they can ruin someone's day. The best thing to do for now is to get some kind of sentry out in the area between them us and dogman.

[mostly_harmless]

Any knowledge about if they have any Dogs (axes) out?

The danger is if they get some Agg Dogs out, because they can ruin someone's day. The best thing to do for now is to get some kind of sentry out in the area between them us and dogman.

Especially important, since the CFC scout made contact with them coming directly from our direction!

mh

[kjn]

Any knowledge about if they have any Dogs (axes) out?

The danger is if they get some Agg Dogs out, because they can ruin someone's day. The best thing to do for now is to get some kind of sentry out in the area between them us and dogman.

I doubt it - we haven't seen any huge power spikes that coincided with them gaining a tech, and dogs require BW which they don't have.

[Dantski]

Would CFC have told WPC where we are? Did Caledorn mention that?

[scooter]

Would CFC have told WPC where we are? Did Caledorn mention that?

No he didn't mention it. Next time I see him around online and/or when I send a reply, I'll ask about that.

[Sullla]

We Play Civ is a neighbor, excellent! :D They are unquestionably one of the weakest teams in the game. Kjn has already given the basic idea of their mistakes thus far, but I'll add that they also opened with a warrior over a worker, and we have them an estimated 400 beakers behind us in tech (!!!) Our current beakers for discovered techs are 1008, they are at 630. We also have 50% more pop, a third city, and far more developed tiles. Yikes. We just wait until midgame when their Native American early defensive bonuses are no longer in effect, then go for the juggular against a backwards civ. Perfect.

I don't think we need to send any units up there to scout, at least not immediately. We don't really have any spare units in the immediate future. Let's ask CFC to give WPC directions to us, and have them come meet us. Keep in mind that:

1) CFC will probably do this anyway regardless of what we say.
2) WPC is a team of role-players unlikely to be aggressive early.
3) WPC doesn't have Bronze Working tech.
4) This is a full diplo game.

I see virtually no chance that WPC would try to come after us in the early game, so we might as well see if we can make contact quickly and get diplomacy going. If we don't have a lot of units on hand for scouting, might as well try and get them to come visit us.

[scooter]

We Play Civ is a neighbor, excellent! :D They are unquestionably one of the weakest teams in the game. Kjn has already given the basic idea of their mistakes thus far, but I'll add that they also opened with a warrior over a worker, and we have them an estimated 400 beakers behind us in tech (!!!) Our current beakers for discovered techs are 1008, they are at 630. We also have 50% more pop, a third city, and far more developed tiles. Yikes. We just wait until midgame when their Native American early defensive bonuses are no longer in effect, then go for the juggular against a backwards civ. Perfect.

I don't think we need to send any units up there to scout, at least not immediately. We don't really have any spare units in the immediate future. Let's ask CFC to give WPC directions to us, and have them come meet us. Keep in mind that:

1) CFC will probably do this anyway regardless of what we say.
2) WPC is a team of role-players unlikely to be aggressive early.
3) WPC doesn't have Bronze Working tech.
4) This is a full diplo game.

I see virtually no chance that WPC would try to come after us in the early game, so we might as well see if we can make contact quickly and get diplomacy going. If we don't have a lot of units on hand for scouting, might as well try and get them to come visit us.

Agreed with all of this.

I hate border agreements, but it's worth considering trying to work out a general agreement with CFC, and then use that to steal a lot of land between us and WPC. Depends on if the land is worthwhile of course, but I think we can get a land advantage that way. The long CFC NAP gives us some flexibility in that regard too.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Regarding the map, it looks more lush to the north with all that jungle and arid to the south with all the plains. I'm guessing we're in the bottom (southern) 1/3 to 1/2 of the map/torroid and we'd have to slash through jungle to settle at WPC. It will be a little while until we can make that land useful. I don't see this changing our settling plans immediately. Fish, then FPs in the south for 4-5. Any guesses to how wide the jungle belt may be? If they have dyes, I'm guessing most of that 7 tiles distance NE of MM to be jungle. Going to need a lot of workers to make that pay out.

If WPC is 7 tiles NE of our borders, that would be 11N, 13E of our capital by my count. CFC appears to be a bit closer than that (if the oasis as a midpoint is to be believed, 9E of cap).

What can we extrapolate from this?

[Sullla]

A little bit more context on We Play Civ as a community... They play a fair amount of PBEM games over there, although the level of play is significantly lower than at Realms Beyond. (Not trying to be a jerk about this, it's just a fact.) There's a big Pitboss game currently taking place at WPC, involving many of their community regulars along with our old friends Sommerswerd and 2metraninja from CivFanatics. Now some of you might remember that when 2metra played in the RB Duel league, he didn't particularly stand out. He lost to Yuris and mackoti (well, no shame there) and defeated Catwalk for a record of 1-2. Based on what I saw, 2metra would likely fall somewhere between average and slightly below average in terms of skill placing at Realms Beyond.

I bring this up to point out how 2metra and Sommers are doing against the We Play Civ community:



They're destroying everyone, with the top two scores in the game. This is a really silly format for a game, on a Huge islands map with six teams of 2 players each (Sommers and 2metra playing together). There's also full tech trading, the starts aren't remotely balanced, and so on. Basically where RB was in terms of the MP metagame about 2-3 years ago. Still, I find it noteworthy that fairly average players are completely destroing the WPC community in their own Pitboss game. Here's a minimap from one of the teams:



2metra has 17 cities on Turn 150. Many of the WPC teams are still sitting around with 5-8 cities, making no move to expand off their starting island on this archipelago map.

Here's a dotmap from WPC player E_T:



Here's an opening sequence from player Zoid:



Rome's capital 30 turns into the game:



I can go on, but you get the point. This is not a particularly skilled team. Although we don't want to get overconfident, we should very much be looking to take advantage of their weaknesses. Do not sign some kind of 100 turn NAP or other nonsense - dem cities are going to be changing ownership down the road.

[Tyrmith]

Note for anyone like me who couldn't get the screenshots to load from sullla's post, you need to be logged into the WPC site when you visit their site for the screenshots to load.