Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[scooter]

Yeah, WPC said they were safe earlier, which implies a NAP with UniversCiv.

Here's an idea for collaboration with UCiv: They fund us to Communism, we gift them the great spy, they infiltrate us and steal a bunch of techs.

I love this. Can somebody do some cool math or something so that if they go "uh is that worth it for us?" I can point to said shiny math as proof?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I wouldn't make light of Apolyton's rifles. They are actually very scary right now. Yes, their empire is smaller and less productive and has much fewer population than us, but they still have ~18 cities and that's plenty enough draft out a big scary army. Give them 5 turns to rapiddraft, and they can make 25 rifles. Can we really fight that off? We'll need a ton of catapults, and even then a good hammer exchange is going to be difficult. I mean, you see people doing Deity games where they whip out a massive army of cavalry from 7 cities and use them to conquer the AI (of course, we're much harder to crack).

So yes, Gunpowder next.



(from here)

The Gauntlet is doomed. No way about it, first turn of the war, they put a stack on the hill 1NW of the city, and we're not getting good odds on our collateral initiative. After they take Gauntlet, they head 3SE or so via suddenly uncultured roads and threaten Mano, Weil and Helm. Alas, these are poorly developed peripheral cities and their cultural borders are very light. We'll need to get the forest tiles cleared out in that area very quickly. It would suck if they had enough time to run into the safety of the jungles and threaten ditchdigger.

I really really don't like the idea of going Communism next. Yes, it's the best economic option, but it's hazardous and requires a long tech path that offers nothing to defend us with (Chemistry-Scimeth-Communism). Well actually Grenadiers are on the path but those aren't draftable, and I'd rather go Banking-Repparts-Rifling and make use of the sheer size of our empire (and the fact we're already in Nationhood).

Remember, we're a good 10 or so cities ahead of anyone else, we have the advantage of size and better long-term outcomes. Hence, we make no bold powerplays (we've made enough of those already), it's time to buckle down and start playing conservatively and use the fact that time is on our side.

Also, someone should check our F3 screen and see if we've gone up to multiple turns for a single civic switch

(We should also answer CPers when the date of the NAP actually ends.)

Edit: I also suggest we pillage the road on the wines tile, so to force poly to use workers if they want to speed towards Weil.

I also suggest we talk to CivFR let them know that we will happily take on the brunt of poly's assault, and they are welcome to go in the back and relieve that ridiculous salient they have going (assuming that they don't have a NAP).

[Speaker]

Even then a good hammer exchange is going to be difficult

This is something that I have seen frequently during this game, and it irks me every time. We don't need an even hammer exchange. We have double their cities. Hammer exchange really doesn't matter that much. What matters is pushing back the inevitable attack, and gaining ourselves some breathing room. Evaluating the hammers exchanged as we were capturing every German city made no sense to me. Not only were we capturing cities, tiles, and future hammer/commerce/food production, we were eliminating a rival. "But we lost 3 maces to kill 1 longbow!" So what?

[pindicator]

+1 to what Speaker says. And wb 25 barrage catapults going into 25 rifles. They get a lot easier after that

[Commodore]

+1 to what Speaker says. And wb 25 barrage catapults going into 25 rifles. They get a lot easier after that

...butt still sore...

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Okay let's all focus on beating back their initial advance then. Step one, build another 25 catapults (we'll need the rest on our other fronts).

Also, while I never cared about hammer exchanges back then, I do now because we still only have so many hammers to throw around. And unlike before, we're not gaining any land or reducing our enemy's production potential (but have the risk of having such done to us). So we need to talk about tech:
Option 1: Gunpowder-Banking-RepParts-Rifling (6100 wikia beakers, no modifications made for modifiers from map size/difficulty)

Option 2: Gunpowder-Chemistry-Milscience (5000 wikia beakers) then Scimeth-Communism (5200 wikia beakers).

They're both expensive, but I still lean towards the latter.

[pindicator]

Should we delay more economic buildings for units? We only have 10t to build and move these units into position

[antisocialmunky]

Can we take this to the Turn Discussion thread?

This might warrant a separate thread on how we are going to fight the Apolyton.

I think that it is likely that Apolyton may not be trying to take us out of the game. I don't think they can realistically throw enough at us to take us down completely so strategically I think their goals are our jungle belt cities and trying to deprive us of Ex-Germany to rebalance the world.

Can we get WPC to do nothing build us catapults? They could be good for that. Not sure what we can give them though? Old drafted Maces to keep them kinda safe from CFC?

[Lewwyn]

Please remember that all we have to do is hold them off. They will have massive unhappy penalties from drafting and will be going offensive against a civ with the statue of Zeus. If anything brick by brick is the most important thing to protect.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

No way in hell, not after we just screwed WPC out of land.

I'll try to throw together a thread...