Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[scooter]

Here's Version Two. I wanted to include some things about CFC making gains while they get nothing:

Apolyton and CivPlayers,

I'm sending this to both of your teams since it has been clear for awhile that you are working closely together. I understand the position you guys are in. You don't want to commit to peace with us, but you don't want to leave us alone to tech peacefully. That's completely fair. However, I think you guys are smart enough to know that a full war with us will just be a stalemate. I'm just going to be 100% honest with you guys: we are tracking your builds very closely, and we basically know what you guys have and what you might attack us with. We know it's enough to do some damage, but we also know we will be able to stop it before you guys gain too much. We've even done some simming on killing different stack compositions. Needless to say, our warmongery members are a little too eager about the idea of killing off a dogpile.

Regardless, I think the only winner in this conflict would be CFC, and I don't think you guys want that any more than we do. The reality is we are pushing everything to our western border right now, since we see your teams whipping/drafting, and your NAP expires 5 turns sooner. Our calculations suggest you guys could take 1, maybe 2 cities maximum, then we would hold it to a stalemate. However, if CFC wants they could just walk into our back side 5 turns later. So you guys would do all the work and make no real gains, while CFC takes everything uncontested and becomes the new runaway. I don't think that's such a great deal for your teams, but it's fantastic for CFC.

So I have one last idea for a peaceful compromise:
* NAP until T230 between all 3 of us
* RB will be generating two great persons in the upcoming turns. The first will complete on Turn X, the second will complete on Turn Y. The great person odds on X are <fill them in>, the great person odds on Y are <fill them in>. We will gift you each one of them. You guys can decide between yourself who gets which one.

This is the absolute best offer we can make. It's actually a little too much in my opinion (there is quite a bit of disagreement within our team over this), but our team has decided to offer it. I'd remind you that when it comes to keeping pace with us, this is basically denying us a golden age. If you don't take this, we'll be using this for a golden age at a very decisive time. If you take this, we'll be passing up on that, and our economic recovery will be slowed down considerably. We've also invested heavily in military to defend against both of you rather than building economic things, so you would have accomplished your goals of slowing us down, not to mention the bonus you both would get from a great person.

I would also ask that you please let us know your answer pretty quickly. This offer will have to expire as soon as the turn rolls to T170.

Thanks!
scooter - Team RB

The main addition is paragraph 2 - I took a previous sentence and expanded it into a new paragraph. The rest is unchanged. Let me know if you like this version better.



If you don't want to offer 2 great persons, now would be a good time to make the case against this offer. The general previous consensus though was that it would be worthwhile.

[sunrise089]

Scooter, I really like both drafts. My only concern with the second version is that it opens the possibility to them thinking "fine, our number 1 goal is to bring RB down a peg, and RB is admitting CFC will crush their eastern front. I also think the first paragraph is quite confident with the 'killing off the dogpile' wording relative to the second.

That's a minor quibble though, and again I strongly support this course of action. @pindicator - if they took this deal on T168 or T169 it would basically be saving us ~44 pop in our cities, not to mention the hammers we'll lose killing stacks. I do think we can beat back the forces our enemies are likely to have by T170/T175 respectively, but at crippling costs, and I think we'll collapse completely if they go into crazy-total-war mode and all start/ keep drafting once the initial battles are over.

[scooter]

Sunrise: do you prefer version 1 over version 2 then? I'm on the fence.

So from the peanut gallery, we really need two opinions:
1) Do you support making this offer?
2) If yes, which version do you like better?

And any other comments are welcome of course. Sunrise's support for this offer is pretty meaningful to me, as I think he has the best sense right now of anyone of how much we can handle.

[Commodore]

Nooooo! Blood for the blood god! Lurkers want to see blood!

[Ceiliazul]

I support version 1, wouldn't change a thing. I support the offer, but I think it should expire at beginning of turn 169.

[sunrise089]

I prefer 1 scooter, but I'm very deferential to your sense of how important psychologically it is to Poly (and civplayers to a lesser extent) that they benefit from the war and not just CFC. If you feel like emphasizing that will score points, I'm totally fine with it.

Nooooo! Blood for the blood god! Lurkers want to see blood!

Hehe, parts of the fight would be fun. But again, we're talking slaving another 22 cities and max drafting another 4-5t, and that's just to try to get the west cleaned up. We might not need anything more in the east, but we also might need another round of whips. Oh, and Starfall and The Gauntlet are gone, and possibly one or more cities in the south if civplayers moves where we're not expecting them to. All told that's a cost of what, 2,500 hammers with nothing to show for it beyond the T165 status quo? Peace would be great

[MWIN]

If we think they can gain some cities, why not offer those cities and 1 GP?

Also at some point we should just stop... Looking at email from CP, some of the things are going to personal level and that would bad...They don't want to say they will declare war come turn 170...At the max they will end admitting that after all diplomacy...

[Ellimist]

I have no inherent objection to those messages, but it's pretty clear that they aren't going to accept any proposal, so the only purpose in sending them is if we want to seem desperate.

Do we want to seem desperate?

[scooter]

I prefer 1 scooter, but I'm very deferential to your sense of how important psychologically it is to Poly (and civplayers to a lesser extent) that they benefit from the war and not just CFC. If you feel like emphasizing that will score points, I'm totally fine with it.

I don't think it's such a huge deal, so I think I'm good with V1. I think they are smart enough to piece it together.

If we think they can gain some cities, why not offer those cities and 1 GP?

City gifting is banned, so it would have to be via conquest. So we're offering them something they can just take, so I don't know what the point of that would be.

Also at some point we should just stop... Looking at email from CP, some of the things are going to personal level and that would bad...They don't want to say they will declare war come turn 170...At the max they will end admitting that after all diplomacy...

I don't know how you could say it's on a personal level. I've had a couple blunt-ish chats (more with CFC actually), but everything outside of that has been super pleasant. After the infamous "walk the dog" ending chat with Yossarian, I chatted with him about non-ISDG things just an hour or so later with no problems. I don't think there's any evidence OT4E took anything personally, it's just high-stakes diplomacy.

I support version 1, wouldn't change a thing. I support the offer, but I think it should expire at beginning of turn 169.

I would prefer this too, but we're on T168 already. They will likely have finished playing their T168 turn by the time we send this. So I don't think that's reasonable of us to expect them to answer within 12 hours or so.

Actually, maybe we should expedite this and I should send it before I go to bed tonight. I don't like so little of the team seeing the message, though.

I have no inherent objection to those messages, but it's pretty clear that they aren't going to accept any proposal, so the only purpose in sending them is if we want to seem desperate.

I disagree with every word of this.

[darrelljs]

I think 2 is more likely to make then wait until t175 to attack, so I also prefer 1.

Darrell