Diplomacy Master Thread- Helping Your Opponents Beat Themselves

[scooter]

WPC gave me a quick confirmation:

Hello,

a quick reply.

We are in a process of discussing and polling (there is always polls) about the Open Borders proposal.
I set a deadline to this weekend, so I'll contact you again when we have reached the decision.

Tatu
FM of WPC

I'm going to draft responses to German team and CFC now.

[scooter]

Alright, here's a stab at responding to the German team. I have to respond to the known tech thing as literally half their (short) message was talking about it, so I did.

Great! Hopefully we can defog a trade route with you quickly so that we can benefit from Open Borders. We will stay out of your borders to keep the no-scouting deal. Do you see a good way to connect a route to you? Your first message was a little unclear, so I was hoping to understand better if you can make it more clear.

Our team is not wanting to share too much for the tech bonus this early. We might be interested later in the game when it has a greater effect, but for now let's wait. I hope that's OK, we just assign a slightly higher value to keeping our tech progress silent in the early turns .

Thanks!
scooter - Team RB

[mostly_harmless]

I think that's fine.

mh

[kjn]

I think something along the line that with no tech trading, we feel it is best for us to research the techs we need as soon as possible, instead of waiting until it is cheaper to research.

[kalin]

Great! Hopefully we can defog a trade route with you quickly so that we can benefit from Open Borders. We will stay out of your borders to keep the no-scouting deal. Do you see a good way to connect a route to you? Your first message was a little unclear, so I was hoping to understand better if you can make it more clear.

Our team is not wanting to share too much for the tech bonus this early. We might be interested later in the game when it has a greater effect, but for now let's wait. I hope that's OK, we just assign a slightly higher value to keeping our tech progress silent in the early turns .

Suggested changes in the first paragraph:

"Great! Hopefully we can defog a trade route with you quickly so that we can benefit from Open Borders. We will stay out of your borders to keep the no-scouting deal. Your first message was a little unclear regarding the Open Borders, please confirm you agree with this? Also, do you see a good way to connect a route to you?"

Regarding the second paragraph, in my opinion it comes out a bit negative. I am thinking that we could say either:

"We prefer to wait until later to discuss an agreement about coordinating research."

if we want to kill discussion for a while, or:

"How would you envisage an agreement to coordinate research?"

If we want to keep talking about it, which I think we probably don't.

Kalin

[scooter]

Ok, here's a draft to CFC. Handling the border stuff with them is tricky since we just haven't scouted in their direction.

CFC/Caledorn,

Quick clarification - you said UCiv is west of WPC and Northwest of you. Are you mixing up east and west? We are northwest of you and the German team is west of UCiv, so that part was a tiny bit confusing.

Things are going well with WPC and the German team. The German team is a bit slow to respond, but they seem very cordial. I tried sending a message to the barbarians, but they just told me my head would look better on a pole. None too thrilled about that, so we declared war on them.

Scouting efforts have been OK, but now that barbarians are making their presence known, we're trying to exercise caution by keeping more units home. We've easily been able to kill them so far, but I suspect they'll start getting stronger soon. We did find the Oasis, but we didn't really go past it so that we could get back in time for barbarians. Is there any specific location you're looking at settling?

Thanks,
scooter - Team RB

Thoughts? Given that the land in that direction isn't real amazing, I think we'd be happy just splitting the stuff between us evenly and calling it a day.

[scooter]

Ok, thanks kjn and kalin. For the first paragraph - the last sentence is probably confusing which is overwhelmingly ironic. I was trying to keep the language simple so we don't have a language barrier issue. How about this:

Great! Hopefully we can defog a trade route with you quickly so that we can benefit from Open Borders. We will stay out of your borders to keep the no-scouting deal. Do you see a good way to connect a route to you? Is there maybe a river to your south that we have not seen?

Second paragraph, I tried to use kjn's suggestion, which does make it sound nicer because it makes a lot of sense:

For the early turns, our team feels it is best to research the techs we need as soon as possible instead of waiting for them to be cheaper to research. We might be interested later in the game when it has a greater effect, but for now let's wait. I hope that's OK! We'd be happy to consider it later in the game when it's more than 2-3 beakers .

Thoughts?

[kjn]

I think going on discussing using the known tech discount with the German team will be counter-productive. If they are after micro efficiencies, then it's a worthwhile thing to discuss, but I hope and think our team is much more for macro efficiencies - ie get the techs we need the soonest we can, even if that path is slightly more expensive.

Going on discussing it without making that stance of ours clear will simply cause a lot of aggravation among them, since we can easily be seen as stalling all the time.

[scooter]

I'm not sure what you're suggesting exactly? I thought that paragraph makes our stance pretty clear.

[mostly_harmless]

Ok, here's a draft to CFC. Handling the border stuff with them is tricky since we just haven't scouted in their direction.

CFC/Caledorn,

Quick clarification - you said UCiv is west of WPC and Northwest of you. Are you mixing up east and west? We are northwest of you and the German team is west of UCiv, so that part was a tiny bit confusing.

Uhm, the German team is west of UCiv??? You mean west of WPC, right?

mh