MZ,
My apologies for taking a while to respond, we did not have time for all our members to comment on it.
This proposal of yours has made us think... a lot. While the proposal is certainly inventive, we see a couple of big problems with it.
First of all, declaring war on us is far from ideal right now.
- the 3 slaves and 2 marines are not really an issue, we can afford to lose those. We were hoping to use them as distractions for Lego anyway, to lure them out of their cities, or at least let their battered tanks not heal next turn. That's not really the point. More casualaties have fallen, and a lot more will before we are done with Lego.
- however, it is our understanding, that by declaring war we would lose our lux deal. We would also lose the ability to receive rubber from you. You can't offer peace and lux at the same time, without an accepted peace deal, we don't have open trade routes. While the rubber would be bad, the lux is disastrous... you can compensate for this by using the slider, we can not. We would lose many cities to disorder (the un-ww doesn't help enough, we are already getting hit by Lego ww)
- and, we do not like fake wars. We have discussed this in the context of RP as well, and decided against it. We are not going to start RP's GA by sacrificing one of our units. Nor are we going to fake a war to get out of mobilization. So we can't fake war, just because a couple of our slaves are in the way either.
Further, what real benefits would it bring to us? As far as I can tell, not much. Smith is the only thing worth it on Legoland right now. It would be cool to keep Legopolis, just for that one wonder. But it holds a serious risk as well. Legopolis is in disorder, and while I didn't calculate it precisely, it has somewhere in the region of 10-30% chance of flipping next turn (10% when not in disorder when we get it, but it was built before EotS, so there is no way to set entertainers if it is in disorder)
The same happens to all other cities: flipping chance of undefended cities, in disorder, with many resisters present are simply huge. There is no point in keeping these cities, they are best abandoned. The aqua and hospital in them are costing more in upkeep that the corrupted commerce can bring us. Don't forget, Lego still has 14 transports... somewhere. If one wrong harbor flips to them, we enlarge the problem, instead of controlling it.
Do we gain extra protection for our exposed units? Not really. Your cavs are not important at all, if Lego would attack them, they have served their purpose twice. They are not going to do anything more, except perhaps be used in a future settler blitz. Our tanks (and the couple you will have left in the open) are not important either. We have some 25 tanks in the open, Lego is welcome to attack them. They will lose lots of units doing so, and expose all other units which we can easily pick clean.
Besides, the tanks Lego still has (only a good guess, but this will be very close to the truth):
1 2/5
11 2/4
1 1/3
2 1/4
there are only a few tanks that can actually win from a cav, let alone from a full health tank. And they can't build new ones either, unless they already started on this last turn.
So... no gain, a lot of costs, and possibly even the public outcry to deal with over unfair tactics.
Cutting Abilene from the rest is different. Abilene does not hold 2-move attackers (well, a couple of cavs, but who cares), but if we can keep the defenders to reach Jackson or Dye, we would be best off. All this pillaging of roads does not have to be seen from the attackers side, only from the defenders side. 50 infs, plus an inf army should be pinned in Abilene if we can. Where those damaged attackers go is not important right now.
I can understand that from your side, it would pay off to isolate most units, declaring war on us. However for us, there is no gain, only heavy costs. We were primarily concerned with you when we attacked Stanwix (to be correct: we knew it would be very important to our alliance, even if in the end it would gain you 29 arties and a lot more gold than we would gain), so it is our hope you also see our point here. We are not helped by this manoeuvre, on the contrary even, it costs us a lot.
DeepO
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