The Council of War

[Maniac]

Originally posted by Kassiopeia
Okay. I wanted to make sure, again, that we know what we're going into. Like with the war against the Gaians. Because it's always the poor guys down in the diplomatic corps who end up doing all the cleaning up afterwards.

With the unexpected truce between the Gaians and the Hive, I'd say the war with Gaia can be called a failure.
/me tries to trip out of the room unnoticed.

However I'd say peace with the Gaians is not so important (in fact they'd be a nice target if we don't want to go to war with Yang again ). It's the Corporation that could prevent us preparing for a popboom.

[Kassiopeia]

We need some cleverness on all fronts for the Morganites to agree to a peace treaty. If they know they are within range of DAP, it's highly unlikely they'd agree to a peace, knowing they can again get the upper hand, especially if they recognise that your infrastructure is on a weak foundation. Mainly, we'd need to feed to them some sort of information through another source that would convince them that we are so strong that we could crush them and that peace is the only way for them to avoid that for the time being and to get a breather. Feigning strength is harder than feigning weakness, however...

[sentry33]

I do not think that Morganities can get upper hand, even with DAP

Point is that the war with them would tie us and them - making Angels and Gaians grow while we waste energy on each other

[Kassiopeia]

Yes, that has been a part of tactical consideration for a while. We founded our trust in the Gaians and Angels staying out of the conflict on that very premise, if I recall correctly.

We just need to convince the Morganites of that too, without pissing off our potential allies the Angels.

[Modo44]

I think Morgan did not engage in peace talks, because they did not believe we actually wanted to sign peace (good intelligence or good intuition - no matter). With the assumption that a quick invasion is notpossible, I say we start the peace talks with both them and Gaia. We can use the Angels to organize things, as they themselves suggested.

If we want to issue threats, we better not tell them were we would attack. It is much better to just keep attacking targets of opportunity as if in preparation for a really big invasion. I assume Morgan is now ready enough to repel one-target attacks.

I think we do need to grow to keep up with the Morgan economy. And please, please, please, let us commit to that Worm project ASAP.

[Maniac]

Originally posted by sentry33
I do not think that Morganities can get upper hand, even with DAP

Point is that the war with them would tie us and them - making Angels and Gaians grow while we waste energy on each other

Originally posted by Kassiopeia
We just need to convince the Morganites of that too, without pissing off our potential allies the Angels.

Would the "honest" approach work? Simply tell them that we attacked them because they were the most powerful faction at that time. And since they're currently no longer more powerful than the Angels and us, that we see no reason to further attack them. That, while we are confident we could succesfully conduct war against them, it would only weaken both of us compared to the rest. Or am I being too naive?

[Googlie]

Originally posted by Snoddasmannen
So now we are preparing to go builder? I don't know, it sounds like the beginning of the end to me, but the Junta usually knows what it's doing

here are some other comments from long ago:

originally posted by Zeiter in the How shall we Play thread

I am also an advocate of making building a priority. However, I'm thinking of an unconventional approach. I've described this vision in other threads, so I'll just summarize it here:

Basically, we can use a momentum strategy in the short term to augment our building efforts in the long run. We are already drafting plans for a University invasion. By conquering and subjugating the University, we can increase our mineral production (as well as labs production if we get Zak submissive) much more than if we focused on a purely builder style. Of course, we won't stop there, but we'll continue on with Lal and, later on, Yang and the others. If we can just maintain tech parity, our new industrial centers on the Uni/Lal continent will lead us to triumph in any war, especially when combined with our superior morale.

I also advocate that we focus most of our efforts on building up energy credit and mineral production (especially mineral production). In fact, I think we should put the least amount of emphasis as possible on labs production, and instead rely on probing to maintain tech parity. Thus, I'm hoping to soon switch to police state, giving us loads of drone control and support, which will actually make us better builders. Yes, an unconventional approach, but the Spartans are almost perfectly suited for it.

We are very much focused on building, but just in a different way.

and, from Kassiopeia:

Posted by Kassiopeia in thesame thread

I think that we should emphasise momentum but try to keep it in balance with our builder efforts - I voted momentum but I'm fine with a hybrid approach too. A good solid base on the area we're sitting in right now to get those rover swarms up and running. Making a run for the centre should be priority - we are the ones best capable of robbing Yang clean of what he has.

And from Maniac:

Originally posted by maniac in the same thread

I think we should play as a builder and explorer/pod popper/tech stealer until we get Intellectual Integrity.

With that tech we can very easily get elite morale (Spartan inherent +1 morale, +2 from command center, +1 from high morale, and +1 from monolith), and then I think we should invade as many bases or factions as possible with eg some 4-1-1 elite (=> 2 MPs) troops.

Once Air Power and MMI arrives on the battlefield, our elite land units become much less powerful again, so we should exploit this window of opportunity as much as we can IMHO

So it's not really an about-face to focus on a builder style for a few decades - it's really what we decided to do nine months ago

[Googlie]

Originally posted by Maniac

Simply tell them that we attacked them because they were the most powerful faction at that time.

As I recall history, they inititated the belligerence by mind-controlling our SCC Hunter.

We can be "honest" by saying that we deliberated on what would be an appropriate retaliation, and as they were the strongest faction at that time ..... took out the PTS to cut them down to size ..... now we 3 (Morgan, Angels and Sparta) are all about the same, with the Gaians sure to catch up now that they have struck truce with Yang

[sentry33]

A question: why Angels want to organize peace between Gaians, Morganities and us?

Ideas that come to my mind:
- they want to be updated on political situation to take advantage of it - by trading techs, and striking deals that 'balance' other powers against each other,
- they want to gain political 'trust' advantage,
- they do not want peace, and if possible they would subtly disrupt negotiations (feeding data that instills paranoia)

thoughts?

[Maniac]

As far as I can see, for the Angels it isn't really advantagous that peace exists between the Corporation and Sparta. So I think we shouldn't count on them to start a peace conference (which they indeed haven't done yet ).

[Kassiopeia]

Here's what I've thought about:

- Declare a cessation of hostilities. A step between vendetta and truce, if you will. A phony war. It will allow us to test the waters and see if the Morganites and/or Gaians will bite.
- Suggest a white peace. The Morganites are the aggressors, but we have dealt quite a blow to them too. Restoring relations and simply ceasing hostilities without fiddling around with reparations etc. will speed up the process and probably work out the best for us in the end. It'll also make us look somewhat gracious.

Of course, we could make some demands to further test the waters, and then "downgrade" our desires out, so that it seems that we are giving away an arm and a leg for what we were planning all along. Old trick.

So the first step, IMO, is to send PMs to arginine and Chaos Theory, proposing a cessation of hostilities. "This would be the first step on the long journey to everlasting peace" or something. We should also consider issuing a public apology for the PTS raid. It's immaterial as far as gameplay goes, but it might rub the Morganites in the right direction. The loss of interfactional prestige won't be too big, I'd think, it might even make us look good. If we can time this to our switch to Democratic, to boot, we could try to throw in some RP line about reforming the government to a better shape.

[Modo44]

As long as you make it look like we are giving away war reparations, yes - I say we should offer peace.

[Googlie]

EDIT: Ignore the below - I fired up the original turn as a parallel-turn diplomacy exercise and tried to contact Yang - he won't talk

Posted by me in another thread, but maybe belonging here:

before we end the 2166 turn, how about selling Doc Air to Yang (if he'll talk to us)

Pros:

• we'll get some credits
• we (may) get some goodwill from him
• He'll get a different tech in 2167 - one that we maybe can pilfer from him
• he'll get another tech and that may be the one that Morgan, Angels and Gaians pilfer from him, thus maintaining our Doc Air supremacy for a few more turns
• we can try to frame the Gaians - or Morgan - for the techsteal

Cons:

• the tech he gets next year may turn out to be Doc init or Int Int - unlikely, IMO, as both are EXPLORE techs, as is Doc Air, and it isn't the Hive's priority (Conquer, Build are the Hive's)
• we give the others the possibility of pilfering that new tech from Yang as well as Doc Air from them subsequently or from the PK's in 4 years
• if we do, and steal his next tech, we risk vendetta again against the hive, if our framing is unsuccessful

All in all, I think the pros outweigh the cons. But before we get too deep into discussions, can someone other than Maniac or me test the turn to see if indeed Yang will talk to us .........................irrelevant - see edit at beginning of this post

[Snoddasmannen]

Sorry about just dropping in without properly reading through everything, but I'm in a hurry.

My question is, why do we want peace with the Morgans? Surely Morgan would be able to bloat far more without having to fear us. Are we that afraid of the other factions?

If we could make peace with Gaia, that would be nice, but I really don't want to give the Morgans any breathing room.

[Modo44]

Originally posted by Snoddasmannen
My question is, why do we want peace with the Morgans? Surely Morgan would be able to bloat far more without having to fear us. Are we that afraid of the other factions?

Because, as much as I had hoped for this, we seem unable to invade in time (i.e. with full air superiority). Anything else would make the war too long, allowing the Angels and the Gaians to out-build us far too easy.

Instead, we want to make peace with Morgan soon, and pick the easier target, namely Yang. We can hurt the Hive badly even without making new units, so we could use the time to bring some infrastructure up for the long haul.

Originally posted by Snoddasmannen
If we could make peace with Gaia, that would be nice, but I really don't want to give the Morgans any breathing room.

Neither do I, but a protracked war, soon to become loss-intensive, would stall our development too much. A momentum strategy requires attacks to be quick and deadly. Remember what happened to Operation Barbarossa...