Dimplo Scholia: - Vox Controli - comments

[DeepO]

Okay, I'm off to bed. But just to make sure everything is covered, could you please include comments on the following things:

1. city spacing, and what it makes us think about their road. They have roaded more then they need right now in order to have a good, close empire, we have no choice as to see everything else as a military road.

2. The question about water: do they have it, and were they deceiving us here too.

3. (maybe) hint at the aquaduct plan, telling them that if we are going to help them, we expect a better relation.

DeepO

[nbarclay]

Here's my full draft message, in case anyone's still awake to comment on it.

Greetings BetaHound and Vox Controli,

On the subject of cows and bulls (and what comes from them), our analysts find it almost impossible to believe that you do not already have Iron Working. According to their analysis, Iron Working should cost us twice as much to research as Warrior Code if no nation we know has either. Similarly, Writing should require one third more research than Iron Working. And there are similar relationships regarding the costs of all other technologies we could currently research. Since you are our only in-game contact at present (your suspicions to the contrary notwithstanding), our analysts say that only your having researched a technology should create a deviation between anticipated and actual research costs.

With every other technology we can consider researching, costs follow a consistent pattern. But the cost of Iron Working is lower than it ought to be if you have not yet researched it. The real clincher is that at the rate we can research Iron Working, we ought to be able to research Writing one turn faster than we actually can – unless the contact situation has made Iron Working cheaper. If you are telling the truth, there is some great mystery here by which the assumptions our analysts base their work on is invalid. But I hope you can see why we would be extremely skeptical regarding your claims of not yet having discovered Iron Working. Either you are lying to us, or our understanding of the world we live in is seriously flawed. (By the way, the original analysis was conducted in 2230 BC, but I have since confirmed the figures myself.)

Regarding our own research rate, if you have been watching the Roster of Great Cities, I’m sure you have seen that Eye of the Storm has been consistently at least size 3 and often size 4 on the International City Size Scale for quite some time. Eye of the Storm has not worked land producing less than two commerce in centuries, and Hurricane has sometimes had access to two commerce and sometimes just one depending on priorities of the moment. Add to that the commerce from the city sites themselves (with capitals inherently being especially wealthy) and you can see for yourself that our research rate, although quite rapid, is not impossible. (And I should note that at Sir Ralph’s insistence, we had already started researching Alphabet based on your conditional acceptance of our trade proposal before you sent your final acceptance, leaving us a turn ahead of where we would have been had more cautious policies prevailed.)

Next, in regard to your claim that Bronze Working was worth more to us than The Wheel was to you, the fact that we would have researched Bronze and then Iron ourselves had you not agreed to the deal renders such short-term comparisons irrelevant. On that path, we would have had Bronze Working in plenty of time to build any spearmen we might want, and would be getting Iron Working through our own research about the same time we will get it from you assuming you keep your word. So the true benefits of the exchange are in terms of long-term prosperity, not short-term military advantage, and on that basis, the agreement was clearly in your favor. We, unlike you, sacrificed a turn’s research (and that at our higher research rate) to make the deal work. Further, based on what you have indicated about your own research rate, a trade at equal value saves you significantly more research time than it does us compared with each doing the research ourselves. And that is not even considering the risk on our side and (I assume) hope on yours that you might be able to exchange The Wheel and/or Alphabet for gold and/or additional knowledge. (We never requested a patent on either of those technologies and, in fact, clearly acknowledged your prospects for trading them when we proposed the trade agreement. The patent concept is strictly in connection with trades involving Writing and beyond.)

If you need further assurance regarding the fact that you are the only nation we currently have in-game contact with, I could e-mail one or more of your people a copy of the “Histograph” portion of our bureaucrats’ “form F8” summarizing relative “scores”. [I’d need an e-mail address or addresses, though, since PMs can’t handle graphics.] That would be sufficient to show both that only our two civilizations appear on that form and that the date on the form is current. By the way, in case you are wondering about recent appearances on similar forms from your own bureaucrats, we recently founded a third city. (Alas, shortly after sending out our settler, our glorious capital was struck by disease, but it has since recovered.)

Before I leave the issue of trade deals, there is one final point I would like to make that is causing us a certain amount of concern. When we first approached you to propose the two-stage deal, we conveyed (or at least I certainly attempted to convey) our assumption that you had already researched Iron Working as your first priority. You said nothing to indicate that our assumption was incorrect, and thereby left us to assume that the exchange of Alphabet for Iron Working could be completed just as soon as we completed our research into Alphabet. Even giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you are now telling the truth that you had not already researched Iron Working, you left us to labor under a false assumption. And while I see the military sense in not revealing your lack of a key military technology, the situation thus created is not ideal for building trust.

At this point, the situation for us has become extremely awkward. When you not only failed to offer Iron Working as requested even though we assumed you already had it, but also failed to provide any other meaningful response to our message indicating that we were ready for the exchange, that left us wondering about the possibility, however remote, that you might renege on your promise. That concern caused us to suspend our research while waiting for the deal to be completed, since if we do not get Iron Working from you, we need to start researching it ourselves immediately (in spite of how horribly distasteful such a duplication of effort is). But the strain of the delay grows greater every turn, and we really need for you to accept our offer of Alphabet and return your offer of Iron Working immediately so that we can get on with our Writing research (which, we hope, you can also benefit from through some sort of future exchange). Unless the deal goes through (or, at the very least, we get an extremely solid explanation for why it does not go through), our government will face intense pressure to write you off as oath breakers and start our own research into Iron Working, in which case the consequences for the relationship between our nations would be less than pleasant. (I am not attempting to threaten here; merely to point out the powerful forces involved in such matters.)

In regard to issues of settling and borders, on a continent as small as this one, it seems prudent to make sure you recognize the importance of making the greatest possible use of the space available. Our city planners are working on a principle they have developed known as the “size 12 principle.” Specifically, cities should be positioned to use all of our land, as much coast as is practical, and most of the sea within our cities’ borders at size 12. That does not allow much room for additional growth should our scientists someday come up with a way to grow cities beyond what a river or lake permits, but we feel that maximizing our gold for science in the meantime is far more important. (And cities built on the “size 12 principle” don’t generally need to start working much if any coast or seas until beyond size 6, which most cities will not be able to exceed until the “aqueducts” certain of our visionaries contemplate can be built.) We strongly recommend that you follow a similar pattern, both to maximize your ability to generate wealth and to avoid possible tensions between our peoples over accusations of “squandering” useful land.

As for whether the northern end of the Spinebreaker Mountains (or Sierra Centralis as you call them) would be a good border, some of your earlier words had given us hope that ours was not the only direction you could possibly expand in. Regarding North Estonia, you said, “And lastly, it connects to another landmass to the east.” If you have another land mass in another direction, can you not do some of your expanding in that direction? We have no other lands within sight that we can expand to, and we had really hoped to expand at least a little north of the mountains. Also, if you have a lake in North Estonia, North Estonia itself ought to be able to support four cities with proper planning. (Eventually, it can regardless of whether you have a lake or not, but we could understand your not wanting to make cities that would have a hard time growing any time in the near future your top priority.)

Sincerely,

The People of Gathering Storm
Nathan Barclay, Chief Economist

[DeepO]

Okay, it's nearly everything I wished for. Sorry to not be awake for final comments, but you posted this at nearly 8 am...

Only remark: I really would have liked asking them of their 'deception', explaining the growth of their capital when they supposedly have no water on those plains.

Oh, and I would have said something about the road connecting 8-10 city sites already, which makes their explanation of 'just a settler road' BS. But they'll get the message

DeepO

[Harovan]

“And lastly, it connects to another landmass to the east.”

Has anyone noticed this? If they don't mix up east and west, like many do, the assumptions, that our continent borders that of the 3 civs we traded minimaps with, can not be true. In this case, they must have contacted another civ, none of these 3.

[Shiber]

In that case, the candidates for Civ X are Legoland and Lux Invicta.
Perhaps we should try again to convince Lux to trade minimaps.

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Has anyone noticed this? If they don't mix up east and west, like many do, the assumptions, that our continent borders that of the 3 civs we traded minimaps with, can not be true. In this case, they must have contacted another civ, none of these 3.

Yes, but we can't tell much of that one sentence, Vox has proven more then once they are not very precise when it comes to wording. The East is unlikely, or there has to be some kind of peninsula warping around North Estonia, but at this point I still believe that there is no landmass connected to our continent, it's just very close.

DeepO

[Dominae]

A couple of comments on your last message, Nathan (did you send it already?).

1. The second-last paragraph is unecessary. I see three scenarios: 1) they're using a wide city-spacing, which is good for us because we'll be more powerful; 2) they're planning to use tight spacing and are actually building a road network, in which case your comment is superfluous; 3) they're planning to use tight spacing, and are just "reaching out" to a nice spot, planning to backfill later. Only in this last case is your comment justified, and then really what you should be saying is: "do not try to greedily grab land from under us" (said more diplomatically of course). Whether or not we have a right to say this is debatable.

2. Although I think your messages are well-written and eloquent, some people might find them rather long and tedious to read. Given the lengths of Vox's communications compared to ours (apart from the last one from Vox), I'm inclined to think that they're a little annoyed at our wordy communications. Psychologically, this can be very important, as someone who feels put out by having to read something they consider too long will not be as responsive to the content. There is also the fact that being verbose is a mark of elitism, which Vox may not appreciate (nor any other team).


Dominae

[Shiber]

1. I think it was already sent. Well, I don't suppose any serious harm was done.
2. I completely agree with this statement. While I appreciate nbarclay's efforts, and I enjoy reading his diplomatic letters, not all people do. Dominae has made some good arguments on why we should stop sending diplomatic messages that stretch over several camels.

[Conqueror]

An idea why Vox might be dealying the Iron Working deal :

If they see only one Iron resource, and its somewhere in the north end of Spinebreaker Mountains, where they are roading to, they might be delaying us for seeing it, and want to make sure their settler gets there first to secure it.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by DeepO

Only remark: I really would have liked asking them of their 'deception', explaining the growth of their capital when they supposedly have no water on those plains.

Oh, and I would have said something about the road connecting 8-10 city sites already, which makes their explanation of 'just a settler road' BS. But they'll get the message

As I recall, they never said no water, just no rivers. I would classify that as misdirection more than deception, and since we recognized the possibility of such misdirection practically the moment their message arrived, it would be hard to argue that we've been laboring under false assumptions all this time as a result of their choice of words. Besides, I felt like I was already laying it on a bit thick with other concerns about their deceiving us (our difficulty believing they don't have Iron Working, and the fact that if in fact they don't, their silence led us to believe they did).

If I wanted to really pack things in, I could envision four cities on North Estonia plus the bottleneck city, one on the hill 3-2 from the bottleneck and another opposite it at 6-3 from the bottleneck, and then one around where Grog is now and one around our #12 site. That's the nine potential cities closest to their capital (not counting the possibility of expanding in some other direction). But they probably can't fit more than two decent early-game cities on North Estonia; even if they have water, the fact that some of their tiles are hills, mountain, and desert would interfere. And squeezing the bottleneck city and the two others so close together would mean truly awful competition for land tiles - especially for a nonreligious civ that has a hard time building temples to grow cities beyond 9 tiles. (Remember, having a decent number of land tiles for our cities to work was one of our criteria in city planning.) So unless they can expand in another direction, they probably need to go either south or east of Lookout Ridge no later than their fifth city and then backfill areas with no significant short-term growth potential later, and the wheat makes south look a lot better than east.

[Dominae]

Nathan, your most recent "personal" response to Jon Miller is somewhat worrisome. Although you indicate that this is an informal communication, you are in fact presenting deals which Vox will probably consider very carefully. This bypasses all the diplomatic efforts here at Gathering Storm, and thus undermines our "unified front". I'm not saying your half-proposals are not good ones, just that the rest of the team may want to have their say before anything is discussed with Vox (officially or no). Dealing with Jon Miller "on the side" could be interesting diplomatically, but then I think the diplomatic school would have to agree to it.

By the way, who is the head of the diplomatic scholia at this time? DeepO?


Dominae

[nbarclay]

If we had more time, I wouldn't have done it, but there's not a lot of time for us to consider the proposal, then send it to Vox, and then have Vox consider it. This way both teams can look at the idea in parallel (and as a programmer, I must confess that looking for a way to speed things up through parallel processing is something of an instinct for me. ) Sorry if I ruffled any feathers.

Nathan

[Dominae]

No feathers ruffled, as long as the need is urgent.

As the one who is playing the turns, I suppose it is your responsibility to ensure that things get done in a timely fashion. It is too bad our diplomatic corps is not available when we need them most though (and I'm a diplomat!).

This is why I do not like Vox's behaviour: they leave things to the last minute, so that we cannot discuss their proposals sufficiently. To me, this is a tactic of 1) the ignorant, or 2) the aggressor. I'll be glad when we have other teams to deal with, so that their inefficiency will not bring us down as much.


Dominae

[Shiber]

I think Nathan was right for taking the initiative, but Dominae is also right: we must display a unified front, even if Vox doesn't... though their team's name, and constact allusions to the number one, infer that they should be acting otherwise. Do we see first cracks in their team's hierarchy? This could be good news - it means that they're confused, and they may do things that they will regret later as a result of that... but I'm deviating from the subject.
What I meant to say was that this case is an exception, for the reasons that Nathan has specified above. Like I said, I'm glad that Nathan has taken the initiative this one time, but we should find a compromise between meeting short-term goals and conducting fast diplomacy when necessary, and meeting our long-term goals, among which are presenting a unified front and a stable structure and policy.

[asleepathewheel]

I'm trying to wrap my mind around the two vox letters regarding the current situation.

Vox started researching IW but received it two turns later from the 3rd for the wheel. This upset some in vox, due to the wasted turns.

Beta sends us a message saying they haven't discovered IW yet, which JM scrambles to cover the tracks by stating it would have been discovered in two turns, had it not been for the aforementioned trade.

Now the third civ is willing to pretty much give alphabet to vox for free. We are trying to trade alphabet for IW.

What am I missing?


So apparently there is confirmation from within Vox that Betahound is a liar (and not a good one at that)

If I were vox, I would immediately fire betahound (as a scapegoat claiming that he overstepped his bounds)and install a different envoy.


Perhaps we should ask vox if they could tell us if the third civ knows our name. Perhaps that is part of their trade for alphabet, knowledege of GS.

I would bet my life that this third civ is also sick of dealing with these morons and we could strike a molotov-ribbenhoff pact with them or something.