The Bob War

[Tiberius]

OK, so the roadplan until now:

1. Talk to GS. (see above)
2. Prepare a public announcement but don't post it yet.
3. Establish an embassy with ND and GoW this turn.
4. IMHO wait with the RoPs. Not only our troops are several turns away from their land, thus we don't need them yet, but also GS could find out. Let's wait until we will actually need them.
5. Talk to ND and GoW about: what kind help do they need: money, tech, what? Also let them know that we could send troops earlier, and ask for a "corridor" across their lands. Especially ND should be aware that we will brake a treaty with them. Tell them about the RoPs. Tell them we will fight GS only. We should also tell them that we are negotiating with GS about their retrieval and in case of succesful negotiations, we won't intervene.
6. Start moving our galleys and troops in position.

New proposal:
7. Slow down research a bit and start saving money.

[vondrack]

Steve, see my diplo note draft in the GS thread, please - and comment.

I would not like to involve ourselves in the public thread and I would certainly NOT include most of the info you have mentioned. The reason is very simple: we'd disclose a lot of confidential info we learned from other teams and GS/RP would better know what they are standing against (and perhaps, why, too).

I understand that you believe we should give our REASONS to get involved in this war. Well - we do not need to give any. The simple "balance of power" is enough. RPers know what they did (besides, we will not join any war against THEM - their city gifting trick is going to backfire on them now). GS knows we do not want to let them grow to keep our own chances high. These two do not care about our reasons - it's the fact that we will fight against them that matters. The others (Vox, ND, GoW) do not care about our reasons either - what matters for them is we are going to fight GS.

The only thing that would result from publicly posting all of our reasons and "reasons" would be a ping-pong-like argument about which reasons are valid and which are not... better avoid that, please.

[vondrack]

Originally posted by Tiberius
3. Establish an embassy with ND and GoW this turn.
4. IMHO wait with the RoPs. Not only our troops are several turns away from their land, thus we don't need them yet, but also GS could find out. Let's wait until we will actually need them.

Agreed. A better idea than mine.

Originally posted by Tiberius
5. Talk to ND and GoW about: what kind help do they need: money, tech, what? Also let them know that we could send troops earlier, and ask for a "corridor" across their lands. Especially ND should be aware that we will brake a treaty with them. Tell them about the RoPs. Tell them we will fight GS only. We should also tell them that we are negotiating with GS about their retrieval and in case of succesful negotiations, we won't intervene.

What about sorting out what kind of help we can provide to them (among ourselves) first?

Here is a quick list of what I can think of:

1) free Astronomy ? (assuming they give us their next tech for free, too)
2) workers ?
3) catapults ?
4) gold ?
5) dyes in exchange for their luxuries

I would directly ask for the corridor - even if they think they can hold against GS, I would still start moving our troops immediately. I assume they will be cool with that.

Originally posted by Tiberius
New proposal:
7. Slow down research a bit and start saving money.

Only after discovering Astronomy, please. This tech is almost game breaking for us. Caravels carry 3 units, not 2 like Galleys, and have the defense of 2 (at the expense of mere 10 more shields). Plus, we will be able to get GoW & ND luxuries. We can slow down afterwards.

[Tiberius]

Originally posted by vondrack
What about sorting out what kind of help we can provide to them (among ourselves) first?

Here is a quick list of what I can think of:

1) free Astronomy ? (assuming they give us their next tech for free, too)
2) workers ?
3) catapults ?
4) gold ?
5) dyes in exchange for their luxuries

I would directly ask for the corridor - even if they think they can hold against GS, I would still start moving our troops immediately. I assume they will be cool with that.

Astronomy: I agree. We could maybe pursue Vox to gift Engineering to ND, so that they would be able to save some money? Being used against GS, should be enough payment for Vox

Workers and catapults would be fairly easy for us to build quickly and hand them to ND or GoW.

Gold: I don't know. How much gold we have? I can't see the pics from the Chronicle thread. I would prefer not. We will need money ourselves. The fact alone that we will pay for the embasies is a financial help.

Dyes: absolutely. All luxury exchanges which don't include GS will help us and hurt them (don't forget, they will lose 3 luxury trades!)

Only after discovering Astronomy, please. This tech is almost game breaking for us. Caravels carry 3 units, not 2 like Galleys, and have the defense of 2 (at the expense of mere 10 more shields). Plus, we will be able to get GoW & ND luxuries. We can slow down afterwards.

OK. You're right, astronomy will help us more than some money we could spare in the meantime.

PS Btw. I agree with Radek in regard to commenting the war in the public forum. What's the point discussing about who's right and who's wrong? This game is about winning, so unless someone's breaking the rules, why would we accuse them? For trying to win?
Moreover, I am strongly against using private data we learned from others to justify our intervention.

[lmtoops]

It would be perferable not to honor the Astro/Banking deal. Astronomy would help the GS war effort considerably. It would open up Legoland to invasion on our West/Weak coast.

It would be foolish to give Astronomy to GS.

We could time the discovery of Astronomy with the Declaration of War. In this way, we do not reject the tech trade until after the war declaration.

[lmtoops]

Giving ND/GoW catapults is an excellent idea. I think they would quickly accept.

I think we need to start sending our troops to Bob now. Simply because it would be easier and improve our response time. If we are deep within ND/GoW, we are unlikely to get caught.

[Tiberius]

Originally posted by lmtoops
Giving ND/GoW catapults is an excellent idea. I think they would quickly accept.

We should gift all of them (4, 6?) at once (in big groops) to avoid declaring war to ND/GoW every other turn. We can gift cats and workers only by letting them being captured.

[vondrack]

Yes, letting them being captured - that was my idea.

[redstar1]

It might be worthwhile asking ND and GOW about us establishing a 'citadel' or two on Bob. I don't fancy sending troops over there without knowing how long they are going for and without having somewhere to pull back to and have a rethink. Ideally we would have 2 small cities, one around ND/GOW and one in the south. We can keep ND/GOW happy by keeping these small (built on hills for maximum defence), and providing city screenshots on request to ensure we aint planning on staying.

This is based on the way I conduct invasions on SP. Pull a settler and as much defence as you can muster, build a small, well defended city somewhere and then start piling the troops in. I find it essential for restoring heath of mounted units in particular who can move back and forth much more quickly.

I would also imagine we will be conducting warfar purely based on getting GS off Bob, or at least getting them to the point where they accept that a major presence, or any at all, is not welcome nor tolerated.

[Tiberius]

That is actually a good idea. We could make ND and GoW agree with this, promising that we would destroy or gift these cities to them after the war.

[redstar1]

Yes, exactly. I think we are at the stage where even if they don't trust us they probably realise that we have no intention of winning this game by any means other than peaceful and that we have no interest in retaining a presence on Bob.

What I think this will also do is make GS think twice. They won't necessarily know about our pact with ND/GOW and we may be able to put some sort of plan together to stop the war and let everyone live happily in peace...

The one thing we shouldn't do is leave Lego even slightly undefended...

[vondrack]

Definitely an idea worth considering and worth discussing with GoW and ND. This city would also make trading workers possible.

[redstar1]

A quick look at the minimap suggests theres one place and one place only this city can go, and I imagine RP/GS won't like it, but sure, thats how it goes

[ZargonX]

I think the citadel idea is a very good one. So good, in fact, that I'm going to start picking out sites

The events in the public forum will help us achieve this end, I think. GS' constant arrogance and general unpleasantness to ND and GoW will basically keep them in our court no matter what. They'll want us to help slaughter GS in any way possible. Hopefully we'll be havign a 3-team chat tomorrow, but in the mean time I'll whomp up some Bob force plans.

[vondrack]

Originally posted by lmtoops
It would be perferable not to honor the Astro/Banking deal. Astronomy would help the GS war effort considerably. It would open up Legoland to invasion on our West/Weak coast.

It would be foolish to give Astronomy to GS.

We could time the discovery of Astronomy with the Declaration of War. In this way, we do not reject the tech trade until after the war declaration.

First: Astronomy alone does nothing for GS, but put them one step closer to Navigation that actually allows crossing the ocean. If they focus on researching Navigation, they will not be able to research Invention and Gunpowder, which I consider good for us.

Second: I would personally feel that trashing our deal with GS would go beyond the line of honour/dishonour. It was part of a bigger deal and they paid upfront, so they should get what they paid for, even if it may not be exactly in our best interest (but as noted above - if they really focus on Navigation, they will only be losing time with a dead-end, non-mandatory tech, while we will be speeding up the gunpowder branch... and if they do not use Astronomy to get to Navigation, even better - we'll get a tech we will be able to use, they will get something they basically already have thanks to The Great Lighthouse).