Ministry of War on NeuDemoEgypta

[WarriorPoet]

A grim choice lies before us. Read below, and then vote on the Ministry's decision.

The options:
Diplomatic: "For x techs, and retreat of your settler, we will not hasten our armies to crush you, and instead agree to protect our western brothers."

Military: Move the warrior one square east, wait a turn, then move one square SW, and on the next turn ambush their city. They are too close and will occupy an awesome city site that we cannot let fall into the hands of others.

Complex: Trade techs and move the warrior, then ambush their city.

I say we excercise the complex option, the biggest bang for the buck.

Drawbacks may mean that NDE will never trust us again.

Face it, this is a National Security crisis, and maybe with some long obscure explanation of the future threat posed by their unfortunately poorly placed city, they may understand and eventually cool off.

If you do nothing, then we risk having a potentially deadly situation with a powerful enemy city in close proximity to our core cities.

[WarriorPoet]

Trip, this is top priority!!!

[punkbass2000]

Drawbacks may mean that NDE will never trust us again.

I doubt they'll have the chance to communicate the betrayal to other civs
I think we should attempt to perform an Archer Rush, as outlined by Sir Ralph.

[punkbass2000]

Oh, and BTW, I vote for complex as well. Move towards the settler. How much do you think they'll be willing to give us NOT to take it .

[Jon Shafer]

I think we should enact a plan similar to the 'Diplomacy' one, and only attack if that's the only choice available to us. Right now, we're not exactly in a war economy, and we don't really have an army. It would really slow down our expansion and scouting, which would be very bad for us in the long run.

We should try to work out some tech trade deals, and advise them to either retreat the settler and give us the land in question, or we'll have to take care of it ourselves.

I need to talk to PJ and get some kind of diplomatic envoy together.

[Jon Shafer]

Unfortunately, Borc will be unavailable this evening, so I'm going to have to try and open up relations with him to discuss things right now... like I mentioned before, next turn they'll know we're there, and they'll be able to see our Warrior.

[BigFurryMonster]

Trip: good plan

[CiverDan]

Go Diplomatic, try to trade also. only attack if they insist one settling there. Don't bother with the ambush. I'd rather we not delibrately try to start a war.

[Zero]

I'd like to remind you, to them, we seem to have the upper hand. Their asset is at stake so they will be more than willing to bargain here. If they are insistent, we can always sack their city and go after them or capture the settler.

We can probably pull off a peaceful solution, I just don't know how much ND will bend over to preserve their settler (maybe we can attempt tech extortion muahhaha! )

[WarriorPoet]

Diplomatic, then, but with an overt display of force? I.E. move the warrior to the south. This way, we deny NDE the ideal city location and let him know that we are not afraid to use the warrior if they don't pull their settler back.

My problem with this is that if I were NDE, I might feign agreement, pull the settler out, bring in a warrior and move both of them back to the ideal location I just let the other team think they had bullied me out of.

This is why I favor ambush. Unless you want to permanently leave the warrior on the ideal hill until you can send a settler there and build a city of your own, then you will end up with an NDE city on our doorstep.

A: he leaves, we leave, he comes back, and we have a serious problem down the road. Long war later
B: he leaves, we stay, and we loose out on scouting, and hope NDE doesn't come back with more warriors while we wait to build our own city.-> Delay that doesn't result in a war, but will drastically increase diplomatic tension in the region...War Later.
C: we feign a diplomatic retreat, then come back to ambush the defenseless city->Shorter war now, at least potentially, or expensive war...neither Civ would go for a protracted war this early, so it would be quick, but we'd fight the real war later.
D: Chase the Settler out of dodge...same result as C, but he keeps his settler.

So...war now, he looses a settler/city or war later....I don't believe we can have a good peaceful settlement that will last out of this situation.

The only way diplomacy would realy work is if this settler was popped far from the NDE core cities, thus we'd have a suitable buffer for diplomatic breathing room. However, I think the NDE capital can only be no more than 18 squares from our siting of the settler...that isn't much room at all.

[Jon Shafer]

At last the problem is resolved. Check the thread over our first diplomatic 'victory' for the details. We'll probably follow the NDE settler to the south to see where our border ends, and to see where their capital might be.