Team Info and Contacts - Imperio

[sooooo]

Is it not time to face up to reality and just accept that Imperio will not be persuaded. I know "talk is cheap" and "no harm in trying" but ... all this grovelling is shameful. We're not even being truthful - saying that we will team up to wipe out templars then wipe out PAL together. That's a blatant lie - we'll just kill Imperio instead. I say we man-up and face this war with dignity. And a lot of oromo warriors.

[mostly-harmless]

I am with soooo here, again.
I am also not comfortable with providing them with the full pop census table. This is information we went to great efforts to get. I see no point in giving it out for free to a civ we have very little chance to team up. Giving it to Banana might be another thing, but not Imperio. You can leave the paragraph below the table in, but please exclude the table.
Furthermore they have 4 gold resources not 3.

mh

[ruff_hi]

so - apart from the desire not to talk to Imperio and dropping the population amounts from the table ... any other feedback?

Imperio,

Thank you for your email. We appreciate talking with you even while we are at war. It is fine to send us emails in Spanish.

Templar have not responded to any of our recent contacts. Because of this, and also the reason that they have played incredibly poorly, Team RB will not be talking to Templars in the future. That said, Templar have previously told us that they are accept our settlement of Pink Dot. They even said that they accepted us settling between Pink Dot and Cape Town. For them to now say they are 'unhappy' is dishonest.

It is true, we do have more cities than Templar ... even The Rabbits, who have been on the wrong end of a whipping by PAL, have the same number of cities. Do not seek to punish us for Templar's poor play. Even now, there are at least 2 great city sites that Templar is making no attempt to improve. If they had not built any settlers and only had their capital, would you be giving them your cities to balance things out?

We understand that you were not happy with our settlement of Cape Town, but we have always considered that land ours and, we believe, that the map-maker considered it ours too. You have your source of strategic resources and we have ours. Further, given your incredible wealth (4 gold resources, early happy resources and lots of flood plains), we had to settle cities to keep pace with you.

Be assured, PAL is currently winning this game. By the way, PAL already have caravels heading to the new continent. Look at this information ...

Census:
PAL - 11 cities
RB - 10 cities
Imp - 6 cities
Ban - 7 cities
Tem - 5 cities
Rab - 5 cities

PAL have more population than Imperio and Templars together, more cities than RB, and they are discovering techs very quickly. They are going to get Liberalism. They are going to get Military Tradition for free. They are going to kill their entire continent. They are going to get Galleons to the new world.

PAL are going to WIN unless we do something now.

Your reaction to the current situation is understandable ... team with Templar, take down Team RB and then deal with PAL. However, you have made at least one fundamental mistake ... taking down Team RB will not be easy. It will take both you and Templar many, many turns to achieve this stated objective. Frankly (and obviously) we don't think that you can do it.

There is another option for you. Team with Team RB, take down Templar and then take down PAL. Based on what we have both observed of Templar's play, that first step should be very easy.

Team RB

I re-read the above, and I honestly don't see the groveling part. Also, I don't see the 'team up against PAL' as dishonest. If Imperio show that they are reliable and able to execute war against Templar well, why wouldn't we team up against PAL before we wipe Imperio out.

[sunrise089]

I'm OK with your message Ruff. I do like my simpler one better.

[Sullla]

Counterintuitively, I think we would be in position to win at least our continent. If we stop at Burgundy, then Imperio would be ahead now, and Templars would be allying with us against Imperio rather than the other way around. Sullla keeps complaining that these teams are acting irrationally, but I think each of them is doing the best they can to actually win. Unfortunately for us, that is to attack us.

In a three-player abstract war game, unless the first place player is strong enough to win outright, the second place player wins. For either #2 or #3 to ally with #1 is to eventually commit self-doom and lose to #1. #3's only chance is to ally with #2 against #1 and hope for some good breaks or a timely opportunity to stab. #2's best chance is to ally with #3 against #1 and talk down or hold off any stabs.

This is all true, of course. It's also when I've put together maps for Demogames, I've tried to avoid the situation of putting two or three teams together on an island/small continent. It's a bad diplomatic situation; with two teams, either you work together, or someone stabs someone else, and 95% of the time the latter will eventually take place. With three teams, you end up with the situation that T-Hawk described above, where playing well means doing badly in metagaming terms. Ugh.

However, I don't believe we should have done anything different from our end. Could we honestly be happy with ourselves had we done otherwise - would we have wanted to say, "this is the best move but we're going to make deliberately sloppy moves so that we look weaker from a metagame standpoint"? I don't think any of us could or would have wanted to do that. And keep in mind our starting spot. We got cr*pped on by the mapmaker in this game. Nothing but a single cow at the start, no copper, no horses, no iron, no early happy resources until Calendar, mostly desert and tundra around us. Simply to move from that position into one where the other teams fear us was the result of daring bluffs and splendid team play. I'm incredibly proud of what we've already achieved, and wouldn't have it any other way. I think I would rather have us lose the game than to have deliberately "stopped at Burgundy" and attempted some kind of sandbagging strategy.

Besides, T-Hawk is right about PAL. They lucked into the perfect storm from a metagame perspective, with poor play from one rival (Rabbits) in the early game, a completely absent second rival (Banana) to provide counterbalance, and a central starting position that gave them universal contacts and trade routes early in the game. Keep in mind, even if PAL had been declared on by both Rabbits and Banana, they would still have preserved all of their trade routes with our continent, while we do not get the same benefit of the doubt, and yes that *IS* a shameful mistake on the mapmaker's part. Maybe Imperio has done better from a strategic perspective than we're willing to give them credit for (I am not willing to lend the same courtesy to Templars!) Still, all we can do is play our best game possible on our end. We don't have much control over what the other teams do. Imperio's dispute with us is over Cape Town, and we absolutely *HAD* to settle there to be a competitive team in this game. We would be a joke team otherwise.

Well, that would a good "D" response there. I also don't feel that talking with Imperio will achieve much at this point, but I say we go ahead and send Ruff's message. It can't hurt, and it doesn't promise us to anything that we wouldn't be doing anyway. Hopefully we can draft Templars out of existence in about 25 turns and break out of this stalemate.

[Zeviz]

Trying to convince Imperio that our posession of Cape Town is more "fair" is pointless. However, we can try to convince them that allying with us is their only chance to win the game. We might be #1 on our continent, but we are #2 overall.

I still think it's better for Imperio to team up with us than with Templars, so I'd send something like this:

Imperio,

Here is the current population breakdown:
PAL 72 - 11 cities
RB 55 - 10 cities
Imp 41 - 6 cities
Ban 40 - 7 cities
Tem 30 - 5 cities
Rab 12 - 5 cities
PAL is far ahead in population, while the two of us are almost equal. Also note that Templar who were at peace for 130 turns have as few cities as Rabbits, who had been fighting for their lives for half the game. And Templars didn't even bother to settle perfect spots next to their capital (see attached screenshot). With allies like Templars, you have no chance.

Your only hope of winning the game is to get majority of Templar lands (we will let you do that if we ally soon), and then take majority of PAL lands. You have better land than we do already, so you'll be even with us in population if you get majority of Templar lands in our deal.

If you split Templar lands with us, our alliance will be able to take down PAL. If you keep trying to attack us with Templars, the best you can hope for is to get more of our continent before PAL consolidates control of their continent and comes to take you out. (PAL's continent is bigger than ours, so even if you + Templars miraculously gain full control of our entire continent PAL still wins.)

TeamRB

PS By T-hawk's reasoning, Imperio should ally with us, because PAL is #1, RB is #2, and Imperio is #3. The rest of the teams are out of contest, as can be seen by Templar+Imperio being evenly matched with RB.

[T-hawk]

PS By T-hawk's reasoning, Imperio should ally with us, because PAL is #1, RB is #2, and Imperio is #3. The rest of the teams are out of contest, as can be seen by Templar+Imperio being evenly matched with RB.

This is correct. But Civ game logistics foil this scenario. We can't realistically reach PAL. Galleys from Cape Town take twenty turns to sail there. Even once we had boats in place, any units built at home are still five to ten turns away from the target. The slow speed and tiny capacity of galleys effectively isolate each continent into its own war theater. If all three land civs were neighbors, that would be happening (and we're trying to talk Imperio into making it happen anyway.)

Also, Banana isn't necessarily out of it - a concerted dogpile effort on PAL might leave Banana in a very good position.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

for what it's worth, I like sunrise's draft better than ruff's. It's clearer, gets more to the point, and provides less intel.

-Kylearan

[Zeviz]

Did we send any of the drafts? I prefer mine, but can support either of the others as long as we send something.

We should add the following at the end:

PS Templars have just approached us about negotiating a separate peace deal.

[sooooo]

Maybe we should wait until we send an email to templars.

[Zeviz]

It's better to persue negotiations with Imperio more aggressively. After all, we are willing to accept alliance with them, but not with Templars.

[Zeviz]

It's been many days since our last message. We have to send one of the 3 drafts. So let's just send the one with most votes in the end of the day. I vote for my draft, so we have:

Sunrize's -
Ruff's -
Zeviz's - 1 vote (Zeviz)

[ruff_hi]

do we have a consensus on what we should be sending to Imperio? From last count, we had 3 ...

- sunrises bullet points
- my general discussion
- Zeviz's version

Any takers on putting a unified version together?

[Swiss Pauli]

Sheesh...I go away for a few weeks and all hell breaks loose

Ad interim, we should send Imperio an quick update stating that not ignoring them, but we're having long discussions about our reply.

How about we discuss something more radical: we propose to ally with Imperio against Templars, and agree to cede them Cape Town after we take Jericho (Iron) and they take Damascus (so their army isn't on our doorstep). Other Templars cities on a first come, first served basis.

We'd need to flesh the proposal about with why we can be trusted (we only settled Cape as the mapmaker failed to give us any Copper or Horses), why we feel we can trust them (they didn't violate the NAP), and why Templars must die (lame play, all the beakers we've both gifted them).

I know nearly everyone has said we won't give up Cape Town, but we've got to take the risk of strengthening Imperio enough that they feel they can stand up to us on their own, otherwise they have no incentive to change the status quo.

[Sullla]

How about we discuss something more radical: we propose to ally with Imperio against Templars, and agree to cede them Cape Town after we take Jericho (Iron) and they take Damascus (so their army isn't on our doorstep). Other Templars cities on a first come, first served basis.

Ummm... we actually already discussed this. I still think it's very creative, but a terrible idea. We lose Cape Town over my dead body.