Team Info and Contacts - PAL

[sunrise089]

My shot:

Hi PAL,
Thank you for your reply on the Ivory trade. We appreciate your offer of assistance, but we feel PAL's plan isn't ideal in these circumstances. We'd like to further explain where we're coming from and what we propose. Much like when RB supplied PAL with Horses, we find ourselves in a very time-critical situation. We pursued a peaceful tech path, hoping to cooperate with our neighbors towards mutual gain. Our diplomatic efforts, and statements by Imperio, helped us remain committed to peace on our continent. Unfortunately recent events show that Imperio has ceased to share our peaceful intentions. We are attempting to rapidly research and acquire military techs and strengthen our defenses, but until we do so we're at a distinct disadvantage to an Imperio team that can field many state-of-the-art military units.

Thus we would like to request PAL cancel the Ivory trade with Imperio and instead temporarily supply the Ivory to RB. This will ensure that both teams will have had access to Ivory, and hopefully allow RB to defend ourselves. PAL can still send their second free Ivory resource to Imperio (just like you had planned to send it to RB) when the current trade can be canceled or when Banana trades the Ivory back. This ensures that no team on our continent can acquire an overwhelming militarry advantage, which is surely in everyone's best interest.

As to our research, since Imperio seems to have enacted a trade embargo against us, we must research construction next.

Please let us know PAL's feelings on our proposal. We welcome your advice and input, as the present situation makes it clear to us how valuable sincere allies can be.

[Dreylin]

and mine:

Pal,

We thank you for your offered trade of Ivory; however we see the situation as a bit more immediately serious than that. Imperio are now in a position to start production of Elephants, and we have multiple reasons to believe they have imminent intentions of aiming them in our direction (ep spending, roading towards our cities). As you know, the only real counter to Elephants is other Elephants – for which we will need your Ivory – however we are many turns away from discovering the necessary techs to field our own. Remember, all three were researched by Imperio, and they’re hardly likely to trade them to us!

We have a real fear that we are staring down the barrel of an Elephant gun, and while we believe we can protect ourselves from destruction; we will definitely incur serious losses.

At this point it seems to us that the only way to maintain a serious contender to Imperio on this continent would be to prevent them from fielding Elephants until we are in a position to do the same. So we ask you to help us in our hour of need, as we helped in yours.

TeamRB

[Dreylin]

I was nearly finished writing mine when I had to run off to a meeting ... dratted work taking time out of my day!

[Swiss Pauli]

I think we're heading off a bit too far in the polite/too much information direction with the latest two efforts. PAL don't really do verbosity, and they certainly aren't trying to look on our emails in a negative light, so I'd advise something in between mine and sunrise/dreylin's efforts. I agree we don't want to offend PAL, but we musn't clutter our message so much that they lose sight of the importance of our request.

[sunrise089]

I think we're heading off a bit too far in the polite/too much information direction with the latest two efforts. PAL don't really do verbosity, and they certainly aren't trying to look on our emails in a negative light, so I'd advise something in between mine and sunrise/dreylin's efforts. I agree we don't want to offend PAL, but we musn't clutter our message so much that they lose sight of the importance of our request.

I respect this view, and I certainly agree that PAL's emails aren't heavy on verbosity, but I think we may be reading too much into that. PAL negotiates from a position of strength, and they are a much smaller team, primarily composed of independent-minded MP folks who aren't particularly well-socialized (Krill knows what I mean). Therefore they may tend to just say what they mean, consequences be damned.

That said, I think sometimes more words can soften the tone of a one-sided request. PAL has already more or less denied a simple version of our email, so I think both giving them more information and making the language a bit more flowery isn't the worst thing in the world. After all, this game moves slowly, so surely they can take the time to read 2 or 3 paragraphs.

Either way though, I'm happy with the content of all three proposals.

[mostly-harmless]

Again: Whatever we sent please renew our request for scouting through their territories.

mh

[Dreylin]

Pal,

We thank you for your offered trade of Ivory; however we see the situation as a bit more immediately serious than that. Up to now, we have pursued a peaceful tech path, hoping to cooperate with our neighbors towards mutual gain. Our diplomatic efforts, and previous statements by Imperio, helped us remain committed to peace on our continent. Unfortunately recent events show that Imperio has ceased to share our peaceful intentions.

Imperio are now in a position to start production of Elephants, and we believe they have imminent intentions of aiming them in our direction. As you know, the only real counter to Elephants is other Elephants – for which we will need your Ivory – however we are many turns away from discovering the necessary techs to field our own. Remember, all three were researched by Imperio, and have ceased responding to our diplomatic efforts!

We have a real fear that we are staring down the barrel of an Elephant gun, and while we believe we can protect ourselves from destruction; we will definitely incur serious losses.

At this point it seems to us that the only way to maintain a serious contender to Imperio on this continent would be to prevent them from fielding Elephants until we are in a position to do the same. So we ask you to help us in our hour of need, as we helped in yours.

As with our supplying you with Horses, speed here is critical. Please let us know PAL's feelings on our proposal. We welcome your advice and input, as the present situation makes it clear to us how valuable sincere allies can be.


We are also still interested in your permission to send a Scout through your lands to make contact with Banana. If this is not a preferred option, would you be prepared to act as a broker between the two teams and suggest and allow a Banana Scout to come through your lands to meet us?

Team RB

Cobbled together the beat (imo) of sunrise's & my previous e-mails and added m_h's requested Banana nudge. I think that someone with access to the e-mail should plan on sending something before the end of the day.

Dreylin.

[Swiss Pauli]

The last effort omits to mention our next tech (after Maths) altogether! Unless anyone objects, I'm going to email PAL by lunchtime that we're researching Construction next.

If I have time, I'll also try to frame a separate note about finding Banana.

Then we can focus on finding an agreed wording about the Ivory situation without holding ourselves back in other important areas.

[Swiss Pauli]

Tech email sent:

Hi PAL,

After Maths & HBR, we'll be researching Construction: Imperio are gearing up their war-machine, and they will neither trade, nor even talk with us. Once we're nearly done with Construction, we'll contact you to discuss research options. The way things look right now, it's likely that we'll prioritize military techs.

As to the CS trade, we're a couple of turns behind target on Maths, but we'll ship you Literature as agreed when you complete CS.

Cheers,

Swiss Pauli

[sooooo]

I think Sunrise's draft looks good.

[Swiss Pauli]

PAL acknowledge the tech trade update:

Thanks for the update Swiss Pauli. I am guessing you are aware, but just to be sure, you should know: English is not the primary language of the Imperio team. I try to keep the language simple and sometimes repeat things in a couple different ways.

[Swiss Pauli]

I had a go at editing sunrise's proposal. I removed the fact that we're miles from fielding Jumbos/state-of-the-art units as that's our look-out, and I deleted reference to Banana doing a trade-back of Ivory (as we'd much rather Imperio be denied Jumbos for a while). Lastly, I tried to tilt to the tone to one which has PAL being the guarantor of the balance of power, rather than them doing simply doing us a favour:

Hi PAL,
Thank you for your reply on the Ivory trade. We appreciate your offer of assistance, but we feel your plan isn't ideal in these circumstances. We'd like to further explain where we're coming from and what we propose:

Much like when we supplied you with Horses, we find ourselves in a very time-critical situation. We pursued a peaceful tech path, hoping to cooperate with our neighbors towards mutual gain. Our diplomatic efforts, and statements by Imperio, helped us remain committed to peace on our continent. Unfortunately recent events show that Imperio has ceased to share our peaceful intentions, and your trade of Ivory to Imperio increases their military might considerably.

In light of this, we would like to request that PAL cancels the Ivory trade with Imperio and instead supplies this Ivory to RB. We have no objection to you sending your second spare Ivory resource to Imperio (just like you had planned to send it to RB in your proposal) when the duplicate trade is canceled. We feel that this arrangement would ensure that no team on our continent can acquire an overwhelming military advantage in the current era, which is surely in everyone's best interest.

Please let us know PAL's feelings on our proposal. We welcome your advice and input, as the balance of power on our continent is currently in your hands.

EDIT: I left out any reference to Banana, as I think we'd be better off getting an answer on this before asking PAL another favour

[ruff_hi]

two further emails from PAL ...

So is there new ETA on PAL getting HBR? Previously, the ETA for HBR was five turns after Civil Service/Lit trade.

The reason we ask is now there is an idea floating in our forums that we would actually rework the trade so that we would get HBR for you if that is faster...if you haven't started HBR already.

[Zeviz]

Swiss' message sounds good.

I'd ask PAL what they want in return for CS and HBR in a separate message.

[Swiss Pauli]

I think we should decline PAL's reworking of the CS deal with thanks: we'll be at worst one or two turns later than planned to HBR (estimate), but seeing as we need Construction right after then they'd be waiting a long time for our part of the deal.