Team Info and Contacts - Templars

[Zeviz]

I'll add the line you suggest in the end before sending. For the signature, I am thinking of

Zeviz,
Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs and Interim Ambassador of Realms Beyond

Is that title impressive enough?

[ruff_hi]

I like your email - title is a bit wordy but maybe just about perfect because of it.

[Zeviz]

Message sent.

[Zeviz]

I just noticed that Imperio has OB with Templars.

I wonder what this implies about their plans.

[Swiss Pauli]

Templar's reply:

Dear Zeviz,

We are pleasantly surprised with your team's choice for our new ambassador. We look forward to exchanging ideas for further cooperation with you. Please bring Ruff my compliments for his excellent role as your team's former ambassador to us.

Trade brings nations together. Just like your team, we are also delighted at your efforts to connect our territories by the river. We look forward to the possibilities for trade it offers.

We welcome your proposal for open borders. However, we feel that open borders must be accompanied by a border agreement. Of course we have discussed this topic in the past, alas, without a satisfying result. We welcome your positive relations with Imperio in that respect. We also have very good relations with Imperio and our continuously ongoing negotiations are very fruitful. Despite the positive relations with Imperio, however, the language barrier would make a mighty obstacle for three-way negotiations for the border agreement, making them extremely difficult. Therefore we are prepared to accept a preliminary bi-lateral agreement which governs exclusively the territories between our current borders. The agreement would be official, but should in the future be replaced by a three-party agreement. With this concession from our side we are prepared to agree with your proposal for open borders.

The reason for our position regarding the open borders follows from the idea that open borders is something for teams that have solid diplomatic relations. While our relationship is very friendly, it lacks a solid foundation that ensures that it is still going to be very friendly in the future. We regard this as a principle: that you don't enter in mutually beneficial deals unless there is a foundation for the friendliness in the form of agreements.

For the tech trading it is the same: we are well prepared to engage in mutually beneficial tech trade, but we can't afford to supply a friendly neighbor with techs, only to hope that this neighbor will be wanting to trade techs with us in the future. Therefore we think tech agreements, especially with neighbors, should be long-term. We have sensed reservations on your team towards long-term commitments. To make it a bit easier for your team to make such commitments, we are prepared to offer your peace-loving team certain concessions or commitments that will help maintain peaceful relations between our teams.

One such commitment is the pledge regarding settlement we have given you. Another such commitment is our expressed desire of a peaceful and cooperative relationship. We are open to formalizing such commitments and pledges in the form of a NAP for example, just like you have with Imperio, would you want to. If you think other concessions or commitments from us would be appropriate, do not hesitate to bring them up. We'll gladly consider the ideas.

I hope this helps you.

Best regards,


Sir Aidun
Foreign Affairs Minister of the Knights Templar

[Swiss Pauli]

The most salient points IMO:

We welcome your proposal for open borders. However, we feel that open borders must be accompanied by a border agreement.

Looks like they want to draw up borders. Should we draft a map for them, or ask them to put forward a proposal?

Despite the positive relations with Imperio, however, the language barrier would make a mighty obstacle

Looks unlikely that they'll form any sort of miltary pact against us with Imperio as a result.

We are open to formalizing such commitments and pledges in the form of a NAP

This is the offer I think we were looking for.

I will reply now acknowledging receipt of the message.

[Sullla]

Oy, what a pain these guys are. I think they want to try and talk their way out of every situation. If they spent half the time PLAYING the game as they did talking about it...

Anyway, the good news is that we can pretty safely say that Templars have absolutely no plans to attack in the near future. (If so, it's the most masterful series of double-speak communications ever!) We can concentrate most of our new military units in Cape Town in the forseeable future, with a somewhat lesser presence in the Pink region. A couple key highlights, in addition to the ones pulled out by Swiss Pauli:

Therefore we are prepared to accept a preliminary bi-lateral agreement which governs exclusively the territories between our current borders. The agreement would be official, but should in the future be replaced by a three-party agreement. With this concession from our side we are prepared to agree with your proposal for open borders.

I added the bold. This is practically agreeing to nothing - we won't go after their current two cities. If they plant more cities later on our border, we could then capture them in war fairly. (Do the Templars even realize this?) I still don't know what they mean by this "three party" nonsense. I'd tell them that we desire peaceful coexistence, but we don't think it's reasonable for the Templars to try and dictate our foreign policy with Imperio. We have to see if we can get them to shut up about such a silly, impossibly idealistic goal!

Therefore we think tech agreements, especially with neighbors, should be long-term. We have sensed reservations on your team towards long-term commitments. To make it a bit easier for your team to make such commitments, we are prepared to offer your peace-loving team certain concessions or commitments that will help maintain peaceful relations between our teams.

I am intrigued by this idea of "concessions." Let's here more about that, heh heh. Maybe we can weasel a missionary out of them.

Anyway, I think the proper way to respond is to suggest that making early tech trades builds trust and paves the way to long-term tech agreements. How can we commit ourselves to a permanent tech alliance before making a single tech exchange? Trust must be established over time, not demanded as a pre-existing condition for any kind of an agreement. Say that we're willing to meet them halfway on this, but they have to meet us halfway as well.

Obviously, we need to spend a couple days discussing this as a team and come to a conclusion on what to do. For my two cents worth, I would agree to any reasonable agreement Templars want right now. If they want an NAP at the current borders, yeah, sure. (We'll use that time to continue expanding!) If they want a firmer commitment to tech trading, OK. (We're not going to get much of anything from Imperio, so having some deals in place with both PAL and Templars makes sense.) The only way they beat us is to attack us NOW, while they're relatively strong. The longer this game goes on, the more of an advantage we have, with our edge in cities and population.

(Quick fun exercise: I counted up city spots we're likely to grab, and I ended up with 13. I did the same for Templars and got about 7 for them, and about 8 for Imperio. The longer the game lasts, the more this advantage will tell! And we're awesome, don't forget that. )

Here's an ideal future for our team. In the immediate future, we concentrate on expanding and building up our economic infrastructure. We consolidate in the late classical and early middle ages, and look to make a move sometime in the latter middle ages/early renaissance period. We get to Nationalism first and begin drafting maces or Oromo warriors (muskets), we can take out a rival of our choice. Try to control the continent by the industrial age and then pick a victory condition from there. Easier said than done though!

Sorry if this went far afield, just trying to lay out my vision of where we're trying to go!

[sunrise089]

@Sullla: I don't have any issues with what you've written, but would you mind explaining how we can attack future Templar cities? From my readings of their message all I interpreted them to mean was that they want to mark of territory between RB and Templars and not worry about our border with Imperio.

[mostly-harmless]

Regarding a potential upcoming border agreement.
I have drawn up a first map with spots we would allow Templars to settle on. Yellow ticks mark the furthest city placement spots. Note that I deliberately allowed for invalid spots in the Constantinople BFC to appear less knowing. Also the iron is edited out of the map.

For the teams eyes only I also put next to it the map with some explanations, existing cities, BFCs of existing cities. Pink dot marks Iron spot. White dots mark planned next cities.


Thoughts?

mh

[Swiss Pauli]

Good work, mh!

I'd slightly change the thinking behind it and I would not marked 'allowed cities' but I'd put on our mutual borders. I'd suggest that we mark the borders for the Twin Peaks area, and give Templars the honour to mark the PinkDot/Fish-Marble borders.

I'll try to illustrate this if I can...

[mostly-harmless]

I was thinking borders initially as well, but then it is tricky to predict how cultural borders will interact.
In the end I thought it is all about where to allow city spots.
I deliberately left some room on the southern coast for them to ask for in return for securing Pink Peaks.

mh

[Swiss Pauli]

I put this ugly SoB together rather quickly :



Pink Dot needs moving west a bit, I realise.

We need to point out that the borders will overlap here and there owing to the nature of border pops, but this map should form the basis of a general understanding.

[Sullla]

Hmm... do we really want to be so specific as to send Templars an actual map? I would think that having some vagueness benefits us a little more at this point.

[mostly-harmless]

The map does not reveal anything that they don't know already. In th end any border agreement will have to be specific (ie. map) other wise it is pretty useless. I am pretty sure Templars will want a map.

mh

[Swiss Pauli]

Thinking about this again, I wonder whether the terribly amateurish nature of the map would work out to our advantage, as it gives us quite a lot of room for manoeuvre...

I'll try to draft an initial, vague response to Templars mentioning border agreement, tech trading possibilities (their religious techs versus our 'practical' ones), the usual verbiage etc., etc.