Banana: Diplomacy Thread #2

[Swiss Pauli]

Reply from Bananaland:

Hello Realms Team,

Congratulations on your Golden Age! It's nice to have it timed so well with ours, especially with the way things are developing. Also, sorry for the lack of communication lately. It's composed of two parts RL priorities and one part hiding my head in shame. Mostly RL, though.

You pretty much pegged it. I saw that you were online, and wanted to discuss our deal with Imperio. I just needed to get that pesky diplo screen with the menacing music out of the way. Oh, good! They accepted our trade! I can't wait to discuss our 3-way alliance......

So, let's move forward, shall we? Banking is yours (and not sure if our president ever formally thanked you for Drama, the ingrate!), and the Edu-Astro trade sounds good to me (surprisingly, we are still at 13 turns for Astro; our GA did next to nothing for our research). I am trying to determine if I will need the ships you requested, but am guessing you will get at least one of them.

Your secrets re: Imperio are safe with me. Did they only mention Acre and no other Templar cities? Because Acre is obviously a strategic place to launch an attack on us. I belieive I will be taking your advice and becoming a card-carrying member of your continent once I get a couple more troops ready. And thanks for continuing to have our back -- the next few turns will likely set the tone for the near future.

That's it for now. I am re-installing BTS right now since I jumped the gun on the patch. My my thanks in advance if there are Horses waiting for us.

Regards,
Donovan

[Kylearan]

Hi,

very nice letter, sooooo!

For what it's worth, I believe Donovan that he didn't screw us on purpose. His feeling of shame sounds genuine to me, and I still trust him. Let's continue to cooperate closely with him (as if we had any choice anyway... ). If after the game it turns out he was secretly plotting against us behind our back with the other teams, then I will congratulate him on his masterful performance!

-Kylearan

[darrelljs]

Education/Astronomy is a nice trade for us. We get Universities and Observatories! Hopefully we'll have some time to slip in half cost Courthouses before we start on those.

FWIW, I still think he new exactly what he was doing when he made the trade, but that's water under the bridge at this point.

Darrell

[Swiss Pauli]

Proposal:

Hi Donovan,

Tech-wise, we'll have Gunpowder in 2 more turns. Paper will be about 4 turns, and Edu a further half dozen assuming we get our Great Scientist (88%). What's PAL researching at the moment?

Turning to Templar's lands: the Gunpowder debacle meant we were in a weak negotiating position with Imperio, so we had to agree that they could have all Templar's cities except Jericho. However, given the *ahem* top secret nature of the deal with Imperio, we couldn't possibly tell you to cancel your plan to attack Templars, so feel free to take as many cities as you like

Damascus is a pretty decent city, and, according to Imperio, the garrison on T150 was just 5 units, though they'll be training more. Constantinople had a 7-strong garrison on T150, and has trained one more unit in the mean-time.

When do you think you'll be ready to attack Acre, and do you think you'll have the forces to take Constaninople or Damascus as well? We can potentially support your attack on Constantinople by bombing down its defences and picking off some defenders, but time is of the essence as Imperio is also planning to attack Templars.

We look forward to your reply.

Cheers,

Team RB

I think it might be useful for us to have Banana form a buffer between our core and Imperio. His protective trait will help him hold any cities he takes, and getting a clearer timeline from him can only help us with our own planning. What do you guys think?

[T-hawk]

I want to point out a big red flag in this tech trade arrangement, that Banana himself may not have realized, or only subconsciously so. Astronomy is worth considerably more in trade value than Education.

PAL already has Education, so they can trade or gift it around at will. Our Education is likely to trade only once to Banana and that's it. But Banana might easily pick up 3-fer or 4-fer worth of trading with Astronomy.

Our own research has always been duplicated and we've never scored a major monopoly trade. Templars did that with Metal Casting, Banana did that with Machinery, PAL did that with Civil Service. This is why we are behind in tech. We need a major monopoly score that we can trade to catch up. Astronomy could be that, if we can dissuade Banana from researching it (but it's probably too late.)

[sooooo]

I'm hoping to dissuade Banana from trading astronomy to either PAL or Imperio. With PAL it should be easy, with Imperio not so much. Hopefully Imperio are researching the same tech. Ourselves, we don't really have any trade partners except for banana, so I don't think that going for a monopoly tech like, say, chemistry or astronomy is better than education. We aren't exactly going to trade either of those two to Imperio or PAL.

I don't think education is that valuable to us compared to say printing press or chemistry, but I'm happy with going for it because it's likely we can use our GS to bulb the tech and get over half of it that way. We will know if we have a GS in 2 turns, possibly if we get an artist we can reevaluate our teching.

[Sullla]

Right, we're rapidly approaching the point of the game where tech trades won't be particularly meaningful. Rabbits and Templars are effectively out of the game as far as researching new techs. We should be able to convince Banana that it's not in his interest to trade anything to PAL, for obvious reasons. Our team also is not going to be making any tech trades with PAL - they won't accept them, and we don't want their team getting any stronger.

That just leaves Imperio as the wild card in the mix. And if plans go forward as we expect them to, Imperio will soon be solidly in the PAL camp as well, once we gut their army and cities with a surprise attack. Therefore, I see the world polarizing very quickly into PAL/Imperio against RB/Banana, with very little trade interaction between the two groups. If that takes place, it won't matter if our research doubles up on techs PAL has already researched, because we won't be trading with them or Imperio anyway. Paper/Education also just lines up really well with our current assets - it's a no-brainer to go there next, IMO. (We force PAL to grab something from Liberalism now, instead of saving it for a really expensive tech.)

And one last point: we did get a super-monopoly earlier in the game, with the Aesthetics/Literature combo. We traded those techs to everyone. But yeah, we could have done better in that area, definitely.

[Swiss Pauli]

Very nice tech discussion, guys, but what about the letter to Banana

[sooooo]

I think it's good. Banana have been avoiding our questions over Acre recently, so it'll be interesting to hear their reply.

[ruff_hi]

oh right - looks good to me.

[sooooo]

Swiss - those tech predictions, did you adjust for the loss of bureaucracy then the loss of the golden age?

[Swiss Pauli]

Vaguely - there's also the possibility of another war with Imperio to consider (and loss of our trade routes) so I didn't torture myself and made some conservative guesstimates in order to arrive at a figure that would more or less match with his discover of Astro

[sooooo]

OK, fair enough. But we can't actually trade for astronomy until we research optics. Which possibly we should do after gunpowder actually so that we have the option to build caravels.

[T-hawk]

Therefore, I see the world polarizing very quickly into PAL/Imperio against RB/Banana, with very little trade interaction between the two groups.

We'll have two blocs of military, but economic trading will still happen. Banana and Imperio will still deal. They are no threat to each other, and both need to hold off a bigger aggressive neighbor. This just happened with the Gunpowder deal and could easily happen again. Imperio will research PPress or Chemistry or Constitution to trade to Banana for Astronomy, leaving us out in the cold and having to duplicate that research.

I agree with Sullla that we have to go for Education now, both to leverage the Great Scientist and to cut off the Liberalism wagon. But next we need to find something that will leverage into more than a single trade.

[Swiss Pauli]

Maybe Banana and Imperio will still deal, but it doesn't change the fact that we only have one trading partner, assuming we attack Imperio. If we go that way, then we're more or less in Always War mode for the rest of the game, and we'll be forced to duplicate research out of necessity.

In these circumstances, we should pick techs to research that can't easily be part-bulbed by a GS, and try to steer Banana in a similar direction. We can then use the GSs for 'backfill bulbing' (once we have Education/Astro). This won't be that great as A1 lacks food to hire additional GSs, but I don't see many other options to get a decent bang for our tech-buck.