Banana: Diplomacy Thread #2

[Sullla]

I think that there's a very real chance that we'll want to upgrade one or two of our Mounted units to cuirassiers. I'd feel enormously better sending Combat II cuirassiers against Mutal than knights! And the upgrade is fairly inexpensive at 50g each. (I know we'd rather put that gold into research, but the Mutal attack has to succeed. It *HAS* to!)

My strong recommendation is to ask for the horses back next turn (T168) and promise that we will return horses as soon as we hook them up at Constantinople, which should be about 5t. That allows us to do the upgrades the turn before the attack, and also start cranking some more cuirassiers at Cape Town.

[sunrise089]

And we have a third promotion on one of the knights, so we can even have a shock or formation Cuirassier if we need one.

[sooooo]

Anyone willing to chat to banana tonight at 11pm EST?

50g to upgrade to a currassier is cheaper than I expected - we should do that.

Banana's revolt to vassalage makes no sense to me. They've still got the draft unhapiness but lose the +2 happy from the barracks. They can no longer draft a unit per turn from their globe theatre city (!). All for an extra promotion?

[sunrise089]

I am available to chat.

EDIT: Does Vassalage even give them another promo? They also took Theo, so they will probably just get 7xp units.

[dsplaisted]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but we only need the horses during the turn when we would do the upgrade, but banana needs them at the end of turn when production is applied. So can't we cancel the horses deal, do our upgrades, and then give him back the horses?

Also, I assume you've accounted for this, but upgrading a unit uses its movement so we need to upgrade 1 turn before the attack starts.

[sooooo]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but we only need the horses during the turn when we would do the upgrade, but banana needs them at the end of turn when production is applied. So can't we cancel the horses deal, do our upgrades, and then give him back the horses?

It's a good idea and I didn't think of it. However, if we offer a new deal then we can't have horses until we hook up the ones at Constantinople (will not be ready until T172). We really want to be building our own mounted units from Cape Town.

I'll reply to the email saying Sunrise will chat.

[darrelljs]

Should we send a message explaining are war declaration against Imperio?

Darrell

[Sullla]

Yes, we should. Quick talking points:

- History with Imperio (pillaging, war declarations, etc.)
- Inability to trust Imperio, betrayed their allies before
- Refused to Close Borders or stop trading techs with PAL
- Did not deliver Gunpowder tech, did not help in war against Templars
- In order to combat PAL, we must secure ourselves against a backstab from Imperio.
- Operation was too important to let any word get out ahead of time.

I also think that we should consider gifting Acre to Banana when we capture it (it doesn't benefit us much whereas it would definitely help Banana, plus the city will be culture-crushed by Banana borders anyway!) but we need to discuss this as a team first before telling that to Donovan. I think he'd feel better if we gifted him a captured Imperio city.

[sunrise089]

Draft:

Banana,

As you may have seen, RB and Imperio are now at war. We believe you may have suspected this, and we appreciate you not spoiling the surprise to Imperio. We also apologize for not formally including you in our war plans. We view this operation, which was planned in part before even T100, as absolutely essential to our goal of stopping PAL from winning the game. Unfortunately that meant not even sharing details or it with our friends.

We also wanted to tell you some of our reasons for fighting Imperio:

*Imperio pillaged and sabotaged RB land before we were at war.
*Imperio declared war on RB.
*Imperio was willing to betray the Templars, so it was hard to believe that they would not betray us, which meant we could never attack PAL without a huge army at home.
*Imperio agreed to trade RB Gunpowder, and then didn't.
*Imperio was never willing to work against PAL to stop them from winning, and in fact continued to trade with them and maintain open borders.

Anyways, the war has started and apparently Imperio's turn player is pretty mad. We'll let you know how things go. We also wanted to tell you we're discussing ways to share the spoils of war with you, but no details quite yet.

Regards,

-RB

[regoarrarr]

*Imperio was willing to betray the Templars, so it was hard to believe you would not betray us, which meant we could never attack PAL without a huge army at home.

I assume you mean hard to believe THEY would not betray us (i.e. Imperio)

Other than that it looks good.

[Zeviz]

Several corrections:
* Imperio pillaged and sabotaged RB land before we were at war. during our previous NAP (before they attacked us).

* Imperio was willing to betray the Templars their Templar allies

Replace line about gunpowder with:
*As part of the same peace deal that included current NAP Imperio agreed to trade us Gunpowder and to attack Templars. They did neither of these things, invalidating the agreement.

[sunrise089]

Sounds good to me Zevis, I vote to send.

[shadyforce]

The last line sort of commits us to giving Acre to Banana. Are we sure we want to do that? If we're not sure then maybe it would be prudent to omit that line. The message works fine without it and we can always bring up war spoils in a future message when we know what we're going to do.

[Zeviz]

I like the idea of giving Acre to Banana. Among other things, it will give them a place to hide if their core gets overrun.

[Sullla]

I also vote to send something off to Donovan. The message above looks fine.

By the way, CivStats shows a PAL decrease in score during Banana's turn. The only way that's possible is if Banana attacked a PAL city! Anyone want to log in and see what went down over there?