Diplomacy Nazi, please!

[Arrian]

There are some pretty good minds on the other teams, too. Part of the problem is that if you *do* overwhelm somebody, two or three other teams will prioritize taking you down, lest they too fall prey to you.

I think the key to victory is somehow to disguise your strength. Then, all of a sudden like, you take off the kid gloves and go for the win.

That will be difficult, given all the information the game provides.

-Arrian

[Aginor]

Absolutely true, Arrian...learned that lesson playing the original board game of Civilization.

I conceptualize a multiplayer game like this as akin to chess in that you're attempting to create a strategic situation that leads to your win. The key is building a situation where the opposition knows the knife thrust is coming but is completely helpless to stop it. Easier said than done, to be sure.

There are two times militarily where offense is clearly stronger than defense - Cavalry (on a beeline) and Tanks. Chances are if we're going to win by the hammer route it's at one of these two points (or both) that we're going to lay down the law.

Otherwise it seems probable that the game will come down to whether somebody can launch a spaceship before someone else can win by culture.

I agree with you that there are some *really* smart people on some of the other teams. Our advantage is in quantity of strong players, which is why I'm harping on organization.

[DeepO]

Aginor, I don't fully agree with the need for rigid structure, to be sure to harness the best of our members. I mean, in principle it's correct, of course, but from my experience it seems not to work that way exactly.

I mean, it will work in a working environment, but this is supposed to be fun. While I like a bit of structure, too much structure and I expect to be paid to function in it... but no need to fully dig this out: our objectives are the same here: avoid burnout, timely decisions, and the best possible decisions while we can. We will adapt once the game gets going and situations might change, which means this structuring is a continuous process.

It will probably be more clear what I mean once we get going, from our experience quite a few structures emerged, and I'm sure others who have played demogames will want to bring part of their structure with them. Then, adapting them will be a very worthy goal, and something you're obviously interested in.

If you want, you can have the title of 'head of GS (re)structuring department', but it wouldn't make a lot of difference: I'll listen to you no matter what official title you might hold, and others will do the same. If you think we should improve, come with a suggestion, and if the team agrees we'll do it. If you want to set up structures for different scholia, just post them, but my advice is to wait a little and see what is already present (yeah, I know, not a lot visible now). This way you won't burn out thinking on stuff we already know... no need to invent the wheel twice.

Maybe we should let current members into our old forum, although it will be hard to wade through all the threads and analyse their structure... one thing I think we should improve on is the reference threads. (I'll start one on intelligence as soon as the game starts, maybe a bit sooner.). However the old GS way is certainly not the same as the new GS way by default: half the team is renewed and really, that half is as important if not more important than us vets.

One final thing to note, though: I strongly disagree that the best ideas came from a structured approach. Our past, most genius moments were all group efforts, with suggestions coming from unlikely places, on days where there was a lot of chaotic brainstorming going on. Certain days, our forum looked like a collection of chat windows, not forum threads: many times I kept several windows open, typing responses in one when another reloaded to see what cross-posts I made last response. Utter chaos of literally thousands of posts per day, but boy was it productive!

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BTW, it's a myth that GS was slow in diplo contacts because we want to be democratic and want to hear everyone's opinion. It's a myth we more or less started to cultivate to have a better excuse of what was really going on: over-analysis, and indecisiveness. At certain points of the game we were paralysed in diplo contacts as we were trying to foresee all possibilities, or we were simply to busy in other aspects of the game.

While Vox was diplo-juggling 4 teams in the first stages of the war with them, we were not, and were quite baffled at the little contacts we had... because we were focusing on 2 things: first how to get out of the disaster scenario (purely a Civ mechanics question). Second how to respond to the starting public forum flame war. We simply weren't interested in dealing with other teams... in that way, Beta nearly won the war in a pure out-of-game fashion.

Later, we were a bit more conscious. It's true nobody ever got the full responsibility to close a deal in e.g. a chat (nobody really liked to chat, or was able to) and all PMs were reviewed before leaving, but we didn't get clogged in the diplo discussion. Most 'instant' decisions were reached in less than 2 days. Sometimes we forgot to answer, sometimes we chose not to answer, sometimes we forgot to contact someone in time. But in the end, I think we were doing pretty well diplomatically. All the talk of us being (and staying) extremely bad at diplo was part of the cloak we could put on to mask our true strengths.

However, I personally have grown even more respectful of the diplo part of demogames, which means I want us to be a lot more active in that part. Aro's diplomatic attitude is legendary, as well as MZ's evil plans (TM), I really want to learn from them and all 'newbies'.

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Aginor
There are two times militarily where offense is clearly stronger than defense - Cavalry (on a beeline) and Tanks. Chances are if we're going to win by the hammer route it's at one of these two points (or both) that we're going to lay down the law.

I beg to differ. True, these two lines are most known, which mean everyone will take them into account. Beelining for them might be a sure way of getting an edge, however is also very predictable... IMO the best points in time to really do some damage will be at alternative routes. Much more difficult to predict, much easier to disguise, and very powerful if the other is not prepared.

My current absolute favourite is the cannon beeline, suplemented with liberalism if possible. Forget about rifling for a while, and upgrade all grenadiers from maceman / pikeman. City raider II grenadiers will eat through both rifles and cavs in cities, cannons take out anything else. All you need to do is reach a city, and it's yours. And this at the same time of reaching cavs, who make great open field attackers, but run out of things to do waiting for cats to pummel down defenses.

Other favourites: elephants, swords, axes even. Or marines.... wow. Better than tanks, if you ask me

DeepO

[Arrian]

BTW, it's a myth that GS was slow in diplo contacts because we want to be democratic and want to hear everyone's opinion. It's a myth we more or less started to cultivate to have a better excuse of what was really going on: over-analysis, and indecisiveness. At certain points of the game we were paralysed in diplo contacts as we were trying to foresee all possibilities, or we were simply to busy in other aspects of the game.

Totally agree. It's not that we were waiting to hear from more members, it's that those of us who were active analyzed everything to death, several times over, before making any sort of decision.

-Arrian

[Hot Mustard]

Originally posted by DeepO
...Beta nearly won the war in a pure out-of-game fashion.

Oh, totally! He was kicking your asses in diplomacy at that time, publicly and privately.

I think it's fair to say GoW and RP were practically goaded into the conflict by Beta. Then once we learned how things really stood...

[Arrian]

My current absolute favourite is the cannon beeline

I'm a big fan of this too (since Steel also conveys other benifits like the Ironworks). I've taken it as my free tech from Liberalism before...

-Arrian

[Theseus]

We should take the military discussion to the Spartan Academy, but...

I've been thinking a lot about Muskets lately. I may have this wrong, but don;t gunpowder units ignore city walls and city culture defenses?

And yes, Marines rock.

[Arrian]

Yes, GP units ignore walls/castles. Muskets aren't all that great, but they do have the advantage of negating the older specific counter promos (shock, cover). Too bad they cannot have City Raider promos, though, eh?

-Arrian

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by dejon
I think it's fair to say GoW and RP were practically goaded into the conflict by Beta. Then once we learned how things really stood...

Not really. We coerced Vox to leave Bob with the promise that we would support them in a war against GS. Vox could've murdered us easily with an Immortal rush so we had no choice but to try and point their swords south instead of west.

[DeepO]

Yep. Another example where diplommacy won the day.

DeepO

[DeepO]

BTW, We were more or less in a alliance (or so we believed) at the time with Vox, we supported their trip to Bob but thought it was too soon. We wanted to add war chariots to their imortals, and wipe Bob clean. When they returned from their Bob adventure, they made us believe they were retreating and were going back in force... I believe we even had some kind of time line when we could join the fun.

DeepO

[Arrian]

Yeah, but they gave us the impression that they were basically incompetant (a big reason being their stated reasons for their attack on Bob and subsequent withdrawl... which turned out to be BS) and so not long before they attacked us, we had a long thread about "when shall we kill Vox." GS opinion had turned on them already.

If, instead, Vox had come to us to coordinate an attack on Bob, we would've been on board. Instead, they went off half-cocked without us.

Brilliant diplo, there, MZ!

-Arrian

edit: another thing, IIRC, was Vox's handling of the Lux Invicta affair. Lux was briefly given a Voxian city on our landmass, so that Lux could survive. Vox didn't mention this to us until it was already done, which irritated some of us (not that we had any particular right to tell Vox what to do with their cities, but still - it impacted the BoP on our landmass) and shortly thereafter had a change of heart and took their city back. They gave a real good impression of having no idea what they were doing.

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Arrian
They gave a real good impression of having no idea what they were doing.

In this instance, I think they didn't know what they were doing for true, it was not played

I still can't understand the whole thing. Part of it was purely provocation, but they nearly provoked us to start building up our military, while they were going to attack us some turns afterwards. Lux so close to our borders would have meant a cultural dent, so it directly harmed us. I still can't understand it... nor the sudden recapturing of the city.

DeepO

[Krill]

Well, either weay, it worked out for vox. If they had not have killed Lux,, then Lux would have had Legos Minor, so Vox would have been screwed after they declared war on GS and got dismantled in short order, as they would have had no where to go but southern bob. And if they had done that, you get the whole bobian war rehashed, and no one in the entire world knows what happens with that...