Vox Diplomacy

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Randolph
That said, is there really any reason why we shouldn't discuss what the terms of a peace deal might be?

Internally you mean? Why not. I think it would be a good idea to see what kind of deal, or what kind of situation would change our minds.

Just how much bad luck would it take?
Is there a situation which would shift the power balance?
How would meeting other teams on either side change things?

Given how early in the game we are I suppose there’s not too much we’re able to trade, but unless there are simply no terms under which we would except peace then what's the harm in opening up the dialog (as long as we're careful what we say)?

Interesting... would we agree when in some sense they give us their religion, or the benefits from it? (say a large part of their gold production). Would workers, or settlers be a good thing to get? I mean, would we be willing to make peace on uneven terms, or does that completely stop the pupose of having an ally?

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by zeit
Also, since we have time on our hands, and we're not handling a crisis (unlike Vox perhaps) we would well if we comprise an action plan for war, perhaps with a crude timeline to winning this thing.

The thing is, BW will change any plan we'd make. Right now, we can plan for e.g. 4 skirms in advance (which is ~20 turns). But the discovery of bronze would change everything around.

We can of course set ourselfs to the ultimate chokers before that time, which we're more or less doing right now. But so far, there is no talk of e.g. building a barracks, which bronze would require (City Raider I or II axes against archers fare better than skirms). It doesn't matter now: we can use 4 skirms at any rate.

DeepO

[Randolph]

Do we have any way of exchanging gold before currency? Even to get settlers and works won’t we need an open boarders agreement (I haven’t experimented much with this mechanic)? Any deal would probably have to be a “gentleman’s agreement,” contingent upon some future behavior (e.g. “you’ll research writing, agree to open boarders, then give us a worker”; boarder agreements, etc). Unless I’m missing something, which isn’t particularly unlikely, there doesn’t seem to be any way for us to get an immediate benefit from peace (and Vox would get one).

The other big obstacle to a peace deal is the massive amount of unknown information. How much territory is behind Vox vs. us, who has access to what strategic resources, what, if any, other civs are on our continent?
If we make a serious peace deal, and then copper shows up next to us, we’ll certainly be kicking ourselves. For that reason alone there probably isn’t any acceptable peace deal until we research bronze working, or some other major event takes place (e.g. the Horde shows up in the west; which BTW could be another reason why they’re desperate to make peace: they’re facing another credible threat).

How much bad luck would it take to shift the balance of power?

(1) They kill grog (he’s the one in their radius, right?)
(2) Their warrior ties up our first skirmisher.
(3) They get copper in their borders and we don’t.
(4) By the time we get our second skirmisher to The Voice they have built, or can pop-rush, an axe.

We’d be a long way from beat, but we certainly wouldn’t be on the offence anymore.

Oh boy am I having fun ; I had no idea things would be this exciting

[vmxa1]

There is very little they could do for us that they would do. What we would need from them is more than they can afford to give.

We have to get something of real value as we are already making a sacrifice.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Randolph
How much territory is behind Vox vs. us, who has access to what strategic resources, what, if any, other civs are on our continent?

In the chat Don said "There is room for at least 2, maybe 3 really good cities to our E."

Unless he's bluffing, they've looked east and there's no-one else there. As I said on the other thread, if we were to destroy Vox we might be isolated until Optics, and fall behind the field in tech. We won't know until we get a boat out, or someone comes to say hello.

[Arrian]

If he's not bluffing, the continent is reasonably-sized. There are several city sites to our west.

They are clearly looking to be reasonable and feel like they're the underdog. I don't think that's an act. Note that he gave us information (to the extent it's true) and we didn't give him squat, did we?

If it wasn't for the religion thing... heh. I find that amusing in a dark way.

-Arrian

[Randolph]

Good point Cort Haus, but I don't think that changes the reasoning much. We still don't know enough about our contenent to make an informed decision about how we would split the contenent if we made peace, or what our prospects of total victory are.

[Blake]

To be quite technical, we can't take them (ie skirmishers vs archers) if they literally hole up in The Voice and don't ever send a single archer out - training new archer non-stop until they run out of gold. We'd need catapults pretty much.

On the other hand, I think we could take them quite easily if they lose some archers fighting outside of The Voice. We need to achieve about 2.5 skirmishers per archer, and have a little luck, to win a skirmisher bumrush on The Voice.

Altough holing up in Voice may be the best way to spite us, I don't think it'd happen in a DG - no-one really wants every turn to go the same way (fortify new archer in voice, next archer 3/25...). We can probably tempt them to engage our skirmishers in the field, they've even declared their intention to try and harrass our lands (which is all positive, if we want to eliminate them).

If we want to be nefarious and despicable we may have even better chances of success - we could for example demand that they train and give us a worker immediately as the condition for alliance, and then proceed to kill them after getting the worker. Altough I do much prefer honor.


As for an Alliance.... there are very real advantages for "two civs working as one" over one bloated civ...
1) Palace income
2) Trade income
3) Upkeeps / freebies.
4) Great People (seperate pools)
5) National Wonders (twice as many)

But for an alliance to really pay off, it needs to be a really close one. With chilly relationships we'd be better off asorbing them.

I say that it's a very bad idea to attack them having the alliance as a fallback strategy. The problem is, once Vox goes into die slowly mode (mass archers in The Voice) they become much less useful as an alliance partner... both having a weaker economy/start, and also trusting us less. I think we really want to commit to either a full alliance (with some conditions on religion) or a fight to the death - the in-betweens are sub-optimal. A fight to the death doesn't have to be executed quickly though, the option of choking them while expanding is still open.

As for which to do?
shoulder devil says kill them and take their stuff !
shoulder angel says befriend them and prosper together !

I hear I'm not supposed to trust the red guy with horns, even if it does sound tempting .

[Krill]

*Shrug* Assuming it is a 1v1 and will stay as one until optics...

If we are to attack Vox asap, how many turns would it be before we had a credible stack? I would hazard a guess at too long, unless they play subotimally or they get screwed by the RNG. And it pays to never expect either of those...

I would suggest that choking is a much better idea than the dagger, but even then, it becomes...dangerous. The perfect choke is one where we can stop Vox from gaining any resources, or from improving any of their land, as well as stopping them from building any settlers. For some reason I doubt that we can do that short of crippling oursleves for real.

So we have to let them improve their land, and expand, and spend the meagre resources protecting 2, or even 3 cities. But we can't afford to let them gain copper or iron. Horses would not be a problem if we have copper or iron. So, we will need a small force, I would suggest 3 skirms and Grog in Voxian land asap, but even then we will have difficulty from keeping them from copper and the gold.

I would prefer to keep Vox form the gold for reasons stated before and now reapplied; if they can work the mined gold, it becomes a lot easier for them to research ironworking if they don't have copper.

---

We also have to remember that we can't just constantly build units either, we have to expand and build build the economy. Skirm/Skirm/Settler works, though we have no scouts if that is the case...so a scout would be quite nice and also be a good 3 turn build with the mined sheep (I did get that right for normal speed? So long since I played a game there).

---

As for nefarious...Worker would be nice, but I would enter any dialogue by saying we want a settler instead of the worker...cripple them for longer while they are building it and giving us a 3:1 cities advantage over them. To complete the deal we want all of their maps (if we can trade maps that is, and this also gives us a chance to see if they are lying by giving us false maps). Also state that war is staying until we recieve the settler (I expect it to be dropped to a worker but one can but hope), so we don't risk the religion spreading and then them reneging on the "Deal".

I also think the basic border treaty would be a good idea as it would say that we are looking forward to the future.

I doubt anybody would agree to such a treaty, because it does amount to both "Negoitiating from a position of strength" and leaves Vox incredably fair behind everyone. But people agree to such a treaties, and people do pull off such tricks in demogames...

Then there is the whole backstabbing part of the deal; I'd just say it was payback for PTWDG, but I doubt anybody (including everyone here) would ever accept doing such a thing. Atleast in a demogame.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Blake
As for an Alliance.... there are very real advantages for "two civs working as one" over one bloated civ...
1) Palace income
2) Trade income
3) Upkeeps / freebies.
4) Great People (seperate pools)
5) National Wonders (twice as many)

6) Double tech rate {Edit: on reflection I suppose this is effectively covered in the other points.}

I assume lower military costs come under 'upkeep'.

If it's not to late for us to shoot for Judaism we could equalise the 'ecclesiastical gap', and see all their cities too, if we each allow the other to install our respective religions in each city. Full shrine income for each could come faster with two civs filling the land, subject to some accounting balances to level things up.

As an instinctive builder, this package looks attractive to me, though I recognise that I'm probably in a minority when I say that building an economy is fun in its own right.

If we could kill them easily (eg, we have Bronze, they don't), them going for the kill is more appealing. If it's a slog and they hole up in the Voice with a ton of archers, the military option looks less attractive long term to me.

[Blake]

EotS can be configured to train a skirmisher every 2 turns, once it has grown to size 5. The Voice can't manage anything near that, with a little choking they'll be reduced to 5-6h/turn, an archer every 4-5 turns. The problem is that skirmishers don't quite reliably beat archers in a city, even at 2:1 odds, so if Vox decides to spam nothing but archers and is careful to avoid losing them they'll "outnumber" us too much (especially because of our skirmisher travel time). On the other hand if Vox willingly sacrifices two archers to kill off a skirmisher it has a much better chance of working. So we could start a choke and if they try to break it (or even if they suceed) it's a green light to skirmisher rush them, but if they stubbornly hole up we want to expand and tech and let them stagment. Regardless we don't want to send too many skirmishers into their territory - we want them thinking they have a chance trading archers for skirmishers.

[Mudhut]

Blake analysis (as usual!) is excellent - we can kill them in a variety of ways, and we should see how it plays out as to what the most expedient plan will be.

I also feel we should make a formal response to Vox (now that we've had time to discuss) - just polite to make sure that we do so. [And I gather that GS is renowned for slow response times, so maybe we should try and fix this early this game?!?].

I feel we should say basically:
-We are in a position of power
-We want to continue the war, because that's where our advantage lies
-We don't preclude the option of peace later on, if we were offered enough
-But there's nothing they can offer us now to make us change our mind
-On with the war!!

But obviously it needs to be put in prose and better structured etc. (And discussed of course!) What say you all?

Also - we could manually institute a mock vassalage agreement, could we not? Taking the warlords mechanic and implementing it in vanilla could be possible via a carefully crafted contract? Just something for all you doves to thing about. Me, I'm with the hawks...

[Dominae]

I doubt they will try to break the siege with just Archers. If they do, they are either desperate, or bored, or worse.

This will probably not be resolved before Catapults.

If I were them I would search the continent far and wide for another team and sell my soul for an alliance. That would mess up Gathering Storm's plans considerably.

[Randolph]

What if we only left 1-2 skirmishers within sight of The Voice to give the impression that we had moved on to building and were hoping to choke them with a minimal force? Hopefully they would attack the skirmishers (at poor odds), weakening themselves enough for “the rest of” the skirmishers (5+?) to move in and take The Voice.

I tend to agree with Blake’s logic that they’re unlikely to simply hole up and build archers, unless that appears to be the only plausible plan, because it’s simply to boring.

[Arrian]

So, perhaps we should seriously consider peace. Catapults are pretty far down the road.

-Arrian