AC Diplomacy

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Aeson
I wasn't part of most of the pre-game discussions. But, given the rules decided upon before the game:

Until Vox and AC are aware of the other's presence through allowed channels, you can't discuss the third party.

The problem, Aeson, is I do not recall the teams agreeing to this rule.

I let it lay, knowing that this would come up. Now is the time to address it, I beleive.

[notyoueither]

Any response, or is the official position that a rule made with little thought by one of the admins is something we are stuck with?

[notyoueither]

This weekend we should negotiate tech trades with AC. This will require revealing information about tech we have. Anyone against this?

[snoopy369]

NYE, the time to address it was a long, long time ago, if you believed it was invalid. Many teams have dealt with this rule already, and it would be utterly unfair to permit you to do this given all of the other teams that have not.

In any event, the rule was put to discussion, and not objected to, before the game was begun. It was made like all of the other rules of this game.

[notyoueither]

Yes, other teams have delt with it. It appears they have violated the rule.

What is the consequence?

What consequence can there be for violating an absurd restriction?

We can describe mountains. We can send pictures of them. We can send pictures of mountains with strange colours painted on them, but we break the rules by saying there is a civ on the other side of the mountain. We break the rules by stating the obvious and speaking of things in our own experience.

Are you able to admit you made a mistake?

[Blake]

This weekend we should negotiate tech trades with AC. This will require revealing information about tech we have. Anyone against this?

I'm not sure about telling them we are going for construction or even mathematics for that matter.

We can say that Monarchy is on our hit list of techs, because we have Wine.

Something to learn is Monotheism and religion in general, do they have plans?

I'm inclined to think that we should reveal the existence of Vox because otherwise we will seem untruthful... and due to the mountain range a scout really isn't likely to miss Vox the scout will pretty much be guided to them. Even if we could convince them to hang west it would suck because then they scout us out.

We can claim that you were evasive because we were still uncertain about and clarifying the rules about disclosing the existence of unknown teams.

Of course those rules make pretty clear that we need to show a screenshot if we do want to disclose the existence of Vox.

We could show a screeny which shows the edge of our borders and Vox's borders and the passage north, which would show that we and Vox are indeed too close for comfort and on a river system.


I took a look and we can easily get a screenshot showing (broadly) the relative positions of the 3 civs in question and much of what we need for border agreement.



We would want to note that both GS and Vox borders are of capitals at 40%, the borders shown are the top, at that point there are 7 tiles separation. At the closest point (where the borders are widest) there is 3 tiles separation.

We would want to note that we are indeed at war with Vox (that is visible from us having vision from within Vox territory) and that showing information any further south would cross our paranoia threshold - that we don't want to nor see the need to give away any information of tactical importance.

We might want to note that there is very little land to the East of Vox and to the south is Ice... just Ice, in other words, Vox are boxed in by us, and even if we didn't attack them, they would've had to attack us if they wanted a viable amount of land.

We might want to go quickly into the details of the war. That Vox have Hinduism, that we share a river, that we were contemplating war to prevent spread of Hinduism into our Capital, that Vox proceeded to ignore our request (warning?) to keep their scout away from our borders and simultaneously presented an opportunity for us to kill the offending scout. That we took that opportunity and Vox have since given us no reason to declare peace.

We might want to note that Vox deceived us by first mapping the river-route (creating a trade link) and then sidling through the ice (gotta stress that ice!) and coming in with their scout from the west, finally coming close to our borders as if desperate to get through to the east before border expansion. That our initial scout (a warrior) had head West, but very soon hit what seems to be the west coast proving that Vox couldn't have come from there (the Vox Scout obviously took a while to get around us) and that we had already sent another warrior East anyway and thus found Vox very soon after their attempted deception.

Our story becomes:
1) War between GS and Vox was inevitable due to being stuck together on the bottom of the world.
2) Vox have given us no reason to trust them, that indeed they greeted us with deception.
3) And they even antagonized us at a point when we were forced to strongly consider war for reasons of basic security.

We may or may not want to explicitly make those bulleted points.


I am uncertain of how much we would want to reveal about our War with Vox. We probably want to truthfully claim that it is going as planned with our skirmishers providing us with a decisive advantage.


Borders:

We could stress that the Marble/Cows/Ivory area is obviously a hard limit for borders and that we indeed might want more. Or we could put the ball in Banana's court, they might feel they are dangerously overextending themselves and give us favorable borders without hesitation. I'd favor the latter.


Anyway I'm just throwing those ideas out there and giving an indication of what I think we should say if we are willing to share the map information.

[Blake]

I dunno if NYE has got this message already or not. It was in the gmail inbox. Anyway in the interest of posting everything of interest:

Sheng-Ji Yang
to me

Dec 7 (1 day ago)
I've come up with a general outline for the 3 way meeting between us and Banana.
The channel will be #Negotiations udder apolyton.net and I'm going to propose a tentative
early Saturday night time frame from a North American time frame so 03:00 - 05:00 GMT
(technically now on Sunday morning) Of course in the Banana representative will be from
Europe that wont work very well and we should instead look for something like a 22:00 GMT
which would be mid afternoon for North Americans. As I see Notyoueither your profile says
your in Canada and based on our first meeting this should I hope be a good time for you.
If its no please respond with a counter proposal by atleast Firday night.

[Arrian]

I generally agree with Blake.

I think our bare minimum northern border is at the mountains by the ivory. That's a lot close to EotS than it is to the 'nana capital, so I cannot see how anyone could argue it's unfair.

As for pushing for the border to be set North of there... well, on the one hand I think it would be reasonable, but on the other I don't see anything on the map that's really worth much to us. Plus, once they're aware of Vox and our war, us pressing for more land to the north might look unduly greedy. I think we start out asserting something like what NYE said in the chat: ~5 tiles south of Banana's stone city, one starts getting into territory we want. Then, if/when we're pressed, we can "concede" some of that, perhaps in exchange for other considerations (tech?). We have a good amount of room if our northern border is at the mountains I mentioned, provided of course we finish Vox as planned.

As for the rest, we trade screenies, we explain that the rules are fundamentally screwy and in trying to abide by them we (NYE) hid the existence of Vox, who will appear in the screenie (I like Blake's shot). Anyway, we say something like: "have a look at the proximity of our starts" and explain briefly that we're at war, feeling for various reasons (which need not be fully explained - I'd leave that to the disgression of whomever is doing the chatting) that we had little choice.

-Arrian

[notyoueither]

Thanks, Blake.

Reply sent to Yang

I would be pleased to attend such a meeting.

Please let me know what time would be most convenient for yourself and the representatives of Banana. I will do my best to make that time or I will let you know if it is a problem for me.

[notyoueither]

We're not allowed to discuss relations with unmet teams.

We can show them a shot with Vox in it, but we can't say anything about Vox, or Vox and us.

That is my understanding of the ruling.

[notyoueither]

I suppose I could discuss hypothetical situations and how GS would act in those circumstances.

This is nuts, so I'm going to have a beer and laugh about it.

[notyoueither]

Picture an alliance akin to GoW and ND. Imagine the age of sail on a continents setup. Imagine contact being made, but you can't tell your ally anything.

All you can do is give them a screenshot showing the discovered civ. When asked, you say 'what civ?'

Picture yourself in a boat on a river...

[snoopy369]

If you show them a screenshot including Vox, you are then free to discuss Vox (from that point, on, forever).

[Randolph]

Ok, that sounds like a pretty good patch-up ruling to this situation. It still might not make a lot of sense logically, but it should avoid any true absurdities in game. I agree with Snoopy that we can't completely nullify a clear rule after the game has started, and it really doesn't seem fair to push for that.

We can send nana & AC a small screenshot showing vox (maybe Blake's), tell them, "congratulation, you have now discovered vox, say hello quickly, before you have to say goodbye." It will then be clear that we have made every effort to be honest (and we don't have any strong reason not to be), and we haven't violated the rule as construed.

[Krill]

#ignore, pw is milking, chat just started.