Yet Another Dominions Game - Game Running!

[DrPraetorious]

I have reawoken the Rimtursar, securing the rapid demise of all the wretched peoples of the world, as well as their petty idols. Your end will be painful; I offer the prospect that it may be swift or lingering. The end of days is upon you! Naught but blood and icy damnation awaits the whole of the world!

p.s. abandon all hope, also, for it is a delusion.
p.p.s. bend over, the lords of the icy north come for you.

[Manuk]

Dr., thanks for this cold winter. We like it.

[CyborgMoses]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see how your precious Rimtursar fare when they've got more crossbow quarrels than flesh in their bodies.

[Manuk]

No diplomacy includes no NAP. Just in case that anyone has tought of doing so.

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[Jurri]

Wouldn't it be sorta hard to make a NAP without communication?

Here's a couple of moves that would be technically ok but very un-sportsman-like:
-Name your god 'Machaka! NAP until 30!' or similar.
-Name your prophet 'Send gold first: slaves sold 15g per' or in the same vein. Kill your prophet and you can do it again.
-Rename scouts with diplomatic messages and suicide them on the receiver of choice. (Heck, I could name my scouts Entente Cordiale and most wouldn't even blink... But Alneyan would sure know what I want when the scout comes trashing! )

Here's another, not as severe:
-Send gems for somebody. What would you do if Mictlan sent you 5 fire gems? If he sent you 1 gem a turn? I would think twice before attacking him, since then he presumably wouldn't send the gem. Also, quite possibly if Mictlan sent me gems out of the blue I might send him back gems or money, in the hopes of it happening again. This could of course not work, too .

Combine the two: Name your prophet 'Send me slaves for these gems!' and send Abysia a couple piles of gems. Gets the message through, undoubtedly.

...yeah. I wouldn't appreciate tricks such as these, although the house rule doesn't strictly speaking ban them: after all, sending stuff is hardly diplomacy if no reason is given, right? And if you have a burning need to name your prophet 'Everyone dogpile Mictlan!', that's your business, no?

I play this one with the thought that you are all AIs to me.* Makes for a good attitude in many ways, since whoever complained when AIs banged him seemingly in concert, and who did ever want to send anything to AIs? (Aside from Gandalf who if memory serves sends herald lances to enemies of Ermor... Now don't anyone get any funny ideas! )

*Top that as a slur!

[Alneyan]

You cannot give a specific name to your Pretender, as everyone else will see it, and they would probably complain. The same goes for the Prophet, though the idea about the scout is nice enough. Next time, switch renaming off.

Note, however, that naming your scout "Entente Cordiale" is unlikely to work: anyone from England would likely get the meaning of the name, and both entente and cordial can be used in English. Naming your scouts "Auld" should work better though... but it is not good enough. You should just look up examples appropriate to the history of the receiver, slightly alter the name, and that ought to work well... perhaps too well though.

[Jurri]

Not the complaints, but the resulting dogpile... Since if it's not against the rules complaints are but hot air for one who uses such tricks, right? It's against the spirit nevertheless, even with the scout and coded message.

What's entente cordiale called in French, then? Is there an expression for it? And what's 'Auld' (Oh, the shame... I deserve laughs and worse!)

[Alneyan]

Jurri said:
Not the complaints, but the resulting dogpile... Since if it's not against the rules complaints are but hot air for one who uses such tricks, right? It's against the spirit nevertheless, even with the scout and coded message.

Me no get the point; I cannot figure out what you mean, and even if you paid me real well... I still wouldn't get it. Must be the heat.

Entente cordiale is the same name in French, but I think it may be a bit less common. The Auld Alliance is the name given to the alliance made by Scotland and France against the perfidious Albion. (Auld is a Scottish word which should mean... well, "old, ancient")

[Jurri]

Aha, isn't this nice, two dudes, neither of which is a native English speaker discussing stuff. Learn Finnish, you, so I can express myself with more clarity!

What I tried to do is point out the dichotomy between playing by the rules and playing by the spirit of game. Arguably anything not banned by the rules is allowed (within the framework of the game, of course), so for a true hard-core player intent on taking advantage of this loop-hole the problem is not in the complaints that follow, but in the dogpile that follows the complaints (this assuming the other players are willing put their foot to where their mouth is, err, their money I mean.) Yeah, real relevant...

Ach, you shamed me with a fond abbreviation! Dude, that's DIRTY! (And funny, if you can get the meaning from just 'Auld'. Well, me not getting it only proves your point, I guess. Do they use that abbreviation in France a lot?)

[Alneyan]

Auld Alliance is, near as I can tell, a strictly English term. I do not know how the alliance is labelled in French... though I seem to recall reading a literal translation of the phrase.

It is not an abbreviation however, but merely a cunning way of getting a point accross with limited odds of being caught doing diplomacy. See, if you used the full name "Auld Alliance", everybody would see it is an alliance; on the other hand, a spy name like Auld might be mistaken as a genuine scout name, or even a name like "Mauldarie" (Marignon), "Mauldaska" (Machaka), and so on.

Of course, it might be such an effective way of hiding your schemes that nobody will get the point... including the intended recipient. I guess we will have to develop scouts named "Roger" (a proper Marignonese name) just to avoid that.

The only Finnish I know of is Suomi; everything besides that is beyond my understanding. I find that Finnish is quite different from most European languages too: while Välkommen till Sverige can be understood easily, the similar sentence in Finnish is another matter. I cannot find it again though... *Curses Google*