Diplomacy Beginner’s Guide[]
The new diplomacy tech adds peace treaties, embassies, and two new units - cloaks and daggers.
Cloaks spawn daggers in proportion to the size of the city, so use them when you know you’ll get enough daggers to take the city. On the other hand, be sure there is enough open space around the city you are attacking with the cloak to spawn all potential daggers. Good counters to cloaks include swordsmen and knights.
If you are going to break the treaty, be sure to move all your units and then break the peace. If you break a treaty, you won’t be able to move your units the rest of that turn or the next turn. If you have units in their territory then those units will be disbanded, so move them out of the opposing player's territory first.
How and when to use them depends largely on whether you are playing a 1v1, FFA, or a team game.
When you are up against one opponent, asking for a peace treaty or placing an embassy isn’t worth it. Along those same lines, you won’t have the opportunity to use cloaks in a 1v1 if you meet your opponent very early. Cloaks are a late game unit, best used when you can sneak an invisible unit up to an opponent’s city. Also, beware of getting cloaks in cities too close to the fighting. Cloaks spawned in cities near fighting give any opponent in range of the city a defenseless target.
FFA games are where diplomacy becomes more useful. Capital vision helps you see more of the map and building an embassy reveals more tiles round the capital. Getting embassies with players who are far from your terrain can be a great temporary boost to your income and allow you to get tech faster. As long as you don’t expect to fight an opponent any time soon, setting up a peace and/or and embassy is a good idea. However, there can only be one victor, so at some point, the peace will break. Be prepared for betrayal.
Although not formally part of the app yet, team games, like 2v2 or 3v3, are where diplomacy will shine. Getting a peace treaty with an ally early will be key to increasing income and coordinating efficient attacks. Also, you can share your ally’s roads and avoid their zone of control.