Closing Curtains Fall 1906

Mike (Russia), we've been friends for a long time, here's a gift to celebrate our friendship. It's a knife and it'd look great right between your shoulder blades.

Well that turned out nicely. As I'd hoped, he mostly just held in place without supporting his own holds. That meant I managed 3 supply centers of his; Norway (he'll have to retreat), Berlin (completely empty  and Kiel (unit automatically destroyed because it had no place to retreat to). Not only that, as I expected, Turkey took back Ankara from the Russians which will drop him down yet another unit for the spring.

Here's my response from Russia after the stab:

lol

If you haven't noticed yet, I'll be at 14 supply centers by the time I build. I'm in a really awesome position again. If the other players haven't noticed yet then I'm on easy street and even if they have, they seem too wrapped up with their petty squabbles in the South East of the map to really do anything about it. I hope I'm not speaking too soon because I'm sure anything could happen.

In the spring, I'll take Denmark and I'll move into position into the Baring sea, ready to capture St Petersburg in the Fall. Other than that, I'll just take things cautiously to prevent moves against me and until I can grab the remaining ones.

I just received a message from Italy with the following paragraph:

You are now the greatest power in Europe and I, hopefully, am your weak but loyal ally. Hopefully I shall be stronger in a year or two, but there is no chance I will be able to equal you in strength or supply centers at any time unless I stabbed you and allied with someone else. I would therefore like to propose a two-way draw once all our adversaries have been disarmed and utterly defeated; in exchange I shall remain your loyal ally until the bitter end. 

This is crazy talk. As mentioned before, I have 14 supply centers, Russia and Italy have 6 a piece, Austria and Turkey have 4 each. For me to let Italy get a joint win with me at the end of the game seems bonkers. If he had made significant strides and ended up with 10 11 12, I could understand, but 6?

He's desperate, clearly. And I think I'm just going to ignore him for a couple of turns to see what he does. We have almost 4 days now until our spring orders are finalized so I'll just pretend to be offline for a while. Sometimes, I think pretending to be offline is enough of a tactic. I could say "Yeah, absolutely pal" and just backstab him at the 11th hour but it might be obvious and he might see the lie coming.