Does diplomacy really have a role this early on into the game?
I mean, I've always found that tribes don't really come together until much later, or if you've planned it well and have a good core of members.
Most people are simply hiding behind the combined points value of any given tribe, and your average player will pretty much work alone and will not help out. The standard tribe is drowned with 'alliances' and 'NAPs' and is merely a confederacy of villages which hide behind the facade of each others' protection (of which there is none). When the leader says jump, most members reply with "ugh, I'm too tired to jump" or "sorry, I can't" etc etc. Clearly a few players will bounce back with "dude, what the hell, I've been jumping non-stop since the beginning of the world" but the majority of players are not like this.
So what is the point of diplomacy if your tribe is not really a tribe? Absolutely nothing. In my honest opinion, I think that to create successful alliances the leaders of the tribes need to have a decent discussion on Skype to formalise the arrangement, along with the creation of a shared forum etc.
Once people start sending noble trains and actually have the ability to wipe people off the face of the map (well, to the rim) then and only then do I think that diplomatic relations actually have a real meaning.
