Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

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swordsman3003
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Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#1 Post by swordsman3003 » Sun Jul 21, 2019 8:38 pm

Hello again friends. I've been difficult to reach and a bit behind on publishing my writing because I'm helping to start a new business. However, I needed to take a breather this weekend so I finished up two companion articles I've been working on for months. I really hope you enjoy at least one of them!

3 Reasons Why "Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy"

Solo Win Tip #2: There's No Such Thing As Luck
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#2 Post by Puscherbilbo » Sun Jul 21, 2019 9:05 pm

There may be no "luck" involved but there sure is a good amount of "variance" in these games concerning effects restricted to an ongoing game which you cannot influence.
Gametheory says your EV (expected value) in any multiplayer situation can be influenced by action of 3rd parties you are unable to influence.

E.g. while Turkey has no has at the start of the game no stakes in the northern theater per se Russias success or failure to conquer spots in the north effects your situation quite directly if Russia so chooses.
Same as an early Italian stab on Austria might profit other players not involved in the action at all.

So certain opening moves, while having a similar winrate for the executing party can very well have an effect on the winrate of other countries.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#3 Post by Puscherbilbo » Sun Jul 21, 2019 9:12 pm

One more thing:
The better the balancing of a game like diplomacy the higher the variance.

Just because the situation is so volatile small things can have big effects.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#4 Post by Your Humble Narrator » Sun Jul 21, 2019 9:22 pm

I believe luck comes into play when all players are behaving rationally. If I’m pushing for a solo and the sole opponent capable of stopping me needs to guess correctly whether I am going to move to one supply center or another in order to bounce me out and prevent my win, and that sole opponent has no rational reason whatsoever to share his intentions with anyone on the board, then my victory turns on a 50/50 guess completely dependent on luck. Situations like these occur frequently. There is skill involved in avoiding such situations, or in shooting for 50/50 guesses as opposed to 25/75 guesses or what-have-you, but once you’ve arrived at the coin-flip situation (and I do think such situations are inevitable in most games), it really is purely luck.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#5 Post by Restitution » Sun Jul 21, 2019 9:50 pm

Of course there's luck. Diplomacy has Nash equilibriums.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#6 Post by Puscherbilbo » Sun Jul 21, 2019 9:55 pm

I do not concure unless there is limited time. Otherwise you will break eventually.
And i have the slight suspicion that spots are rarely exactly 50/50 if you take all information into consideration. But currently our discussion might be missing a detailed system measuring the miniscule differences precisely.
So if a situation is actually 55/45 you can actually increase your EV (net dots) oh so slightly if you aply gametheory.
Question remains how can we actually determine a spot to be 55-45 instead of 50/50 or 60/40.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#7 Post by RoganJosh » Sun Jul 21, 2019 11:14 pm

You are hereby all invited to join Probabilitics Anonymous. Yes, theoretically there is luck. But the first step to improve your diplomacy skills is to stop blaming your losses on bad luck, and accept that practically all losses are due to bad play.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#8 Post by swordsman3003 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 2:03 am

If you refer to Nash equilibria and "50/50 guesses" without responding to anything I wrote about these concepts, there's a 95% chance that you shot your mouth off in this thread without actually reading the articles I wrote to initiate the conversation. :smirk:

Reason number 3 in 3 Reasons Why "Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy" is subtitled "Outguessing Your Opponents is a Skill; Maybe You Just Suck." I already pre-empted all this baloney. :razz:

You're like students who came to class without finishing the assigned reading, yet want to be the first to comment on the assignment. You're embarrassing yourself...

These two essays add up to over 6,000 words and I worked on them for months. If you disagree with me, either tell us something that I didn't consider, or attack what I wrote. :?
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#9 Post by swordsman3003 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 2:46 am

Re: Nash Equilibria specifically

1. The majority of Diplomacy players don't even know what a Nash equilibrium is. Even among those familiar with the concept, I doubt that more than a handful understand how to apply the idea correctly to a given gamestate of Diplomacy. And among that tiny minority, how many are inclined to spend the hours it takes to figure all that out just to decide a single move?
2. Human beings are constitutionally incapable of making random decisions even if they want to.
3. If your rivals are not applying these principles of game theory, you are foolish for treating them as if they are. If Player X chooses Rock 9/10 times, you should play Paper 9/10 times, regardless of what the theoretical Nash equilibrium is.
4. Neither player knows if the other is applying these concepts, so even if your opponent is the extremely rare individual who would be willing and able to apply this analysis to a specific turn of a specific Diplomacy match, you always have to consider that your opponent may instead be trying to analyze your playstyle (instead of applying game theory), which would mean your optimal play is to outwit your opponent (instead of applying game theory).

Have you played a game of Diplomacy before? You understand that your opponents are human beings and not machines, right? Are you imagining that your opponents are calculating that the Nash equilibrium for a given move is 50.5%, and then bringing up a website that generates random information based off atmospheric phenomena and whatnot so that they can generate a result based on a 50.5% chance? Have you yourself actually done this even once?

And we're supposed to agree that Diplomacy involves luck because it is theoretically possible that a person could do this?
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#10 Post by Matticus13 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 3:00 am

Swordsman: Keep up the good work!
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#11 Post by jmo1121109 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 3:12 am

I strongly agree that coin flips are not something that happen in the game and in fact I've written about it in several of the current School of War posts I've made during this ongoing school of war. If you aren't convinced by Sword's posts I strongly encourage you to go read my lectures. The School of War isn't just for new players, I'm covering material that I see skilled players getting wrong consistently.

viewtopic.php?p=89527#p89527

I win, at a bare min, 75% of "coin-flips" because they aren't really coin flips. There's multiple strategies to beating someone else in one. From the most logical move to expect your opponent to make, to dropping press hints to an ally and asking them to leak it to someone else and make sure it gets back to the person you're flipping with in a way they'll trust, etc.

By considering situations outside the normal box you can get your win percentage to an absurd level. I think I'm sitting around 35+ these days, in large part because I accurately predict opponents movesets and order the best counters to their likely moves.

Even in a CHAOS gunboat, which should in theory be the most luck driven game possible, I was able to outmaneuver people with strategies like my convoys in Autumn 06 and 09. http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameI ... #gamePanel

I will admit to getting some degree of "luck" in surviving the first year or two in that game, but note that I took a gamble of supporting someone year 1 that I *knew* would stand out to possible allies on the board in the hope it would result in that "luck".
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#12 Post by Carl Tuckerson » Mon Jul 22, 2019 3:40 am

I think the claim that "luck" plays no part in Diplomacy isn't true for most colloquial uses of the term, which really means that there are situations where you can make optimal decisions every time and still lose. We call that "unlucky" but there's no random element involved--but from your seat, it's still outside of your control (and most people shortcut that to luck). This stands in contrast to Chess, where as far as I'm aware the player who makes optimal decisions every time should never lose.

I agree with the broader point that people attribute too much of their failure and too little of their success to those outside elements. But to say there is literally no element of that doesn't ring true to me either.

I do think the element is near-zero in press games, where any positional difficulty theoretically can be overcome by good press, and the ceiling is mostly on willingness to invest effort into overcoming the difficulty rather than skill. I think it's more significant in gunboat, where you don't have the cure-all of negotiations, but I also think people (myself included at times) overstate the extent to which this outside element influences the game. I have a post coming about a recent Austrian gunboat game I played where I can point to several instances where I "got lucky" to avoid being defeated and eventually to make it into the final draw, but I believe I also made important decisions which made it more likely for me to "get lucky," and I believe (if I might implicitly flatter myself) that the hallmark of skill in this game lies in making the right decisions to maximize your chance of getting the breaks you need.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#13 Post by jmo1121109 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 3:47 am

Carl Tuckerson wrote:
Mon Jul 22, 2019 3:40 am
I think the claim that "luck" plays no part in Diplomacy isn't true for most colloquial uses of the term, which really means that there are situations where you can make optimal decisions every time and still lose. We call that "unlucky" but there's no random element involved--but from your seat, it's still outside of your control (and most people shortcut that to luck). This stands in contrast to Chess, where as far as I'm aware the player who makes optimal decisions every time should never lose.

I agree with the broader point that people attribute too much of their failure and too little of their success to those outside elements. But to say there is literally no element of that doesn't ring true to me either.

I do think the element is near-zero in press games, where any positional difficulty theoretically can be overcome by good press, and the ceiling is mostly on willingness to invest effort into overcoming the difficulty rather than skill. I think it's more significant in gunboat, where you don't have the cure-all of negotiations, but I also think people (myself included at times) overstate the extent to which this outside element influences the game. I have a post coming about a recent Austrian gunboat game I played where I can point to several instances where I "got lucky" to avoid being defeated and eventually to make it into the final draw, but I believe I also made important decisions which made it more likely for me to "get lucky," and I believe (if I might implicitly flatter myself) that the hallmark of skill in this game lies in making the right decisions to maximize your chance of getting the breaks you need.
See I get what you're saying, but I would argue that if you made decisions that you knew would give likelihoods to something happening then you're not experiencing luck. You're manipulating the board state in conjunction with every other players expected board state manipulations. And if you can accurately predict those factors then you get the outcome you want. If you only do it partially correctly then you might get what you want, but that depends on how skillful everyone else is in their manipulations. It's skill based, but because the manipulations can be hard to track across turns, as players lose track of those manipulations they seem to default to calling them luck.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#14 Post by Carl Tuckerson » Mon Jul 22, 2019 4:05 am

I think I mostly buy what you're saying. Let me pose a counterexample that comes to mind from gunboat and see how you evaluate that example within that framework so I can better get where you're coming from.

In gunboat, I find that with Austria, the optimal opening is to expose Trieste to an Italian stab on the first turn, and to play the opening Vie -> Gal, Bud -> Ser, Tri -> Alb. In a certain % of games you are functionally dead after Spring 01 because Italy orders Rom -> Ven -> Tri. The opening is (IMO) still optimal in any individual Spring 01 turn, because over the course of many games as Austria, you will have the best results from that opening vs any other opening which might, for instance, insure you against an Italian attack at the expense of Greece, or of covering Galicia from Russia.

I think it's incorrect to say that the % of games where you are functionally dead is zero, and I think it's incorrect to say that in those non-zero number of games, the colloquial understanding of "luck" as I defined it earlier (make optimal plays every time and still lose) does not apply.

I do think those situations essentially never happen in press games, and I think past the first turn of gunboat you can argue that they don't happen there either (I think I would argue as much but I'd have to think more about it to be sure). But I also don't think they never occur in gunboat. Do we disagree, and if so where and why?
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#15 Post by diplomat554 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 5:29 am

To add to this point, it's worth mentioning why the poker comparison (not mine) is more apt than you give it credit for. My take is that poker and Diplomacy are both games of incomplete information. The underlying randomized process in poker is a game mechanic that is not present in Diplomacy, but it isn't really relevant; the commonality is the absence of a dominant simple strategy. Optimal play in both games thus depends on having a better read on the opponent based on incomplete information. The incomplete information means the best moves can't always be determined. No matter how good you are at the game, there's a certain threshold of "50-50s" you can ever expect to win, probably not far above jmo's claimed 75%. Even with the best possible read of existing information, you can't avoid losing a certain percentage, simply because that information is insufficient.

Basically, I think it's a valid definition of "luck" to say that a game entirely devoid of luck has no such variance (e.g. chess or go). One argument for this is to say that in the absence of luck, the loser of any "50-50" must have made a mistake...but surely there is a move set in which no mistake was made by one side or another! The term "outguess" is therefore accurate IMO: we all understand that one can guess better or worse, but you can't always outguess a good player, no matter your level of insight, even though he or she does not literally use a random number generator for moves. As in poker, though, there are better and worse players in these kinds of situations, and better players will win reliably over time -- but even correct / +ev play will lose "guesses" occasionally.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#16 Post by Puscherbilbo » Mon Jul 22, 2019 5:29 am

Have you adressed the multiplayer component somewhere?
All your examples from computergames only apply to 1vs1 if i am not mistaken.
Imho this especially holds true for the first few moves but which are possibly the most important ones for the outcome.

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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#17 Post by Squigs44 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 6:04 am

Puscherbilbo wrote:
Mon Jul 22, 2019 5:29 am
Have you adressed the multiplayer component somewhere?
All your examples from computergames only apply to 1vs1 if i am not mistaken.
Imho this especially holds true for the first few moves but which are possibly the most important ones for the outcome.
He talks about this in the first point in the second article, the "free for all" problem. He includes a picture of super smash Bros with a caption that references this.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#18 Post by Carl Tuckerson » Mon Jul 22, 2019 6:07 am

RoganJosh wrote:
Sun Jul 21, 2019 11:14 pm
You are hereby all invited to join Probabilitics Anonymous. Yes, theoretically there is luck. But the first step to improve your diplomacy skills is to stop blaming your losses on bad luck, and accept that practically all losses are due to bad play.
And honestly this attitude drives me up a wall in the specific context of this discussion.
I get the mindset-driven approach to this question where you optimize your ability to improve by assuming every bad outcome is your fault because that best lets you find your errors. Most players improve drastically by adopting it. I'm not arguing otherwise and as far as I can tell no one else is either.
That doesn't mean it's a perfectly accurate reflection of reality. It's a heuristic designed to ensure that your incorrect evaluations occur when you erroneously assume there was something you could do and failed to do it, instead of occurring when you erroneously assume there was nothing you could do when there was.
Like all heuristics, it is designed for a specific end goal: in this case, optimize your ability to improve.
Like all heuristics, it is sometimes wrong.
Assuming that anyone who acknowledges the existence of scenarios where optimal play won't save you is in need of more practice to improve their play does nothing to find the truth and frankly is astonishingly arrogant.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#19 Post by Your Humble Narrator » Mon Jul 22, 2019 6:31 am

> Human beings are constitutionally incapable of making random decisions even if they want to.

Respectfully, have you ever heard of a coin?

And to your point, Jmo, about winning 75% of your "coin-flip" situations through subtle hints and other shenanigans meant to steer an opponent's decision one way or the other, I don't really see how that challenges my assertion that luck starts to come into play when all players are behaving rationally. I don't doubt that you have fooled many a moron in your day, but my hypothetical envisioned a player close to a solo and one and only one player capable of stopping that solo, both of whom are rational actors. The player capable of stopping the solo would have no rational justification to trust anyone's word about where the player pursuing a solo is going, and would have no rational reason to share where he is going. I mean to a certain degree I guess you can say that both players could base their guesses as to the other's move based on some kind of pattern of play up to that point, but if both players are rational they're both equally aware of the possibility of the other detecting a pattern.

I get that you hot shots are so adept in your analysis of human behavior that even the most coin-flippy of decisions of your opponents are subject to your evil genius influence, but I submit that your powers of manipulation and prophecy can only reduce the randomness of a coin flip when your opponents are morons.
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Re: Luck Plays No Part in Diplomacy

#20 Post by Squigs44 » Mon Jul 22, 2019 6:50 am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_eZmEiyTo0

But it's so simple! All I have to do is divine from what I know of you - Are you the sort of man who would support hold Munich, or Berlin?
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