webdiplomacy.net

New format, recorded phase by phase with fairly in-depth analysis on press and strategy!

It's long (somehow each of the commentaries ends up being longer than the one before lol) but if you have 4 hours to spare, hopefully worth a watch!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGivpIn12pQ

captainmeme is the YouTube hero we need!

yay, but ... where's ezio?

Reports of Ezio's death have been greatly exagerrated

More seriously, anon game in progress meant I couldn't bring him in on it, much as I'd want to But this isn't replacing the traditional format, he'll be back whenever we next do a postgame commentary :D

Yeah, I noticed after I've watched it but posted before ... so not a great combo.

Still, would love another episode of you two.

Im not all the way through it yet but this is a phenomenal resource for new players, even if it's not explicitly structured that way. You show not only the importance of thoughtfulness and good decision making in general but also discuss in depth some really important concepts of negotiation, tactics and grand strategy. In particular the way you discuss constructing a narrative into your press with your non-allies..... are you not a mafia player?!?!?

It's great that it's not a retrospective but a live journal. Id compare this to what swordsman has done with his journals, and making it accessible to people who learn better visually/orally than by reading.

Totes mint. I hope you're doing another for your next game!

Thanks! I'm planning to do more for my other Nexus games (although probably not for all of them), especially given the response to it. It would probably work better as a new player resource if it wasn't 4 hours long, I think that will likely turn players looking for intro content away... but even if I shorten my thoughts each phase a lot, I don't really see a way a game is going to take any less than 2 hours.

Maybe I need to come up with another format too :D

Swordsman was definitely a huge inspiration (I think his journal is probably the best gunboat resource there is anywhere online) and I talk about his blog a bit partway through. As for whether I'm a mafia player, I used to be but I burned out around M20-ish. I was never a very good one anyway, my strategy was generally to hide for the first half of the game, then lead on someone I felt was scummy, then immediately get shot by mafia. More recently I switched to playing Survivor over on MafiaScum which is where a lot of the social strategy I use in my diplomacy games now comes from.