Victorian Victory

[foodcoats]

Hi diplomats! England is a country I really struggle with. Although I am usually successful at building an initial alliance, I don't really know how to play England properly in order to set up and go for the win. As a result I have three really solid 3WDs with England, but I've never had any kind of solo bid.

In my most recent game, I made a tactically crappy stab of my ally Germany, knowing it was likely bound for failure, because I needed to sort out what I was doing wrong. I got to 14 before it was obvious an opposing triple of GRT would reverse me. http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameI ... #gamePanel (Thanks again to my opponents for suffering through my bumbling!)

I think I learned some important lessons from this one, but I thought I'd ask the community for tips. How do you play England in order to give yourself the best chance of winning? What are the most important elements of an English solo strategy?

Cheers!

[captainmeme]

To preface this, I'm well aware I'm not the best person to be giving advice here :D England is my favourite (and I think best) country in Face to Face purely because it's so good when you're maximising centers on a timer, but when it comes down to achieving the solo I'm fairly clueless.

That said, the thing that stands out to me about that game is your fleet/army ratio. To do well, England needs control of the northern seas - but to win, England needs armies. IMO you shouldn't have more than 6 fleets on the board ever if you're going to make a solo run.

It's important to note that to control the northern seas, England doesn't need many fleets - it just needs more fleets than everyone else has up there, which is where negotiation comes in. It's fairly easy to take Russia's fleetbuilding center without building a single fleet in the right circumstances, and alliances with France/Germany can often be made under the condition of sending fleets south/not building fleets respectively. Instead of trying to overwhelm the north by increasing your own fleet count, try to decrease everyone else's.

[captainmeme]

This was my (very much failed) attempt at pulling off this kind of strategy, involving an alliance with Germany that had the condition of zero fleet builds on his part: https://www.webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=182619

I think in theory it's a good strategy for an England win. In practice it's difficult, because you have to balance how fast you're pushing on each front - in this case, the Russian front collapsing entirely while the east was still in turmoil gave Germany a far faster expansion route than I had in France/Iberia. I was also way too accepting of keeping my units far enough away that he didn't have to worry about a stab.

[foodcoats]

To preface this, I'm well aware I'm not the best person to be giving advice here :D England is my favourite (and I think best) country in Face to Face purely because it's so good when you're maximising centers on a timer, but when it comes down to achieving the solo I'm fairly clueless.

That said, the thing that stands out to me about that game is your fleet/army ratio. To do well, England needs control of the northern seas - but to win, England needs armies. IMO you shouldn't have more than 6 fleets on the board ever if you're going to make a solo run.

It's important to note that to control the northern seas, England doesn't need many fleets - it just needs more fleets than everyone else has up there, which is where negotiation comes in. It's fairly easy to take Russia's fleetbuilding center without building a single fleet in the right circumstances, and alliances with France/Germany can often be made under the condition of sending fleets south/not building fleets respectively. Instead of trying to overwhelm the north by increasing your own fleet count, try to decrease everyone else's.

Yeah, that was definitely something I realized I had boned up. Not having a good army ratio meant I wasn't able to control my position on the continent. I'll keep that in mind next time and focus on negotiating for my armies to make good landings earlier in the game.

Maybe I miscalculated because I analogize England with France, with whom you want max 6 armies, hah. (In my humble opinion at least.) That may be because France has to fight for the seas, whereas England has them by natural right, but has to fight for position on land.