bump

I think there is a lesson to be learned at this juncture in the game, and perhaps I’m a little late to post this since the game was unpaused this morning, but I want to say it anyway:

Pauses can be a diplomatic nightmare. If you’ve ever been in a game that was paused for a few days, a week, or more, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The relationships that you have spent the last couple of years grooming have lost a little bit of their luster because you have not only gone for a period of time without talking, but you have probably gone for a period of time without even looking at or thinking about the game. For one reason or another, that person on the other side of the board that you were friendly with, sharing information back and forth with, and generally considering a good potential late game ally might have grown a little bit colder toward you, or you might just not get that same vibe about them anymore. We’re humans and our emotions dictate our play sometimes, for better or worse, and pauses in gameplay really bring that out.

As such, now is the time to talk. A lot. Like, blow up your neighbors’ phones. Don’t let them lose sync with the plans that you made in the last couple of years. Get them back in game mode with a good, thoughtful message and a plan moving forward. At the same time, open up the door for new relationships with some new people, even people that you haven’t been huge friends with before. Your arch nemesis might still be your arch nemesis, but taking a little bit of time off to let old tensions cool might have given you just enough room to get your foot in the door with them again too. For whatever reason, pauses change the landscape of the game, and while it sometimes sucks, it’s inevitable, so take advantage of it in this game and in every other Diplomacy game you play online.

Bump new turn

Autumn 04 Retreats.
A+ to Turkey for convincing Italy to help him. Risky choice by Italy imho, once unleashed it's damn difficult to get the Turkish genie back in the bottle.
Just an opinion, but France's attack on Edinburgh with army Liverpool, supported by fleet Clyde ? Did fleet Clyde support that attack ? I think that's a poor way of going about it. Usually the more experienced players would attack with fleet Clyde and use army Liverpool as the support move unit..why ? It gets fleet Clyde into Edinburgh where it can support a fleet from English Channel or London into the North Sea. Plus you keep the army in the centre of England.
Poor old Austria, set to be gutted like a fish. If it helps..most of us have crashed and burnt playing Austria. Well tried though, you did make a surprisingly good recovery before this latest setback.

Germany.. What was the story with army Livonia I ask myself. ATC made an excellent post about the value of having the most efficient orders. Suggest you read it, page eleven. Should army Livonia have supported the attack on Warsaw ? Yes. The cost of failing to do that, a sc, a new build and what not having that new unit will cost you in coming year(s)

Russia could make a bold choice..disband unit from Sweden, build a new army Moscow. Do a deal with Germany ?
It puts Norway at Germany's mercy, but Germany might be interested. Germany could use Russia as a block against further Turkish expansion and get to grips with France. Russia's position is weak. I haven't a clue as to the Diplomacy, but France's attack on Edinburgh might be just the thing Germany can use in his Diplomacy with Russia. I think France stumbled a bit that move, and therein lies the opportunity for Germany. But I am in the dark with the Diplomacy of the game. What does Germany have as his strategic plan and how does his relationship with France fit that an ? What sort of long term relationship does Germany want with France ?

Lots of misorders this turn, especially in the north.

Fall 1904

This turn demonstrates why face-to-face diplomacy is a most challenging variant for even the best of Diplomacy players. In this turn, we see two critical misorders. One by France. One by Germany. These will be discussed below. But as a general observation, there is no excuse for this except carelessness. Mistakes happen. We are all human. But new players make more of them. It's complacency. They get overconfident and don't pay enough detailed attention to their moves.

Harping on boring tactics again, aren't I. Well, get it right and do your studies and I will stop.

You had a day and a half to get it right. Imagine you have 15 minutes to do your diplomacy and write your orders. You can get your mind accustomed to the stress of face to face play by playing live 1v1 games. At the end of a 1v1 live game, you have five minutes to write 15 orders. For a person of ordinary intelligence, and I'm speaking from experience, it can be difficult when you have complex tactics to consider. It's good practice.

AUSTRIA

You win the, “I got hammered award,” for the game. That was one heck of a stab to endure. Looking back, as I'm sure you have, you're probably telling yourself, “I should have seen it coming.” You're right. In hindsight, it was obvious. Italy's last move before the stab was the giveaway. He moved all his units but they didn't change position and remained in exactly the best spot for a fall stab with Turkey. Additionally, he let you have Greece. Where else was Italy going to expand? Into Turkey? That would have taken a huge investment for little gain in the near term. Yep. You should have seen it.

Your moves. You were sold swampland in Florida. And you believed it.

ENGLAND

Survival mode. The disband depends on your philosophy. If you want the best chance to survive, keep the army. If you prefer to be king-maker, keep the fleet and start negotiating. Good tactics this turn.

FRANCE

Misorder in Edinburg. F Clyde ordered support for the English unit in Yorkshire to move to Edinburg. Could it be a strategic misorder. There is certainly merit in slowing the Russia collapse. Right now, your potential centers for expansion are very limited in the E/G alliance. On the other hand, your ally Germany has lots of potential growth. Slowing Germany down is good for the stability of the alliance. A strategic misorder would not be a bad move at this time.

GERMANY

Good tactics in Scandanavia to retain Sweden. Covering Munich was also prudent. It would have been better to bounce units with France. That way, you could have built A Munich. But you misordered so it worked out. The misorder was the A Livonia supported A Sil-War. But you actually tried to move A Prussia to Warsaw. Using Livonia for the support order was the right choice. A Pru-War was the right choice. You just need to be more careful in execution. Unlike France, I see no strategic advantage to this misorder and I am dubbing it a blunder.

Your position is still good. Italy's growth likely means the Frenchman has to be concerned about Iberia and Mar. Help him polish off England. He gets London and Edinburg, and you get Norway and Warsaw in the fall. The G/F is still in good position to face off Italy/Turkey. Both alliances need another turn to polish off the weak power in their theater.

ITALY

You took a lot of heat in the thread for the previous move. But I think you planned it for this—one of the most beautifully executed stabs I've seen. That includes highest level players.

Strategically, you need to keep the Turk building armies. Once he starts popping out fleets, you need to find a new ally.

RUSSIA

You are the beneficiary of luck. Someone suggested disbanding A Sweden and rebuilding in Moscow. You need to do that and then start negotiating with France, Italy, and Turkey. I guess the German is too invested in taking your centers at the moment to do much diplomacy other than to lay the groundwork for the future.

TURKEY

Excellent. You get an A. You have the best strategic position in the game. I think Germany or maybe France are your strategic allies now. Short term, stick with Italy and reap your Austrian harvest. You get Rumania and Serbia. Maybe trade Greece to Italy. You need to move to Aegean this spring. You can probably risk all army builds if you want to keep Italy as your short-term ally. Start counting to 18.

Well if France wanted to slow the Russian collapse last move then wouldn't, fleet Clyde to Norwegian Sea, army Liverpool support hold Edinburgh, fleet Irish Sea to Wales, been a better way to do it and set himself up to take London with a fleet in the spring move, and get control of North Sea the following move ?
ATC put in an excellent post on the topic of efficiency / not wasting moves. I think that if there is any one thing SoW should try and impress upon the students with regard to improving their tactical performance it's that simple principle..Don't waste unit~moves. Get the most out of your forces every move.

Maybe, but tactics go hand and glove with diplomacy. ATC had some good points about Italy's moves, but Italy may have preferred to bide his time for the stab. Same here for France, and we're speculating the misorder was intentional. In that case he might want to deceive Germany, whose interest is in the accelerated collapse of Russia. So, the misorder hides frances intent (possibly) while.your efficient set are unambiguous.

Well I am just an average player from the Peanut Gallery. For real inspiration players should take a look at Swordsman's performance in the Greatest gunboat game of all time..there's a separate thread for that.

You've played in way more games here than I have. Edinburgh was probably a misorder. I'm just speculating about the possibility France could have a reason to intentionally misorder. I'm not advocating for or against the strategy.

Game has been paused until Friday.

I'm speculating too, but at a minimum then fleet Irish Sea to Wales.. To set up to take London. France made a point of not moving army Burgundy to Munich, of Ruhr, so that tends to support the view that he doesn't want to upset Germany. At least not yet. Who knows, Germany and France might both want at least peace with each other.

Hey, in public press it says I asked for the pause but I didn't. Reason?

I wanted to comment on something that Bo said but didn't have time to, and now we're paused again and the turn gave me some examples. I think of pauses as momentum killers. If things are strongly going one way, and there's a pause, it can result in shifts of direction. I remember a game where I was France and everyone was really mad at each other, and I was about to get a solo. But then there was a lengthy pause that gave everyone else a chance to settle down, and it ended up being a big dumb draw. For everyone in this game, it means that there's going to be new opportunities for diplomatic gains.

Anyway, for Autumn 1904 moves.

TURKEY: A
Great. I don't know if you caused all of it by diplomacy or not, but it doesn't matter: The AI is shattered, you've got a pair of builds, and Italy will have to deal with two powerful neighbors before you do. You are in the driver's seat and can influence the rest of the game to your liking more than anybody, if you play things right.

I didn't like Turkey's decision in the past to stab Russia, but it turned out well (so far).

RUSSIA: B-
Better lucky than good, my friend! If you've been talking a lot with France (France and Russia being perhaps the most natural long-term allies in the game), you are in good shape. France's move to Edi doesn't look good, but the speculation about a misorder seems more plausible than the speculation about an Italian set up I discuss below.

Both Italy and Russia need to be selling Turkey hard on the advantage of fighting the other power. I think this will be easier for Russia to do than for Italy to do as a strictly strategic matter, but the set of moves also suggest that Italy and Turkey may have developed a stronger relationship than Turkey and Russia had or could have.

AUSTRIA: :(
There's a lesson about timing here, I guess, with the risks you take with centers in spring vs fall, but this isn't really a tactical failure. It's a diplomatic one. Italy decided working with Austria would not be as profitable as working with Turkey. Professor eturnage above suggests this was an Italian plan all along, but I'm not so sure. I think it was poorly-planned moves in the previous turns leading to an Italian change of heart in the fall. This is something I will be interested to see in the EoG.

ITALY: C+
I don't know if this was a sophisticated complicated stab as suggested above. If it was, I don't really like it. I don't get the point of it, I guess: did you let Austria get into an advantageous position in order to set up the perfect stab? It's neat on the board, don't get me wrong, but it seems like too much to get to where you got to. If you were able to do that, surely you were able to have a better position vs. Austria while the two of you ensured that Turkey was too weak to be a threat when you did stab Austria. Now you'll be hard-pressed to squeeze Turkey out. Perhaps the plan is for Italy to get the remaining Austrian home centers and Turkey to Rumania, because if not, I don't see how Italy can hold it. After that, what?

It's hard for me to get a read on Italy in this game, and maybe I'm being unfair here because Italy has indeed ended up in a pretty good position at the end of all this. But there appears to be a lot of strategic uncertainty on Italy's part. It all feels too reactive. The end result of it is that France and Germany and Turkey are all in good shape and none are obviously fighting the others. That needs immediate addressing if Italy hopes to prosper. I'm not saying it's impossible to do that; there may be some larger machinations in the press.

FRANCE: C-
I guess you thought that Germany was getting a build and so you didn't press an attack, but, it would have been effective, I think. Burgundy supporting EC to Belgium could not have been stopped if you had Russian help (North Sea to Norway being the most likely move meant you could have taken the risk even without Russian help), and the odds of England getting a fleet behind you were low.

As has been discussed, there are several possibilities about the misorder in Edi. I would character the options as:

-accidental misorder
-intentional misorder to help Russia
-intentional misorder to avoid commitment

If you actually were trying for Edi, I don't understand why you'd accelerate Russia's decline to benefit Germany. If it was a fancy planned fake out to keep Germany unsure of your intentions, it seems like a better move to just go to Norwegian and Belgium and fight; any benefit of the deception seems outweighed by the loss of a turn of engagement. If you just didn't want to commit until you see where things go, well, I sympathize with that. You've got the benefit of being able to wait a bit, but it means you have to be more productive now.

Intentional misorder or not, I'm not even sure how much that helps Russia. Edi is far away from home; Russia would probably be better off losing the center and guaranteeing France attacks Germany, if that's what it takes. I get eturnage's point about tactics and diplomacy going together, etc etc. But look at France's units; to my eye, France accomplished very little this turn, if anything.

I guess I would say the same thing, if that's an intentional misorder, to France that I would say to Italy: A lot of times it's good and necessary to be clever and tricky, but sometimes you're better off just doing a thing.

ENGLAND: W
England's probably dead and will probably be better off, since they very much appear to not enjoy being in this game. The support to London is the smart move, to the extent such things could happen. France probably made an error in not setting up to eliminate England in the spring rather than the fall, but it also probably doesn't matter.

GERMANY: D+
We all make misorders; I made a fairly big one recently that still bothers me. This is just an especially bad timing for one. Russia will get an army in Moscow, which ends your efforts to single-handedly take Russian home centers. Now it really depends on your relationship with Turkey (which you should have been cultivating carefully) and Italy. If Turkey and Italy both decide that working with Germany seems like a good move (which I'm not sure is in either's best interest), then things can be good.

I really thought you'd set yourself up for a smashing French attack. You stopped that, through luck or intelligent diplomacy, so well done on that front; this turn could have been a game-changing disaster, but it was just a regular disaster.

If we're looking at the future of this game, I'd say we've got:

The well-positioned edge powers (France and Turkey)
The larger-but-exposed central powers (Italy and Germany)
The still-fighting-to-be-alive power (Russia)
The soon-to-be-gone-but-not-necessarily-without-influence powers (Austria and England)

I am excited to see what, if any, long-term alliances emerge out of those combinations, or if we keep seeing the irregular shifts that have characterized the game so far.

I don't think it's fair to categorize Italy and Germany together. Assuming that Russia falls, which is becoming more and more likely, Germany has just one substantial neighbor left - France - and he'll be positioned to hold off any attack he could try within the next couple of years. Italy, on the other hand, is going to have to keep his NAP with France intact in order to defend himself against Turkey, and vice versa, which could become a problem for him. I have been wondering if France left Marseilles open in order to put the build he thought that he would have there, though if he was planning on making a move in the spring, it probably wasn't in congruence with Turkey and he surely didn't see Italy getting two builds this year.

boop

It’s unfortunate that it’s come to this, but KansasBoyd, has been banned from the site. As such, the English position is currently open. If anyone is interested in taking over the position, please post here or PM me. Otherwise, I will unpause the game tomorrow and let the game continue with England in CD, since it only has one SC anyways.

If you have any questions, please feel free to PM me or email the Mod team at [email protected].

The game is unpaused!

Bo has volunteered to play the English position through to the end. Playing with and against skilled players is a useful way to improve. I expect he'll be able to teach a thing or two from within the game.

Gee, I hope you can get Bo a really good tutor team

bump

The real question is whether Bo is going to play diplomacy or uno

I don't think bo has the mental capacity for uno.

Oh wait, this is the thread I'm not supposed to talk in. My bad.

Best of luck to our new English player. This is ... this is not the best position to be taking over.

If any other player has designs on a solo, he would be well-served to kill off the new English player. In the absence of advice from this thread, his presence would make achieving a solo more difficult. A skilled player like Bo can spot your aims, alert the board, and organize stalemate lines. Everyone now knows you have a master in the game. Even with only one center, he is a dangerous player to keep alive. It will be interesting to see how these newer players handle his presence.

Even his handle, "webDipDummy00," is a deception.