First person to list 20 problems with this proposal in a single post "wins".

First person to make a joke about how ludicrous it is that player a with a 38% win+draw rate organizes games in my thread "wins".

click E) TheCzech ;)

Yeah I gotta improve. Still.

@Red - OK, so not technically meta, but an additional factor beyond the original design of the game.

just to make it more Byzantine in it's complexity
can we have a secret "worth" rating for treaties
so from "worth some undefined value" through to "completely worthless"
and each player can assign a secret "worth" value to each treaty ???
that's also revealed at the end.
just figure the best way to knock this on the head is to offer stupid suggestions that
make it more complicated and dificult to implement and use

ps, Dwaugnar, guess what ????
-- I have achieved "Diplomat" status
HOORAH HOORAH HOORAH

bump

In the mind of a learning player this tool would be useful to me to see on existing games that I had no part of to help form strategies of my own from players that have been playing a lot longer than I have. My only concern is your "statistics" implementation, as many others have stated. I wouldn't want someone to look at more history of my in depth actions more than they already can by viewing my profile. Say if they did this in a school of war your atmosphere where people looking on could determine what happened and formulate why.
This has the potential to be a great learning tool for the new players. So I say yes on an individual game basis. No statistics recorded.

Many years ago, a whise man once told me "the map never lies!"
I dont see the benefit of such a tool and would not want it in my games

@Sevyas, I agree 100% that the map never lies. But that doesn't mean we can easily understand what the truth is that it speaks. Also, players sometimes make genuine mistakes.

one perhaps simpler way (???? ) to achieve a similar opportunity for endless
post mortems of games would be to, once a game is completed,
to then allow all players access to the messages of all other players
this could only work with games that had full messaging
endless feud potential !!!!!

what is with this constant desire to "tinker with things "???

redhouse1938: Players come up with far more intricate and elaborate treaties/agreements/pacts/alliances/guarantees/etc. than the ones any system for inputting them could allow. Sure, your change might make people take their own word a little more seriously, but you can have the same effect in-game by making a point of highlighting international law at every turn in your press.

JECE: I don't think the proposal has anything to do with changing in-game behavior, just to make the general arc of alliances/stabs easier to read post-game or for people not in the game. Also, I would at best scratch my head and at worst LOL if someone was talking about international law in a game.

erist:
1. I think I understand redhouse1938's proposal. It is impossible to code such a 'general arc' in the face of how complex agreements get in Diplomacy. To give a silly example, how would an ambiguous agreement between two parties to not make a declaration of war if as a consequence a certain 3rd party might be in danger of elimination be included in the 'overall arc'? (I suppose it would be nice to have a system where you could propose a draft treaty and have it displayed, secretly or not, for others to sign. That would be a way of getting to the text of treaties without having to dig through the press archive. Maybe it could be considered analogous to actually writing out a document in a face-to-face game and forcing other players to sign it in ink, ha ha. But that's a different proposal to what redhouse1938 is proposing.)
2. Demanding a treaty be followed is appealing to international law. Unless you're a supporter of the 'realist' school of international relations that sees the world through the same tribal, pseudo-Darwinist lens as a fascist, then you should see that demands for honor or legality inside Diplomacy are often heeded for a variety of reasons.

@JECE: in the case you describe, you could go for option "B", or you could simply not click anything and write an EoG. Or, when the moment country C attacks D, you could "activate" the alliance at that point by clicking B and write in your EoG that the alliance was automatically activated.
It has nothing to do with International law. These "automated treaties" are no more or less binding than the "treaties" that are signed simply by two players agreeing on a form of cooperation, they are just a different way of *noting* that they did.
Think about chess: whenever you play a chess game, you get a white paper with a yellow carbon paper beneath. On the white paper you note all moves, but if you want, you can flip over that page and annotate the carbon paper. And there's a code for very easily annotating chess moves: a question mark for a bad, two question marks for a very bad move, two exclamation marks for a very good move, etc. etc..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols
These annotations simplify the interpretation of a match tremendously, for example, you can see the exact point where an expert player, or the opponent, thought a crucial mistake was made. Then you can dedicate a lot of time studying that particular point in the game. If you look at a Kasparov-Karpov match without some kind of annotation, you simply won't understand why the game was won by one player or the other.

@redhouse1938 But in chess annotation, you're just adding an editorial to past events *that are inevitably revealed in the course of the match*. In Diplomacy a track record of promises kept vs. promises broken in the past is vital information *that would not otherwise be verifiable* except for this new "feature". It changes the balance of the game by making it impossible to repudiate dishonesty (unless you forgo the "treaties" which is suspicious by itself.)

"I want to work together to stab Italy but only if we don't formalize it into treaty"

Players will do anything to bend the rules.

dudes, i don't know why redhouse is getting so much heat for suggesting this idea. I think its awesome. It's just like real-life. This is how REAL LIFE WORKS. so if you disagree it shouldn't be in a game, you don't take your gaming very respectfully and you're probably a shitty player.

I even saw this idea done in some early political games where you offer treaties to (CPU) opponents. Risk comes to mind.

REAL LIFE also doesn't feature "self bounces" where Turkish Fleets in Constantinople and Smyrna try to bounce off of each other in the Aegean, but an Austrian fleet in Bulgaria "maliciously supports" the fleet in Constantinople out against it's own real wishes! But it's allowed anyway, because gameplay takes precedence over realism. In the case of redhouse1938's suggestion, the balance of the game is thrown out-of-whack.

"so if you disagree it shouldn't be in a game, you don't take your gaming very respectfully and you're probably a shitty player."

-1 rollerfuck

It could just be that you take the original boardgame *very* seriously and are a purist who believes Allan Calhamer was a genius and messing with his design is a bad idea.

Holy shit I 100% AGREE with draugnar... wtf...

ha this is hilarious. not that we are discussing the mechanics of the game, which i may remind u are SIMPLIFIED. but add a dosage of imagination and anything can be explained; self-bounces included.

balance of the game is thrown out of whack? how exactly??? the laws are still there, everyone is free to stab or make an agreement commitment. If anything i think this idea would work BEAUTIFULLY with the public press option. like i said earlier, as in real-life.

and sorry dickgaugnar, sorry that my comment offended you. truth hurts sometimes. ha

Rollerfiend I don't think it's very consistent to appeal to "how REAL LIFE WORKS" and "add a dosage of imagination and anything can be explained" at the same time. Which is it?

man regarding the mechanics of the game, its a different thing, there's so much more that goes into war, like morale and momentum that diplomacy doesn't account for, i agree. But I think its still a good reflection of things OVERAll. i'll leave you with a quote from henry kissinger, secretary of state, who was a BIG fan of our lovely diplomacy: "Military Men Are Just Dumb, Stupid Animals To Be Used As Pawns In Foreign Policy"

;)

Holy fuck! I agree with tendmote 100%!

Which is it? Imagination or reality?

Now for adding it to Public Press, that might be cool. PP is already a variant. so long as you can choose to still attack even under the "alliance" declaration (i.e. stab), then add it as a variant. But you have to find at least one PHP developer willing to do it and Kestas has to decide whether the ROI is worth doing it (i.e. will enough players play the variant to make it worth the effort implementing it).

(the point is foreign policy is the heart of the game, not war like risk. this is why, in my opinion, diplomacy is superior to risk :P)

yeah just to clarify i don't think the original game should be permenantly changed to adjust for the treaty idea. It's just a variant idea at the most. so chill guys

The biggest problem I see with something like this is the coding time. I know that Kestas is working on some new moderator tools and then probably something like Reliability ratings afterwards. So anything that requires a code change is difficult to get set up unless someone like Alderian is willing to give it a shot. Setting up some games where all the players agree to give up their press afterwards might be more feasible for what it sounds like you're interested in.

redhouse1938:
1. I don't see the point of your system if so many agreements/understandings still go unrecorded unless you dig through the press archive. If you are trying to present a solution to digging through the press archive to find out what happened on the diplomatic level, then I don't see the point of your system: people still have to dig through the press archive to find out what happened on the diplomatic level.
2. Whether a treaty is 'binding' or not doesn't take away from the fact that it contributes to international law. You're still forging customary international law at every step of the game. Also, a treaty in Diplomacy is only 'binding' in so far as it is cleverly designed to be self-enforcing. Such an enforcement mechanism might even depend on the customary international law that has developed in the game. I mostly made independent thoughts here, but I hope you see what I'm getting at when I say 'international law'.
3. The only way to objectively put 'annotations' by key events in a game (while at the same time giving incentive to 'produce' these annotations) I can think of is that treaty/agreement publication feature I came up with. If there is a place where 'agreements/understandings/treaties' or something like that can be written outside the press stream, with privacy options added to limit the players who can view it and buttons/check-boxes where players can 'sign' the agreements, then such a system would probably be used to easily record that something was formally or semi-formally agreed to. At the end of the game all these treaties et al could become public (if that is what the community thinks is best) as another archive. If I understand you correctly, that would provide the record of important events you want.