Interestingly enough, I reached the opposite conclusion on the French builds. They look funny for all of the reasons goldfinger mentions -- it takes a position that was potentially quite dynamic and appears to lock it into one mode, a mode that will not be good for France if it cannot find a build somewhere and get a second fleet on the board.
And yet, let's consider what the other options would have looked like...
Suppose France built two fleets, with the intention of poking at Italy and keeping England honest. By pulling Italian forces off the front lines, the end result is that the I/A would be fighting a losing battle, so Turkey gets let out of its box into the Med. France potentially gains something here too, certainly Tunis and likely a bit more. What about the rest of the board?
Well, Russia is growing with little in the way of effective opposition. Should England join in and make it EFRT vs. the rest of the board? No. When EFRT gets reduced, England would be faced with a Russia with multiple fleets and nowhere else to go (even if the fleets are temporarily around Denmark/Sweden, they will continue on) and a France with multiple fleets and a stalemate with Turkey, a border that is likely to be defended short a couple of fleets. So, England doesn't want the EFRT.
What about Germany? Does Germany want the FGRT? Possibly in the short term; F StP(nc) and F Ber look mighty effective, and it's potentially staring down the barrel of an EFR pile-on. But Russia just removed its biggest asset in a long-term stab of Turkey, so how does the FGRT reduce? With Germany caught between France and Russia and having no strategic depth to deal with it.
With a weaker board that isn't thinking to the endgame at this stage, France should IMO still just build the fleets, assume that he can fashion an EFRT or EGRT, and be happy that those both reduce to an FRT. With a strong RT, France is a de facto ally as long as he can find some temporary help.
The place France loses, of course, is when strong players realize that the FRT endgame isn't in their best interest, and so a rampant RT foments a strong EG. Which is the scenario that France has to be worried about the most, of course.
So, the point is that even though a successful RT is probably in the best interest of France, and two fleet builds are helpful for making that happen, the combination doesn't work. France needs an ally willing to work with him, and two fleet builds are likely to stop that from happening. Ultimately, the problem for France is that if an EG forms to deal with Russia, it also attacks France unless it's a triple. And...I'll suffice to point out that if this is a Western triple, y'all are doing it wrong. :)
So, what about F/A? The most standard answer here, and I'd reckon what ~80% of players would have put on the board. I wouldn't have complained with this build -- end up putting fleets in Spa(sc) and MAO, say, and it means that France has a defensive perimeter against England, can quickly put pressure on Italy if desired, and has lots of leverage. Probably my favorite pair of builds in this spot, absent other information.
But wait...let me speculate and ask what happens if we *do* have other information. Perhaps it's a read on England that this build is enough to convince him to take his chances with an EFRT game. Or just perhaps...what would you do as France if you found out that A StP was about to hit the board?
F StP(sc) is most clearly anti-German and was the most likely builds. F StP(nc) is most clearly anti-English and was also possible. But A StP? That has several axes of threat, including Fin/StP and a heavy Scandinavian assault and an all-out blitz on Germany. And most notably, it puts England into a really awkward situation. The normal purpose of the E/G is out of worry about hostile fleets, but there aren't really any. England could, over time, slowly force his way into the MAO, I suppose. But that's going to take 2-3 years, in which time Russia will surely overrun Germany and build northern fleets with England wide open. The French army builds are actually better than fleets defensively, because a perimeter of MAO/Bre/Par/Gas/Mar, say, isn't going anywhere anytime soon, not with Italy otherwise occupied and Germany having a large Russian army to contend with. The French army builds also offer England the possibility that Italy might not collapse anytime soon, so that the RT doesn't have to be part of the endgame. A drawn war between AI/RT in the south while England expands is the best possible scenario, and now it's on the table, right?
In other words, if you knew what the rest of the builds were looking like, this looks to be a clever way of forestalling the EG. It's much less useful offensively, but it also makes France a much less appealing target.
And finally, I might add, if goldfinger is right that Italy is the most important target right now, and you want to pick up a center, let me simply state that the current disposition of the Italian forces is such that I don't think such an attack has been rendered impossible. Even just in terms of distance, F Por and F Mar are equidistant from their nearest Italian centers, after all...
In summary, the point is that France made a poor short-term tactical choice in return for setting up the strategic structure that he wants for the game, and received absolutely the perfect builds in return even from powers far beyond his borders. That's either incredibly fortuitous or the mark of a skilled player, and with skilled Diplomacy players, I tend not to bet on serendipity. So I like these builds a lot.
Having said all of that, I think there might have been even one more option if France was this confident in his read of the situation -- A Par/Waive holds almost all of the benefits of A Bre/A Par, but holds out the possibility of throwing a fleet onto the board in W1902. Three armies is sufficient to deal with Germany, but has the short-term tactical problem that in a F/G war, France obviously wants to be in both Picardy and Burgundy, and these builds let France do so one turn quicker than A Par/Waive or F/A. France seems to have concluded that the extra tempo is worth the loss of flexibility, and if that tempo lets him get a 1902 build, he'll be right. I think I might have preferred the added flexibility from waiving instead. But, in my view, France seems to have judged the situation quite well, so if he considered both waiving and building and decided that the second army was necessary, I suspect he'll turn out to be right.
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