Because Mafia alone doesn't make us paranoid enough.
ScoreboardDorian G: 0.5 Europes
Pesco: 0.5 Europes
Alright, I'm not sure how familiar you folks are with Diplomacy, but I'll go ahead and explain it all here so anyone who wants to learn how to play can do so. Diplomacy is a board game with simultaneous turns that pits all the players against each other in a free-for-all battle of wits. Each player controls a European power of the early 20th century.
Players fight for control over the marked territories, and of special importance are the Supply Centers marked with black dots. To take these territories, the players control army and navy units. Armies can move through land territories. Navies can move through water territories and along coasts. No two units can occupy the same territory. Turns are simultaneous, and they follow a 3 turn cycle. On Spring and Fall turns, the units move to try and occupy Supply Centers. On Winter turns, no units move, all Supply Centers pass into the control of the player who occupies them, and players build or disband units so that they have as many units as their new number of Supply Centers.
What makes this game unique is the rules for battle between opposing units. It's this aspect that forces the cooperation between players that gives Diplomacy its name. Two armies can sit next to each other and keep attacking each other for years, and neither one will be destroyed or forced to give up its position. In order to dislodge a unit from a territory, the attacking unit needs support from another unit. And in order to resist being dislodged, the defending unit needs support from at least as many units as are supporting the attacking unit.
In this example, the two Turkish units alone wouldn't have been able to dislodge the Italian army as long as it was supported by the adjacent Navy unit. If they tried, then the Turkish unit would be bounced right back to the territory it attacked from, and there would be no change for the following turn. However, with the Austrian army's support, the attack is successful and the Italian army is dislodged from its outpost in Greece. Italy must then choose whether to retreat to an adjacent territory, or else disband the army and perhaps free up a slot to build a new one next Winter.
Now, this means that Turkey's attack was entirely dependent on his trust of Austria to go through with helping the attack. Austria could well have decided not to help the attack at all, as he might be afraid of making an enemy of Italy, or he might be afraid of letting Turkey get too powerful. And whatever he decided, he could have promised anything at all to Italy and Turkey. Because orders are sent in secret, and resolved simultaneously, they'd have no idea that they had been betrayed until the orders had been resolved. This is the theme of Diplomacy. No one player has enough power to win on his own, and so alliances have to be made. But every alliance is going to be broken sometime or another, because only one player can win.
Really, that's all the basic info you need to play the game. The rest of this post is just a wall of text to deal with technicalities and special issues. Feel free to skim over it if it's too much to bother with right now.
---
Reference map here.This is a map with the names of all the territories. To send your orders, PM me with the territories, units, and actions involved. For Spring and Fall phases, the are four valid types of action: Hold, Move, Support, and Convoy.
HoldA Hold order tells a unit to defend the territory where it's stationed. For example, "
Army Munich Hold." If a holding unit is attacked, and the attacking unit doesn't have more units supporting its move than the holding unit has supporting its defense, then the attacking unit will simply be bounced back to the territory from which it was attacking. Note that a holding unit does not automatically support nearby units - it must be explicitly ordered to do so.
MoveA Move order tells a unit to move from one territory to an adjacent one, and to fight any unit that tries to keep it from getting there. The syntax follows "
Navy Aegean Sea Move to Ionian Sea." If two units move into the same territory, and one has more support than the other, then the unit with more support will occupy that territory, and the unit with less support will be bounced back to its original territory. Army units can only move through land territories. Navy units can move through water territories and also through land territories that are on a coast, but they cannot move between disconnected coasts. For example, a navy that moved from the Mid Atlantic to Spain would be on Spain's north coast, and so it could not move directly into the West Mediterranean. Remember that if you want multiple units to attack a territory, you must give only
one of them a Move order, and the others should use a Support order!
If a unit attacks another unit that was given the Support command, and that unit's Support is not going towards an attack on this unit that is in turn attacking it, then that Support command is canceled. In this way, a unit can disrupt an attack even if it's not in range to directly support the defending unit. However, if a unit attacks into the territory of a second unit that is irself attacking into a third territory, then that second unit's attack is not disrupted. If that second unit's attack succeeds, then it moves into the territory it was attacking, and the first unit then moves into the territory that the second unit vacated. A rare situation, but it bears mentioning. Finally, note that no two units may ever occupy the same territory, even if they're friendly, and even friendly units will just bounce against each other if they try to switch places by moving into each others' territories.
SupportThe effects of a Support command have been pretty well covered by the rules up to this point, but it's important to note that a Support command must always be explicit in what it's supporting. So, an order of "
Army Ruhr Support Holland Hold" means that the Ruhr army is supporting the Holland unit's defense of Holland, and only that. If the Holland unit moves, or if it supports some other action, then the Ruhr army's command does nothing. To support an attack, the syntax follows "
Army Ruhr Support Holland Move to Belgium."
In order to support an attack on a territory, a unit need only be adjacent to the territory being attacked, not necessarily to the territory where the attack is coming from. Likewise, to support a defense, a unit need only be adjacent to the territory it wants to defend, not necessarily to the territory where the attack is coming from.
ConvoyThe last order is a rare one, but it does come up occasionally. A Convoy order lets a navy transport an army to a territory it couldn't normally reach, at least not in one turn. The army just needs to send a move order that would take it to a territory it couldn't normally get to. For example, "
Army Berlin Move to Sweden." If a navy is adjacent to both the territory the army occupies and the territory it wants to occupy, then it can be ordered as "
Navy Baltic Sea Convoy Berlin to Sweden."
An army can be convoyed into a territory occupied by the enemy as an attack, but note that the navy doing the convoying is not considered to be supporting the army's movement for the purpose of determining the outcome of the battle. A convoy attack can be supported as well, as with "
Navy Gulf of Bothnia Support Berlin Move to Sweden." Also note that a convoy can take place over multiple navies. So, the combination "
Army Berlin Move to St. Petersburg," "
Navy Baltic Sea Convoy Berlin to St. Petersburg," "
Navy Gulf of Bothnia Convoy Berlin to St. Petersburg" would be valid. Needless to say, if the units' orders don't match, if one of the navies is dislodged by an outside attack, or if the destination territory is successfully defended, the convoy doesn't happen and the army stays where it is.
RetreatIf any units are dislodged, then in between the main turns there is a Retreat Phase where the dislodged units all decide whether to retreat or disband, and where to retreat to. If a unit is disbanded, then the player that owned it won't be able to build a replacement until the next Winter phase. If a unit chooses to retreat, then it must go to some unoccupied territory, and not the one from which it was just attacked. If two units attempt to retreat to the same territory during the Retreat Phase, then both are immediately disbanded instead.
BuildAfter the Spring and Fall turns, there is a Winter turn in which no units move, and all Supply Centers pass into the ownership of the player occupying them. For this turn, each player's number of controlled Supply Centers is compared with his number of units on the board. If he has more Supply Centers than units, then he may choose to build a number of armies or navies equal to the difference. Built units may only be initially placed in the Supply Centers the player started with, and of course navies may only be built in coastal Supply Centers. If he has more units than Supply Centers, then he must disband a number of units equal to the difference. Players send in their orders simulaneously for this phase, as with all the others, and after that the next Spring turn begins.
---
Whew. That was quite a job to type. I just want to have it out there so there's no ambiguity in the way orders will be resolved. If it looks to me like you've made a mistake in your orders, I'll send you a PM back to confirm if there's time to do so before the deadline, so don't fret about memorizing all that. It should all make sense once the game gets going. Anyway, the default Diplomacy setup uses seven players, with armies and navies initially placed as follows:
I'm open to trying out variants, but I'm hoping to just gather enough newbie interest this time around to ease into it with the default setup. So, if you're an experienced player, or if you're interested in learning the game, please sign up! The jDip client I use to run the game is really simple, so it's no problem at all if we need to run multiple games if there are too many signups, and to be frank, as I write this I'm more worried that there won't be enough to run even one full-size game.
The thread will mostly just be used for signups and for posting public updates, as most of the plotting will be done between players via PM with each other. I'm thinking that 48 hour deadlines per turn will give enough time for people in different timezones to do their diplomacy. Anyway, if you have any commentary on that or anything else, feel free to voice it, and same for any questions about the game.
Current Signups:
1. Pesco - France
2. Doll Warrior S. - Turkey
3. Kasunagi no Tsurugi - Germany
4. Fusion-Etch - Russia
5. Naut - Austria-Hungary
6. T34G3 - Italy
7. Dorian G. - England
