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Diplomacy
Misc. Thoughts:
- In casual games it seems important to keep your eye out for players who are likely to remain in alliances for longer than they should. The same thing happens a lot in casual games of Risk.
Questions to Answer:
- What is the smallest functional game that you can make? In other words, if I wanted to have as few players as possible and as few territories as possible, but I also wanted to not violate any of the original rules, how many territories / players would I have?
Analysis of Simple Situations:
2-player games
2-square game:
If each player starts with one square and there are only 2 squares, the game will be a stalemate. [Is there any way to generalize this observation?]
3-square game
If the winning condition is to get 2 squares, this game should be a stalemate with perfect play (the pieces should bounce every time they try to move into the middle territory). However, with an imperfect opponent one player could win by convincing the other player to not
Misc Links
The Diplomatic Pouch Zine
PlayDiplomacy.com Forum Discussion - Diplomacy Game, Scoring and Game Theory
LessWrong.com - Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory
David Rosen - Diplomacy and International Relations Theory (Part 1)
David Rosen - Diplomacy and Game Theory (Part 2)
Wikipedia - Edi Birsan (apparently one of the best Diplomacy players)
Demis Hassabis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
http://www.mobygames.com/developer/shee ... erId,2659/
YouTube videos about him: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... sabis&sm=3
YouTube - Systems Neuroscience and AGI - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjG_Fx3D0o0
2014.01.10 - Washington Post Magazine - In the world of war games, Volko Ruhnke has become a hero
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I think I may have added the stuff below without realizing this page was originally meant for the board game named Diplomacy.
2011.06.17 - NYTimes - Book Review - How Hitler Could Have Won
Quote:Throughout the book, Roberts notes errors that, if avoided, might have helped the Germans to win battles and perhaps even the war itself. Hitler, he says, should have begun the war three years later than he did, in 1942 rather than 1939. He should not have allowed the British to escape at Dunkirk as France fell. He should have arranged for the Japanese to help in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Once on Soviet territory German forces should have recruited the non-Russian populations rather than repressing them, and returned farmland to peasants rather than exploiting their labor and taking their food. In September 1941, Army Group Center of the Wehrmacht should have pushed forward to Moscow rather than detouring to Kiev. Army Group South should have fought a war of maneuver rather than concentrating on Stalingrad.
Inevitably, the reader of these observations will find himself posing counterfactual questions. If we agree with Roberts, as we should, that Churchill personally helped lengthen the war by keeping Britain from seeking peace terms after the fall of France, then we are also implicitly saying that, absent Churchill, peace might have been made. The war-winning alliance of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union was sealed only in December 1941, and could not have been achieved had Britain left the war.
But even if the case for Churchill shows us the importance of this implicit counterfactual, it is still unclear just how to deal with Roberts’s explicit ones. Each depends upon careful judgment of what was thinkable in a given moment, and the fact that Roberts appears to use only English-language sources cuts against his ability to weigh convincingly what Hitler and other Germans considered possible. If Hitler had begun the war three years later, surely very many other things would have been different, and not all of them to his favor.
In other cases, the what-if’s require too much to be altered to be really useful. The reason German forces did not befriend the non-Russian minorities and assist the hungry peasantry in the Soviet Union was that they were embarked on a war of racial colonization that was meant to kill tens of millions of Jews and Slavs. In the end, as Roberts himself concludes, that is the war Hitler wanted. And as he knows, the reason Japan did not help the Germans in the Soviet Union was that Hitler did not want Japanese help. What’s more, the Japanese themselves had already decided to move south into the Pacific rather than north into Siberia. Tokyo had been quite powerfully alienated from Berlin by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, in which Berlin seemed to exchange its alignment with Japan for an alliance with the Soviet Union. In other words, sometimes what appears at first to be just a matter of Hitler’s own decisions in fact involves the thinking of leaders of other countries as well, which means that the exercise becomes much more complicated.
Then, too, what if Poland had agreed in 1939 to join Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union, as Hitler wanted? If Poland had allied with Germany rather than resisting, Britain and France would not have issued territorial guarantees to Poland, and would not have had their casus belli in September 1939. It is hard to imagine that Britain and France would have declared war on Germany and Poland in order to save the Soviet Union. If Poland’s armies had joined with Germany’s, the starting line for the invasion would have been farther east than it was in June 1941, and Japan might have joined in, which would have forced some of the Red Army divisions that defended Moscow to remain in the Far East. Moscow might have been attained. In this scenario, there is no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and thus no alienation of Japan from Germany. In that case, no Pearl Harbor, and no American involvement. What World War II becomes is a German-Polish-Japanese victory over the Soviet Union. That, by the way, was precisely the scenario that Stalin feared.
Question: What general principles could be extracted from these what-ifs? In other words, what process for decision-making could Hitler have followed to avoid these mistakes (assuming they should be called mistakes)?
Nevsky
Reviews
- YouTube - Player's Aid - Nevsky
- Summary:
- They found the theme dry / hard to get excited about. (Personally it seems to me like it should be marketed as being Operation Barbarossa but in medieval times.)
- They found it was very easy to make mistakes that would totally ruin your chances of success. (But if it's equally easy for both sides to make such mistakes, presumably you could recover if the other side made a mistake later?)
- They found it was a very front-loaded planning experience, meaning you had to put a lot of effort into planning things before you even got started with your campaign for the season. (This reminds me of defending in Combat Mission, where your largest opportunity to affect the game is in the setup phase, and if you mess that up you can be in a totally hopeless position before things even get started.)
- They didn't like the box art. (IMO they spent a ridiculous amount of time talking about this.)
- Summary:
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