A friend of mine wrote me and asked my opinion on the PC version of diplomacy.
Now, I recall reading something about it, but I haven’t played it.
I am hoping that with the rather broad spectrum of folks we’ve got here, someone has played it.
So, I’m asking the Teeming Dopes to review the PC Version of Diplomacy for me.
(note- he’ll be playing, most likely, against the PC. Just saying.)
I was on the beta test team for this game but I think I can be unbiased. I would bet the game did not turn out as well as Paradox would have hoped; they have high standards. But with the last patch 1.3 it is OK.
IMO the AI is poor, but the game as is is an acceptable platform for playing online against human opponents. Paradox maintain a gaming server and an online forum to support the game. Reading some of the posts there will give you a good feel for how it is viewed.
There is also a user-driven effort to implement new maps and suchlike.
I haven’t played it, but from what I gather quite a bit of functionality was broken-strange design
decisions IOW. And the AI, while improved a bit from that of the preceding game (c. 1999), still wasn’t
quite up to snuff. In particular one criticism was that it was very hard to devise complicated plans
with an ally or three.
I bought the 1999 game to play v 6 computer opponents, but it was a big disappointment.
The negotiation process was clumsy. Also I could win just by outplaying the computers with attacks.
I’ll be interested to hear what the new version is like…
It’s awful to say the least. First, the AI is non-existant. On my third play through I beat the computer on the hardest difficulty setting using Italy, reportedly the hardest country to play, using assistance of an AI player once. This would be my third time playing any version of Diplomacy. You can’t even play with human players because the interface is so poorly designed. I have played worse games but only on the most rare of occasions.
This is coming from someone who has made it one of their goals this year to play a full game of the board game Diplomacy, so it’s not just an “I hate board games so I didn’t like this” opinion. It really is abysmal.
The 1999 game referred to here is I assume the dreadful Avalon-Hill attempt, that had THE most user-hostile interface I’ve ever come across!
I understand the OP to be referring to the Paradox one that I was. So JSG, for instance sounds more like he’s talking about the AH version - the Paradox one actually had a farly clever way of dealing with making proposals to other players, al though admittedly one that takes a bit of getting used to!