ppg, would you prefer Italy? I honestly don’t care, you choose.
Ah, there’s the problem. You know us tricky Census types - I was trying to get away with a sample, rather than a complete count. 
Yeah, and me, acting as Congress, shot you down again!
Full count or nothing! Ach du Lieber!
Although I got my first choice, I would be willing to trade with about anyone other than Italy or Turkey.
And RT sampling. I can just see him in a backwards baseball cap and low-rider jeans, standing behind a few turntables scratching records.
I can just see the German teams plotting Weltherrschaft right now. All wearing their lederhosen and brownshirts and plotting a Bierhallputsch. Then the Americans come in, late, and you end up with a sort of Weimar Republik. How sad.
McG, the first thing you should do in Russia is attack Austria or Turkey, make friends with the other, and square away a friendly relationship with either Germany or England. But you knew that already. Tell us, exactly what has Abe been whispering in your ear?
You don’t know how right you are.
FWIW, some guys on Cat23 recorded the data from 3,485 games to determine which countries did best. The results are here. The winner was Russia, running about a length ahead of France, with England and Turkey in a dead heat for third, four lengths back of France. Germany trailed England and Turkey by a length, with Austria another few lengths back, and Italy way in the rear.
My main problem with their analysis is that their games aren’t in the same universe as those I’ve played in. 62% of their games had winners, for instance; I’ve yet to play or GM a PBEM game that resulted in a winner, in six tries so far. And before that, my years of occasional FTF games produced only 2 games with outright wins. And since their scoring system values wins very heavily, that really makes a huge difference: excepting Germany, the countries’ overall ranking was in the same order as their number of wins. So it’s interesting, but I’m not ready to make too much of it, despite the sheer quantity of data that went into the analysis.
This game is so balanced that it would seem to favor ties over outright wins, at least in games where all players are determined to see things through to the end. In the case where all players are not equal in ability or there are autopilot countries it would seem to tip the scale toward wins. Are all of the Cat23 games in the analysis “vanilla”, eg, one’s without any variants?
The game does favor draws…if the players are of equal caliber.
And that’s an important point. IMHO the stats compiled at the Cat23 site reflect the uneven competition, especially early in the Cat23 history.
David Watson and some others are, right now, working on compiling win, lose or draw info from all modern (since the numbering system started) Cat23 games. It’s in tables right now and the DB needs to be set up and made available online.
I’ll keep you posted.
But unless country assignments fall just right, it only takes 3-4 decent players to make a game even. Half the players can be tossers without necessarily disrupting the balance of a game, and it seems hard for one superior player to rise above the crowd.
Also, allowing NMR’s greatly skews the balance from ties to solos.
Well, NMRs are specifically included in the game rules.
Unfortunately, the rules assume that you have 7 players sitting around a kitchen table somewhere. That circumstance makes NMRs fairly unlikely. A player would have to pass out drunk or some such to NMR. In an email game it’s much more likely to occur and have fewer interpersonal consequences for the player).
So it’s just something we have to live with. Or have a policy (like me) of having a quick replacement trigger.
That might be the difference, WL. If you’re at that level of 12-14 bases, and instead of joining a coalition against you, one of your neighbors NMRs, all of a sudden you walk home to your win rather than being forced into a 4-way draw.
Another interesting thing about their stats was the number of players in your typical draw. 3-way draws were the most common, which isn’t surprising. But 3-ways outnumbered 4-ways by about 2-1 (5-ways and larger orgies were negligible), and there were essentially as many 2-way draws as 3-way draws.
It’s pretty obvious why 3-way draws would be a common outcome: when the game’s down to 3 powers, it’s in the interests of any two of them to make sure the third one doesn’t get too close to the magic number of 18 bases. So unless the game goes from being a more complex game to being a 3-player game in a way that gives one of the three immediate winning chances, a 3-power game has the stability of a 3-legged stool. So you draw.
But the evolution of a 2-way draw isn’t as natural, whether the two drawing powers have been allies or adversaries as they’ve approached 17 bases. If allies (e.g. an R/T pushing westward in parallel, or an E/F similarly pushing east), then all it takes is a well-timed stab to turn the outcome from 17-17 to 18-16.
If adversaries, I would think that that needs the sort of game which turns into 2 large powers and a collection of really tiny ones, pretty early, and so there’s nobody to play the balance-of-power role. So the two big fish compete to see who can gobble up the small fish faster - but still, a 17-17 tie would appear to be a fairly infrequent outcome.
It would be interesting to see how a sample of those 2-way draws happened. Or maybe I’ll just wait for the results of David Watson’s work (that JC referred to on the previous page) to be posted online at some future date.
On the WorldMasters Diplomacy 2002 main page, it says:
So Dave, you might want to add Steve.
And moving the other links forward:
Diplomacy official rules (PDF)
I posted a query about the scoring system on their MB yesterday, and now it seems to make basic sense.
“the current SC count” apparently means “the SC count at the game’s conclusion.”
Then all of this stuff makes sense:
So for instance, Dip 1040, which just ended in a 4-way draw with Austria at 14 units, France at 10, Russia 7, and England 3, with Turkey and Italy having the most longevity of the vanquished players, would be scored something like this, if I understand correctly:
Country: SCs + positional bonus = total
Austria: 14+32=46
France: 10+16=26
Russia: 7+8=15
England: 3+4=7
Turkey: 0+2=2
Italy: 0+1=1
Germany: 0+0=0.
If Austria had pulled off a victory, with the order of finish otherwise unchanged, it would score like this:
Austria: 34+32=66
France: 0+16=16
Russia: 0+8=8
England: 0+4=4
Turkey: 0+2=2
Italy: 0+1=1
Germany: 0+0=0.
I’m told that consideration of penultimate and earlier years is solely for purposes of tiebreakers, and that only the SCs at game’s conclusion are used to calculate the players’ point totals.
This is pretty clear. I don’t expect we’ll get any of these points, but after conclusion of the round, it may be a factor in eliminating some of our better players.
One thing I’m going to suggest that they think about for next time, in terms of advancement, is the reality that the different Great Powers have differing degrees of difficulty. It makes more sense to me to advance the top n scorers for each country - that way you’re competing against others similarly situated. (So if there were 28 boards in Round 2, they’d advance the top 28 Italys, the top 28 Englands, etc. from Round 1.) When they calculate the first-round player scores sometime next summer, before adding in the team bonuses, it would be interesting to look at all the Russias together, all the Austrias, etc., to see how the players of each specific Great Power fared.
I’ve left out the tiebreak stuff.
Has this really been bothering you, Kim?
Have a martini for lunch. You’ll feel better.
Anytime I really have no clue of how to make sense of something that really ought to be pretty straightforward, it bothers me, especially if it directly involves me. I’m used to being able to figure out pretty much anything, or at worst, figure out exactly what is holding me back.
And I really had no clue about their scoring system, which was apparently quite straightforward. But the way they worded it sure wasn’t.
What makes me feel better, naturally, is being able to understand whatever it was that I found incomprehensible. Mission accomplished, and I’m feeling fine now, thanks. 
Yeah, just because they play diplomacy all the damn time you think maybe they’d be better communicators?
It depends on where the spazz country is. In 983, when Celestina took over England, it was a huge boon to France. England would have fallen anyway, but it was much easier.
Even with a central country, if Austria is played by a goober, just Turkey may be situated to take advantage, or just Russia.
I agree with NMR’s.
Since I just played like a goober in an intramural game (as Austria) I can assure everyone that you can go out quickly.
Ouch.
I personally like having a GM with a quick NMR trigger.
In 983, I didn’t feel too bad about taking advantage of Celestina’s play as England; Abe, you’d already benefited, as Russia, from her play of Turkey, and White Lightning as Italy had had the good fortune to have Steelerphan as Austria, and Celestina as Turkey. I figured in having Celestina as England, I was just catching up with you two. Subsidies for all! 