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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

No Diplomacy?

For those that actually found my analysis of the first couple turns of a Diplomacy game interesting, you must be wondering what happened to the rest. Well, there were a couple factors which disrupted my analysis of the remainder of the game:

1.) The game moved very quickly. With each phase on a 12 hour cycle, I quickly ended up behind on my analysis. Since I had therefore seen ahead several turns ahead from when I was analyzing, I felt my predictions were no longer particularly fair.

2.) A number of players ended up dropping out of the game, massively skewing its outcome. The first player to drop was Turkey in Fall 1903, but another player took over in Spring 1904 and gallantly played out an admittedly weak position. More unfortunately, in Fall 1905 Germany made a couple very clever retreats behind Russian lines, and the Russian player (despite his commanding lead and still quite viable position) simply stopped submitting orders in Spring 1906, ultimately auto-surrendering in Spring 1907. This completely upset the balance of the game, since it left a massive power vacuum in the east.

Despite this, the winner (Italy) played a very good game (and Germany, the second Turkey, and Austria-Hungary all lost with good grace), and the public press is fairly amusing as well. Therefore, if you are curious to see how the game progressed, I believe it is publicly viewable. One can click on the order history button in the top right and scroll through the turns to see how the game progressed.

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