A Weekly Threat Assessment of the Diplomacy Community
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DBNI Countdown Show
In the latest episode, Bryan and Zach provide updated standings for the halfway point of the 2021 Invitational season. They also discuss which players are most most likely to break into the tournament, search for the Rookie of the Year, follow the journey of last year's Super Seven, and analyze how upcoming events may impact future standings.
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Diplomacy Games #96
Kaner and Amby celebrate their 5th year of existence! Listen here as the guys welcome Zach Moore and Bryan Pravel from DBN in a fun discussion about growth of the hobby, including DBN internships, partnerships with NBC for the Olympics if Diplomacy becomes an official event in 2032, and talk about a wide variety of variants.
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Tour of Britain
With three rounds of the Tour complete the leaderboard is starting to take shape, but it's still anyone's going into the two November rounds, where phenomenal results could put anyone into the race for the crown. Sign up and have a go if you think you're 'ard enough!
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Diplomacy Serial offers proven players a chance to share thoughts that are just too big for one issue. In the final part of the series, data analyst, journalist and Diplomacy player Dave Ainsworth explores the characteristics and behaviours that will help you appeal to other players and get your games off to the best start.
Check out these previous issues of the Briefing for the first and second parts.
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The Seven Personality Traits That Help You Win in Diplomacy Openings
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6. Strength
Strength is a remarkably ill-defined characteristic in Diplomacy, but it's one we hear a lot. "Such-and-such is a strong player" is a shorthand we hear frequently to describe someone who knows what they're doing. Unlike the other traits we've discussed here, strength is much more down to tactical and strategic ability. It is hard to look strong is you do not know what you are doing. I said way back at the start that this is not an article about tactics and strategy, it's about personality. But if you want to look strong, you must seem like you have some kind of a plan, and a clear idea about what ought to happen.
Other players do not want to work with someone who seems as if they do not know how the pieces move, because a partner who may give away position by making weak moves is a complete liability. Nor do they want to work with someone indecisive or cowardly who might be pushed into changing their mind by another player. Or, if they do decide to work with a player on that basis, it will be as a vassal, a patsy, who is to be used and discarded at the appropriate moment. (This is why getting started in Diplomacy is so tricky. Players who don't know what they're doing are treated pretty mercilessly in this game.)
Strength is a mixed blessing, of course. It makes sense to display a judicious amount of strength, because if you are obviously too competent, other players may take fright, get talking to each other, and decide (correctly) that you are a dangerous predator and the best course of action is to remove you from the fray before you can build a power base. So even if you know the names of every alliance and every opening, keep that information to yourself until you've established the calibre of the opposition.
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It can go the other way, of course. Strength can intimidate. Other players can be too overawed to fight you, and may just decide to do what you tell them. This is where empathy is so important. You need to understand their personality before deciding which way you think they will go.
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All told I would prefer to overdo it than underdo it. It's crucial, in all cases, that you do not appear naive or vulnerable. This is an invitation for others to take advantage of you, and you want very much to give the impression that if you are attacked, or someone else is considering stabbing you, it will not end well for the other player. Generally speaking, all you need to do to avoid getting attacked in Diplomacy is to not be the most attractive target. So long as someone, anyone, looks more inviting than you, they are the power which will usually get attacked.
7. Reliability
I've left arguably the most important trait until last. Diplomacy is a game about trust, more than just about anything else, and if you do not attract trust, you will not prosper. So it is imperative that other players feel they can rely on your word.
The irony, of course, is that you will struggle to win a game of Diplomacy if you do not have plans to betray the trust of your allies. Trust is a commodity in Diplomacy. It is not something to be hoarded meaninglessly. Trust is something you acquire throughout the game, and then spend to get something you really want. There are many different ways a Diplomacy endgame can play out, but my normal plan would be to arrive in the third act with a big wad of trust in my pocket, and to have spent most of it by the time the game finishes in order to acquire a victory.
In order to get trust, you must also invest trust in others. You must make a judgement about whether they will do what they say. Just as you cannot win a game of Diplomacy without being trusted yourself, you cannot win without investing trust in other people.
I've really hardly talked about the moves and the pieces at all in the course of this discussion, but this is where they can really help you. If in doubt about whether you can trust another player, look at the board. Are their pieces telling the same story that their words are?
This comes back again to that trait I discussed at the start - empathy. If you have a good mental model of the other player, and how they think and what their goals and approaches are, and this is allied with an assessment of the state of the board, you should have a reasonable read on how much trust to invest in the other player.
The ideal situation is obviously that you display an appropriate amount of trust in other players, while they display absolute trust in you. The other players are likely to also have played Diplomacy before, however, so acquiring their trust may prove relatively tricky.
So, how do you acquire trust? By being reliable, basically. By making promises, and keeping them. There are some caveats. Never promise anything you are not willing to deliver, and never give away so much information about your plans that other players are able to identify exactly what you will do, and take advantage of it. But with those in mind, it's just a really good idea to make clear commitments to other players, keep those commitments, and generally behave as if you are a rock-solid player whose word is their bond.
It hardly needs saying, but the greatest success to be had in Diplomacy doesn't come from being absolutely reliable. It comes from appearing absolutely reliable.
My normal modus operandi is to do exactly what I say I will, every single turn, for the whole of the game, until an opportunity arises to launch a devastating attack on another player which puts me in a commanding position. Sometimes this never happens, with good play from others, and I go through the whole game never breaking my word to anyone and end up in the draw.
Occasionally it happens as early as 1901 or 1902. If you have the opportunity to no-build a neighbour in 1901, that is worth taking, and most other players will be entirely forgiving of that behaviour. What you don't want to do is leave angry neighbours alive.
The important thing to realise is that just because you have done exactly what you said 11 times in a row, that is no reason to keep your word for the 12th time.
In Summary
It's not a matter of chance who players pick to work with in the first year. Whether they know it or not, they are looking for particular behaviours and personality traits from their fellow players. If you display all those traits, you will usually get other players to consier you their ally. And if you can persuade everyone to think of you as their ally, you are very likely to win.
There is far more to Diplomacy than this. Strategy and tactics are vitally important. You need to know where to put the pieces. But as many people have said before me, they didn't call the game Strategy or Tactics. And there is a reason for that.
I hope you've found this useful. I'd love to know what approaches and stratagems you use to get other players working with you in 1901. If there's anything you think I missed out, do let me know.
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This issue was brought to you by Adam Silverman. Thanks for the support!
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