THE DIPLOMATICON

I was hoping I’d be writing about a game on Playdiplomacy, frankly, but that’s proving hard to get going. Playdip seems to have problems, at the moment.

It isn’t too long ago that Playdip was taken down by… let’s call them hackers although it wasn’t really hacked as such. It wasn’t down too long, and nothing was taken relating to player info, but it is never good when a site is attacked.

Now, Playdip’s forum seems to have disappeared. The link to it isn’t available on the site; you can still play on the site but there’s no way to advertise a game. And given that I enjoy games of real Dip, with decent communications, a 3-day game in this era of short deadlines is going to struggle without advertising.

So, instead, I went to the apps. There are just two of them now: Primacy, the newest, seems to have disappeared. At least, it isn’t in the Google Play store. And I can’t find a working link to it.

That left Conspiracy or Diplicity. Conspiracy, when I looked, is never going to be a place where I can play. The longest deadline available now is one day, which means it’s a place where you’re never going to get good players. One day just isn’t long enough to play a decent game of Dip, with decent communications. Not for me.

Which left Diplicity. Now, Diplicity didn’t have a game I could join with deadlines longer than one day, so I created one. This puts it miles ahead of Conspiracy anyway, where you can’t create a game without paying to do so. Ridiculous.

Because I couldn’t see any games with longer deadlines, I admit I was worried. Would I get anyone wanting to play a 3-day deadline game? Well, I was pleased to find that, a matter of days later, we were full and ready to go.

It’s currently S01. I’m England, which I’m happy about because I love playing England. I’ve messaged the other players and am currently fishing for an alliance or two (or three!). And I thought I’d write a record of how the game’s progressing here.

Obviously, I’m going to delay publishing posts (after this one) so that I’m not giving away anything in the game too early. I guess the chances of any of the players reading the blog are small but still, you don’t give out free information!

I’m a little cautious about the people I’m playing with, I have to admit. It looks like this is Turkey’s first game on the app. The same with Germany. France, Russia and Italy don’t have impressive records. France has started four games and doesn’t seem to have finished any of them, which means they’re playing in four (seems a lot to manage); Italy has started two games and hasn’t finished either; Russia has started two, and abandoned one.

Austria seems to be the player of the bunch. It looks like they’re in seven games (which isn’t really manageable) but they’ve finished 1023 games, with close to 20% resulting in solos. However, they’ve also abandoned 67 games, which is a lot (assuming no real life interference). The solo rate seems quite high, I know, but playing somewhere like Diplicity a decent player will get a good solo rate. Austria’s is 18.9% solos; a random solo rate might be judged as being 14.3% (one game in seven). They’ve soloed 193 games, and drawn 214 which suggests that they play to win when things go well. However, they’re not great at preventing solos, I believe: an unstated stat suggests they’ve survived 273 games in which they’ve lost to a solo.

Austria is clearly the most experienced of us all when it comes to playing on Diplicity. They should be aiming to use this to their advantage – I would be. The others are unknowns – including me! So it’ll be interesting how many of them stick around when things get tough.