Diplomacy Zine -- EP #213 Chapter Seven From: Eric_S_Klien@cup.portal.com Date: Sat, 10 Nov 1990 00:33:32 +0000 Issue #213 of ELECTRONIC PROTOCOL: **************************************************************************** "The pedestrian had no idea what direction to go, so I ran over him." "An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my vehicle, and vanished." "I thought my window was down but found out it was up when I put my head through it." "The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him." **************************************************************************** Chapter One contains: BAGHDAD, AUSTERLITZ, BLITZKRIEG, KING'S GAMBIT, PASSCHENDAELE, GET SOME, DRAGONS, BLACK OCTOBER And is published by uunet!cti1!rlister or rlister@cti.com/Russ Lister Chapter Two contains: REPUBLIC, BORODINO, JACAL, VERSAILLES, DRESDEN, KHAN And is published by sinhaa@mcmaster.ca/Anand Sinha Chapter Three contains: DAWN PATROL, BERLIN, EL ALAMEIN, SQUALANE, UNGAWE, BRUSILOV OFFENSIVE, CULLODEN, GANDALF'S REVENGE, GOODBYE BLUE SKY And is published by cwekx@htikub5.bitnet/Constantijn Wekx Chapter Four contains: OZARK, DEADLY DAGGERS, YORKTOWN, MONTREUIL-SUR-MER, FIRE WHEN READY, THUNDERDOME And is published by dm8sstaf@miamiu.bitnet/Douglas M. MacFarlane Chapter Five contains: DEF CON 5, BORDEL, ERIS, MASADA, YALTA And is published by jjcarette@watami.waterloo.edu/David Gibbs Chapter Six contains: TOKUGAWA, BERLIN WALL, HIROSHIMA, GENGHIS KHAN, SEA LION, VIOLENT PEACE And is published by ps9zrhmc@miamiu.bitnet/Peter Sweeney Chapter Seven contains: HELM'S DEEP, GROUND ZERO, GIBRALTAR, TIBERIUS, BETELGEUSE ------------- Chapter Seven ------------- Table of Contents: Lots of letters. Taken from Mouth of Sauron Volume Six Number One (English) -- Part One ---- Here is a letter from loeb@geocub.greco-prog.fr/Daniel Loeb: DIPLOMACY PROGRAMMING PROJECT UPDATE ----- OCTOBER 26, 1990 1) At the bottom of this update I'm enclosing a letter from Jack Bennetto. Appearantly he too is writting a diplomacy. This bring the total number of diplomats in progress to 3. Given the fact that I can suppliment that by twiddling parameters in your programs, or adding CD countries, I think we'll be running some tournaments pretty soon. However, this means that any changes in my PROTOCOL should be made as soon as possible. In addition, I would like people to propose sample conversations between countries. This would give a better idea of the contexts in which messages can be understood, and it will show the lack of any messages I haven't anticipated. As soon as the first DIPLOMAT is finished, I will save my protocol and refer to it perminently as DPP protocol. Later improvements to the protocol will be upperwards compatible wherever possible and be referred to by the names DPQ, DPR, DPS, DPT et cetera. 2) Here is the letter from Jack: As long as I'm writing you, progress with DPP is still pretty slow. It will probably get written in C++; I've only done a couple class declarations so far (~ 30 lines). The one point noone seems to have made is that unlike games such as chess and go, there is no "best move" in Diplomacy. The players do not have perfect information; the best they can hope to do is choose randomly from a set of orders, with the probability coefficents for various orders derived from game theory. My program (as currently planned) will choose a small set of reasonable orders for itself and its opponents (possibly found from an advanced version of the "targeting" progaram you described in an earlier article) assign scores to each of the combinations, and then solve it as a two-player matrix game. The alliences though, I feel, are the most interesting part. Each other coutry wil be treated as an ally, enemy, or neutral. Allies and neutral will have at least one back-stab in their set of hypothesized orders, although there will be some penalty to (in the scoring) for such moves, depending on there trustworthiness (compiled from past actions and possibly other situations around the board). Otherwise, allied units engaged with the diplomat's enemy will be treated (initally) as being under the program's command. In this first round of matrix-solving, the progam will not consider attacking allies. It will then, however make similar calculations in which it tries backstabs, treats allies as enemies (i.e., announces an end to the alliance first), make peace with enemies, etc. After considering these, the possible benefits of each, the social penalties of backstabbing, and, in the case of ungrading an allience (i.e., making peace or becoming allies) the chance and side-effects of rejection it will decided on a course of action, and send UDO/UNO's for the appropriate moves to it's allies. If it decides to pursue peace, it will suggest that. The responses will be considered, and possible orders will be generated constrained by any of its allies's requests and considered. This comment is already about twice as long as I'd planned, but it descibs at least the part of the program. The initial alliences and moves will be book openings, again randomly chosen. (it will never look more then a turn ahead; special parts for openings and redeployment should be sufficient) Hence France might automaticly send England DMZ ECH and Italy DMZ PIE at the begining of the first turn, and have a list of random options for each response (YEP (or is it YES?) or NOP), including, say, sending England ALY VSS (GER). The openings can gradually be expanded to a realistic and effective set. Sounds pretty ambitious? It's actually a little better defined at this point than I've descibed. I'm still interested in trying a simpler game first (one with a similar allience/enemy structure to Diplomacy) to further refine ideas on what I consider to be the most important aspect of the DPP. Anyway, I'll let you know if I get much further. Jack Bennetto Here is a letter from loeb@geocub.greco-prog.fr/Daniel Loeb: DIPLOMACY PROGRAMMING PROJECT UPDATE ---- NOVEMBER 7, 1990 1) Here is a note from Ken Lowe: "In order to not waste away in this effort to the exclusion of all else, I have budgeted one night per week max to Randy. Randy actually generated some moves this weekend. Not too bright, the units in England spun around in circles while nearly everyone else bounced. That's to be expected though where my selection critera was "The first movement in the adjacencies table". The next step is in evaluating the moves to decide if anything looks better than something else. A coworker appears interested so we will probably end up with some sort of joint project." When he sends me RANDY-1, I'll test it along with my program and show you the results in order to give you an idea of how the protocol works. 2) Michael Hall and I are still working on that article you've seen. Send us your comments. Yours, Daniel Loeb, DPP "Combinatorics: The Thought that Counts" Here is a letter from ken@dewey.cac.washington.edu/Ken Lowe: Greetings. This is a general mailing to all the players and observers for the Diplomacy Adjudicator judge@milton.u.washington.edu. Danny Loeb is trying to convince Eric Klien that an automated adjudicator such as this one is feasible to run some of his various games. I've been asked to pass Danny's survey to those of you interested in providing feedback, both positive and negative. The survey can be gotten by sending the judge a "get survey" request. Please fill out the survey if you wish and send it back to Danny and Eric whose addresses appear at the top of the file. Danny will be running some games to be included in Eric's Electronic Protocol 'zine. These games are: Berezina: Standard variant Cannes: Pure variant Dien: Youngstown variant Eylau: Loeb9 variant Fontenoy: Chaos variant The latter of these is an experiment in which each of the 34 players controls one center on the standard map. The game starts in Winter of 1900 with you getting to choose what type of unit to build in your center. Subsequent builds can be done at any owned center. It promises to be a gas, but it needs a whole bunch of people to sign on. For info on the other variants use "get info.xxxx", for info on the house rules for Electronic Protocol games use "get EP.house.rules", for information on where Danny is getting his game names use "get battles". To sign on to the chaos game use: SIGNON ?FONTENOY password CHAOS The NoNMR feature of the judge has proven to be quite useful. In several cases it has caught games that would otherwise have been ruined by having powers go CD. I have decided to make this the default for all games after "zulu". Thus if no orders are received or even if only partial orders are received the judge will refuse to process the orders while the flag is set. Reminders will be sent out every 48 hours indicating that the judge is waiting for someone to take over the abandoned power(s). If this feature is not desired for a particular game the "set NMR" command can be used to allow partial or nonexistant orders to be processed. Note that orders submitted ahead of schedule with the "phase" command are considered complete regardless of whether they contain errors or fail to order particular units. The games "walouf", "whip" and "snake" are the only remaining games that will allow NMR. To facilitate games that are actually moderated by a human (as opposed to myself) a new flag has been added to prevent certain parameters from being changed except by the designated "master" for the game. This includes the deadline adjustments, access levels, etc. For more information on being a moderator use the "get master" command. The games with me listed as the master are all unmoderated so the players can continue to adjust the parameters (with the consensus of the other players). -Ken The following was scribed by Martin Snow/snow@cololasp.bitnet: Taken from Mouth of Sauron Volume Six Number One (English) AN INTERVIEW WITH FRED DAVIS JR. MN = Mark Nelson, FD = Fred Davis Jr. At World DipCon I (July 1988) I had the opportunity to interview Fred C. Davis Jr. To British Hobbyists Fred will probably be best known as the designer of a series of great variants, many of which are amongst the few variants that have stood the test of time. In the States he is also known as one of the most reliable publishers of all time (approaching eighteen consecutive years) and as a person who has been active in promoting postal diplomacy for many years, within organizations such as the old IDA and as an individual. His list of achievements within the hobby is too long to even begin. He is one of the few people who have had a major influence on the hobby. Moreover, he is one of the friendliest members of our hobby, always willing to explain things and offer useful advice; and not always on hobby matters. But perhaps you'd do better to read the interview... MN Could you explain how you entered the American Hobby? FD I entered the American Hobby at the same time I discovered Diplomacy. I was invited to a party by Marvin Garbis, who I knew through Maryland Mensa. He told us about this great new game he was playing and took out his Diplomacy set. At this time (Oct 1968) he was playing in the first All-Mensa game run by Terry Kuch in Thulcandra. Thulcandra just ran this one game, with the game fee going to charity. A month later the English player had dropped out and I entered my first game as a standby. MN Were you interested in board games before you came across Diplomacy? FD As a kid growing up we had all sorts of boardgames, most of which were fairly simple--the really complex games only started with Avalon Hill's "Tactics-2" which I bought about 1958. "Tactics-2" uses squares rather than hexes and I got my poor wife to practice playing with me a couple of times and I played it once or twice solo. At Christmas 1941, I had been given the original Tactics game. "Tactics-1" was designed during the Russo-Japanese war and is a game of battleships blockading harbours. It was reissued when WW2 came up, slightly updated by adding aircraft. We used to play that in High School and Grammar School, and so I was always interested in that type of game. I had even once tried to come up with some sort of a design using squares but had never been able to come up with anything satisfactory. When I saw Diplomacy I knew this was what I had been looking for for years. MN So you'd been playing games on and off for years... FD Oh yes. MN James got your board game through the PDA... FD Oh, you mean Landwehr? MN Yes, what was the background to that? FD These two friends of min and myself used to get together every Saturday. One fellow had an apartment which had been condemned as unfit for human habitation, but we had been given it as a club house, as the owner of the building was a personal friend of my friend's mother. We had tools and materials for many hobbies and activities there. We build miniature warships for the Fletcher Pratt Naval Wargame, and were also building a model railroad. They had built some little tanks to use in the Fletcher Pratt Naval Wargame, using the land war section. They had all these tanks, we also had some nice lead model cannon that had been built for a scale model warship, and we decided to build a two man wargame. FD We used the tanks and the cannon and took a dowel rod, which we cut up into small pieces for infantry. We had tried playing this for several months, about 1950, and it didn't work out because we were only allowing three pieces to move each turn. After I discovered Diplomacy I went back and dug this old game up and speeded up the movement, so that every piece on the same side could move at the same time. That improved the game tremendously and made a playable game. FD It was really called "The Land War Game". I wrote to some other wargamer about it and he said that you couldn't call it "The Land War Game" because there were hundreds of Land War Games. So he suggested Landwehr (which is German for defense forces)...it's a pun really. So "The Land War Game" became Landwehr. MN What was the American Hobby like in 1968, a fairly small close-knit community? FD Yes. I don't think that the first census was taken until a couple of years later but I would estimate that there weren't more than 400 or 500 people in the hobby. It was still the first generation of old timers like Rod Walker, Conrad von Metzke, and Charles Wells, who ran Lonely Mountain, running things. Most of the zines had place names. The early tradition was that the zine must be named for an imaginary country like Lomokome, Ruritania, or Brobdignag. Brobdignag, I think was the first Canadian zine. John Boardman's Graustark was the first zine of course. I've never subscribed to Graustark and didn't have any contact with Boardman. My early contacts were mostly with Rod Walker. FD He had one zine Erehwon for regular games and Lomokome for variant games. I played Imperialism VIIR, which was Rod's design, in Lomokome. I started my first regular game (1969B) in a zine called The Voice of Vienna run by Jeff Key in Oklahoma City. There were only, perhaps twenty zines in the Hobby at that point. All the publishers traded with everybody else and knew each other, at least postally. FD At first I got both Walker's zines (Lomokome and Erehwon) and The Voice of Vienna, which later became The Voice, which folded. The 1969B game was transferred to Jocztrab which was run by a Polish fellow called Stan Wrobel. Stan lived in a little town called Poland Village, Ohio (right near Youngstown). I think he knew some of the original Youngstown players. There were two or three other zines I was getting. Then, somehow, somebody put me in touch with Don Turnbull, so I started getting Albion from England around the Fall of 1969. MN That would have been just after Don started? FD Yes, I missed the first couple of issues. It might have been from issue four or five that I started getting Albion. Of course, originally the Diplomacy games were carried right in Albion. This was a while before Courier was born. MN How did you come to start Bushwacker? FD I had told Rod Walker that I was thinking of publishing but that I first wanted to feel my way into the hobby. I said to him that I would call it Bushwacker, after my comic strip character of the same name. Rod said "Oh no, you can't do that. Hobby tradition says that every zine must be named after an imaginary country". FD I told him that was all right, Bushwacker's an imaginary country too. You see my comic strip character was also President of the Bushwacker Republic, which was on an asteroid. They had invented space travel on this alternative world in the 1930's and they had gone out and captured a comet and put this little asteroid around the comet. We thought that comets were hot in those days. The comet was the sun and they lived on an asteroid called The Bushwacker Republic. So Bushwacker is a name of a country as well as the name of a person. So Rod didn't say anything more about that. I waited for a while as I wasn't sure if I wanted to publish. FD What happened was that the Mensa club in Baltimore decided to buy a mimeograph machine. We had been doing all out Maryland Mensa newsletter by cutting stencils and taking them to a professional printer for printing. Unfortunately, they were not all that reliable. Sometimes they would be three or four days late, and once month we got the newsletter in the mail one day after our montly meeting. Needless to say only a few people showed up, although they were all Mensans and they knew precisely which day of the week the meeting was supposed to be...((chuckles))...even Mensans need a newsletter delivered to them hard copy under their noses to make sure they know where the meeting is and what day. After that debacle we decided to buy our own mimeograph. So, I was in a committee of two and we went around looking at a couple of used mimeograph machines. Somewhere, someone told me about the Roneo machine and since Roneo had an outlet in Baltimore we went up and were so impressed by this little Roneo machine, which was fully portable, that we decided to buy it. FD I offered to pay for one third of the machine and keep it at my house if I could use it once a month for a Diplomacy magazine. So that ws the agreement. Once a month we ran the Mensa newsletter, which was about six sides, and once a month I would run off Bushwacker which started out only four sides. The first issue was printed in Feb 1972, but was actually dated March because we waited six-eight weeks to see what the response was before I published the next issue. MN How did you become interested in variants? FD As a matter of fact only one month after I purchased my first Diplomacy set! (Incidentally it was impossible to buy a Diplomacy set in Baltimore in those days. I had to go to Crocks and Brenttano's Bookshop in Washington and buy it there.) I took one look at the map and said "There are map errors here!" FD I grew up in a National Geographic family and I've always loved maps. I saw what Dr. Calhamer mentioned yesterday about Belgium coming too far down into France. I also never liked the jump from Norway to St. Petersburg, knowing how rough the territory is up there. So I wrote something for Don Miller (whose zine I was also getting). He published the Gamesman which was a quarterly discussing games per se and he also had Diplophobia which ran games on a three weekly basis. I wrote to Don saying that I had come up with some ideas for improving the Diplomacy board and he offered to print them in the Gamesman. I forget where he actually did print them, but he printed my idea for adding a province between Norway and StP, a province between Venice and Trieste, and a few other ideas I came up with when I had been in the hobby a very short period of time. Then I found out that Don Miller was THE variant man in those days. He issued "Miller Numbers" for variant games. FD I just sat down one afternoon in 1969 and I just worked on Abstraction, that was my first variant. So I was very interested from the very beginning in variants and when I founded Bushwacker I was determined that I would run it as a variant zine. This was not unusual at that time. Rod Walker had Lomokome running variants only, there was John Boyer, in Carlise, PA who had two separate zines; one for regular games and another from variants, some of which he had designed himself. So it was not considered at all unusual for an all-variant zine to exist. The only difference was that I didn't also have a second zine to run regular games! but from the very beginning it was announced that I would run only variants, and I offered Abstraction, my first game, which included the first use of the Army/Fleet rule which I had invented, and Atlantica which was first printed in the UK in Don Turnbull's Albion. MN How did you get the idea for Atlantica? It's quite unusual, having two sets of powers on both sides of an ocean; and you've got the boxes as well. FD Atlantica I had only one set of boxes. I had seen Youngstown, which has boxes...at least Youngstown IV and up. I had wanted to get a game, living in North America, in which North America was involved. Up to that time the only variants you saw were based on the original map of Europe, Tolkien variants, and a few based on England. I knew of only one American map variant; and it was not a very good one. It had all the forty-eight states as supply centers, no neutral provinces and was a very crowded game. FD So what I wanted to do was to bring Europe and America together. I was also interested in an International game. The idea was that hopefully I would get a few Europeans to play in the Atlantica game and I did succeed. The very first Atlantica game had John Piggot playing England, Herb Barents, who was a Dutchman playing Germany (in American slang they call Germans Dutchmen sometimes) and then I had a genuine southerner, a Dr. Keithly, playing the Confederate States of America. I had a Canadian playing Canada and an American playing the USA. So the only countries not played by people having a connection were France and Italy, who were also played by Americans. Piggott had a slight disadvantage, being the only person literally overseas, but I was running monthly rather than 4 weekly deadlines. I started using four weekly deadlines, but after the first two months I realized it was much easier to adjudicate monthly, and this allowed Piggot to participate fully in the game. So I just drew and designed, I can't draw so I traced. I traced a good map of the eastern side of America and Canada and I took the Avalon Hill conference maps...You don't get them in your sets do you? MN No, one just gets the board... FD Well, in the American set you have seven conference maps which are included, and you can order extra copies. I simply traced an Avalon Hill map. I put them together, with an Atlas in front of me, and I did the Ocean spaces pretty much free hand, hoping that the two scales were fairly clsoe. The first Atlantica version did not have these numbered spaces in the middle and had one set of boxes. I think we had the Panama/Pacific box and the Suez/Indian box. Later on, with the second version we added the Siberia/Alaska boxes to make it possible to go around the world by army as well as by sea. By Atlantica III (the current one) we had found that the United States, even though it started with four centers, was the Austria of the game and would get crushed between Canada and the CSA. So in Atlantica III we have another space called the Wild West, which is passable only to the United States, which gives the US five units to begin with, hopefully to keep it in the game, and also a few other minor modifications. MN Going back to Abstraction, where did the idea to split Venice and Trieste come from? Was it historical, or a desire to improve the game? FD Well, I credit myself with having a good spatial vision and being able to look at a map and being able to understand things very quickly. For example, in Chicago, when they opened the so-called Chicago Skyway expressway (which they had spend umpteen million dollars on) I looked at it for 15 seconds and said it's wrong--they'd forgotten to add any extra entrance or exit ramps between the entrance in south side Chicago and the other entrance in Indiana. Sure enough, that proved right. Later the big shots had to go down and add some more exit and entrance ramps. So I do pride myself in being able to look at a map and pick these things out very quickly. FD To me it was glaring that no other place on the board do two starting powers have units/supply centers adjacent to each other, and somehow pure instinct told me that there should be a separating space in there. Unknown to me Larry Peery had come up with the space known as Perrijavo, a take-off on Sarajavo of course, but I didn't know that then as I didn't know Peery until years later. We both saw the need to separate Austria from Italy, so that Austria and Italy can trus each other and work together hand and glove. Austria and Ialy have great difficulty working together otherwise because it is just too tempting to strike over the line and grab a supply center. Whenever I design any variant, or when anybody sends me one, I always say if at all possible within the context of the game don't have two home supply centers touching each other. MN And A/F's? That's quite a good rule. How did you come up with that? FD I believe it is one of those cases when you go to bed thinking about it and when you wake up you have a brilliant flash. I think that's how it was. It suddenly came to me that that was the solution. When I tried it out it seemed to work. There have been slight modifications to the Army/Fleet rules adding few clauses for some very improbably things occurring, which I didn't have any provisions for in the first games, but it was basically 90% of the idea in that first brilliant flash. MN Can you tell us something about Don Miller. Many people seem to have a high respect of his activities in the early days. I believe he was a SF fan as well... FD Yes, Don Miller published three different types of publications. He published a SF zine, a detective group zine (I didn't even know there was a set of detective fans but apparently there are) and of course three different diplomacy type publications. The Gamesman was all games, in fact there was a lot of Chess in there. In the Gamesman he had different color pages for different things: Chess might be green, Diplomacy might be white, etc. FD The thing to remember about Don Miller was that he had no access to computers or xerox. Everything he did was typed on mimeograph stencils on a manual typewriter, cranked out by hand on his own mimeograh machine and collated in his own house. He had a nice big den in Wheaton, which is just north of Washington DC proper. He was a civil servant, a lawyer by training, and was blessed with not having to work too much overtime, so he did have free time, and when I first met him he was in good health. FD They tell me that he very rarely ever travelled anyplace. He had an eye condition which meant he could not drive after sunset. So if he ever went out after sunset his wife Stella went too. (Stella was British by the way. Don was stationed in England during the Korean War, I think, and ment his wife here...one of those GI bride things.) He rarely went to a convention of any sort or games party. He would go to the World Science Fiction Conventions when they were held on the East coast, and maybe he went to some of the early diplomacy games, but from the time I knew him he very rarely went anywhere. I lived 35 miles away, and he only once came over as my guest. I got to his house about four times, but he never came to any diplomacy party we invited him to because he always said he was too busy or that he was having eye trouble. Later on of course, he came down with cancer, and he had several operations. He was one of those never-say-die people. He returned from an operation and published another issue of the Gamesman and you would never know from reading the Gamesman how sick he was. The last issue of the Gamesman was published about 1979, maybe. There had been about a six months gap and he apologized for the long delay. FD When Larry Peery announced we were going to have the Don Miller Award (equivalent to your Les Pimley Award) he called me from California and asked me to invite Don to the Diplomacy convention where the award was being presented (I think it was the first MaryCon down in Fredricksbourg, Virginia). [rest of interview will be published in a future issue] Publisher comments: The actual quotes from accident reports were taken from p. 39 of "How to Talk Your Way Out Of A Traffic Ticket" by David W. Kelley. ****************************************************************************** To join in the fun, send your name, home address, home and work phone numbers, and country preferences to Eric_S_Klien@cup.portal.com. ****************************************************************************** Up