France is a much more natural naval than land power, I'd tend to agree with that. Its largest rival, England, is also a naval power, so it MUST have boats to defeat England. It is virtually impossible for France to conquer Germany without getting into North Sea, so there too it must have boats. It i...

Austria (Germany) are advantaged vs France (Italy). Austria and Germany have some "rushes" strategies that afford them to win in making a "touchdown" at 18 centers whereas they would clearly lose this advantage a few turns later. An easy solution could be to set the victory conditions at 20. More i...

peterwiggin wrote: ↑

Mon May 06, 2019 9:39 pm

If you won points in this tournament, you should have just gotten them.

yep, received. Thanks! :D

Sounds like Med Ax is as good for Turkey as Western Triple is for England then

Claesar wrote: ↑

Wed May 01, 2019 4:15 pm

mhsmith0 wrote: ↑

Wed May 01, 2019 3:47 pm

xorxes, you forgot my 665 points and 4th place finish

You scored those in only 3 games instead of 5. Relatively, you scored 1108.3 points and 1st place.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOO
mhsmith0, the *REAL* gunboat tournament champion

But seriously, congrats to all, it was a hell of a tournament :D

xorxes, you forgot my 665 points and 4th place finish

In gunboat, if England goes all out against France and just sort of forgets about Norway for a while, then it's doable to have Russia stop at Norway and take it with an army and both players focus on other issues instead of each other. Even in an early game E/R alliance, there's still a long term is...

They're more what you call guidelines than actual rules

I think you basically need to pick F or G and go hard after them once you push into an open Belgium slot. Potentially you abandon Scandinavia wholesale which *SHOULD* keep Russia off your back since almost always he has bigger problems down south anyway. Then again in my "finals" game as England I d...

I am struck by Russia's communication problems. Now we know that certain moves can be interpreted by other players to suggesting alliances. The question then becomes what moves could be used to suggest an alliance with Italy or other powers? Opening to STP suggests an alliance with Germany (and som...

I think it'd probably be helpful to Russia if there was a strong gunboat meta of England always opening to the channel, but my sense is it's pretty hit or miss there, and Russia suffers from England going hard after Scandinavia because that's yet another enemy that Russia has to deal with when it ha...

In gunboat, Russia has a very simple choice in spring 1901 (3 of its 4 moves are super obvious and constrained) 1) The Octopus: Move MOS to STP and contest Norway 2) Southern Defense: Move MOS to UKR and contest Rumania Option #1 makes Russia stronger in the north (and *SHOULD* help encourage German...

In terms of Germany and Sweden, I'm not actually sure how prominent the site meta is in terms of allowing Russia in (in my GBT game as Russia, I was pretty screwed early in a fairly obvious way, AND Germany got attacked by Austria, AND Germany STILL didn't let me into Sweden, which actually really h...

Off the cuff, I'd say that a really massive sticking point between Russia and Austria is Galicia. In press games, the two of them can negotiate a DMZ there, and if it holds, then Russia can easily send an army north and contest Scandinavia reasonably effectively without worrying overmuch about getti...

The problem, I think, is that every single power is substantially impacted by the metagame, maybe even more so in gunboat compared to press because of how it's impossible to communicate and therefore unspoken "norms" can dominate so much. Austria is a poor gunboat power in almost any world just beca...

I'd say Turkey is debatably the #1 power in gunboat where the meta doesn't encourage A/I alliance because it's ridiculously hard to kill Turkey once he gets 5 centers and ION access... but where A/I ally, it's pretty brutal on Turkey and he's mainly waiting to see if a western power can muscle in on...

I would say that both Italy and Austria are much stronger than Turkey and Russia in gunboat. There is an argument for Turkey ahead of Austria, but Russia is definitely the worst country, and Italy is among the best, with Austria not far behind. Italy in general is astonishingly undervalued by Diplo...

I double dog dare you

What is WFO? Wait-for-orders means the phase will not process if one (or more) players haven't entered orders yet. It just automatically pauses the game instead. While it sounds lovely to prevent NMRs, we've had a lot of problems in the past with people holding games hostage by not entering orders....