Top 100* GR Round Robin Series Roundup

[Carl Tuckerson]

Friends,

Back in June, I organized two round robin gunboat sets with experienced players well-regarded in the Ghost Ratings, with a lot of help from (and much thanks to) Claesar and Magnetic24.

As announced in this thread, the series recently finished.

Claesar was kind enough to compile results in a spreadsheet here. Thank you Claesar!

Some quick navigating info: We "scored" the games by assigning each game 420 points, and then splitting the points among all players in the game who won or drew. For instance, a solo was worth the full 420 (and all survivors get 0), a 3-way draw is worth 140, etc. Because there are seven countries playing seven games, the expected value of a given country over the seven-game set, assuming all countries are equally good, is 420 points, and 840 for the full 14 games played.

First, I want to thank everyone who participated for a fun set with some pretty good play all around. Special shoutouts to Matticus13, mdrltc, and 90kicvesb for finishing first or tied for first in their respective groups--mdrltc and 90kicvesb had the only solos of the series, and Matticus had the most centers of any player in the series with 69 (nice) across seven games.

Second, I want to discuss some of the broader narratives about gunboat Diplomacy strategy that one might take from this series. We need to dispense with some important caveats first: fourteen games is far from a statistically significant sample size, and patterns that emerge among seven specific players playing against each other repeatedly (albeit anonymously) won't necessarily be reflected in the broader metagame.

That said... personally, I was very impressed and surprised with how strong Germany was in this series. Germany had both solos, and more than doubled the expected value of an average country, with a total of 1729 points over 14 games (EV = 840). One wonders how many German players were consulting The Biggest Gunboat Journal of All Time during the series. Germany's metagame position has looked very good to me for some time so I'm not too surprised Germany did well here--it's the sheer dominance that surprised me.
I was similarly surprised and unimpressed with Italy's showing. I apparently had the best Italy, and it was a very mopey game where I successfully took Marseilles and Iberia from France, Smyrna from Turkey, and waited for the 3-way draw. I've recently come to appreciate Italy as one of the stronger gunboat powers, but I guess it still has a tendency to stall out and put up middling results.

[Aurelin]

with a lot of help from (and much thanks to) Claesar and Magnetic24.

Which mod spent almost two hours on flight II making sure that 7 players had each country once in 7 games? That happened to have been one of the first things they did as a mod? Asking for a friend :)

[Carl Tuckerson]

with a lot of help from (and much thanks to) Claesar and Magnetic24.

Which mod spent almost two hours on flight II making sure that 7 players had each country once in 7 games? That happened to have been one of the first things they did as a mod? Asking for a friend :)

Feel free to use those mod powers to edit yourself in since I cannot

Thank you for sorting Flight II Aurelin!

[et]

Thank you for organizing this series, Carl.
And good job, Aurelin.
I enjoyed games very much.

In my opinion, Italy and Russia have better help each other in the middle game more .
'Winter green' is more popular in full press game than in gunboat.

[FlaviusAetius]

Italy Austria and Germany have a very good potential for a central alliance that really is constantly unexpected and ill prepared for by the other players, easy borders to maintain and on top of that, easy to mask until it is far too late.

Austria doing well means Germany does well and Germany doing well means Italy does well, its quite easy to see how this gains momentum real quickly.

On top of that its easy to make other alliances that can be dropped later, andddd
which can be counteracted by the other powers.
And any betrayal risks your own position of getting crushed, meaning its pretty much full proof. You also get several turns to prevent betrayals, and the other two powers both have incentives to keep the betrayal from happening, so ultra alliance oo