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Although I disagree with some of his conclusions, I think swordsman3003's Tier List for Gunboat Diplomacy is a great discussion of the powers' strengths and weaknesses, and that he makes some excellent prescriptions for most of the powers in the game. For example, I think his advice to Austrian players to gamble on total trust in Italy from the beginning is exactly right, and that strategy has been the cornerstone of a record of success for me playing the "C-tier" power.
His prescriptions on Russia are noticeably absent. One might think there are no prescriptions, and the situation cannot be salvaged. Maybe that's true, but why not take a stab at it?
swordsman does a superb job of breaking down Russia's weaknesses:
I think this is a generally accurate description of the situation. What can be done about it?The Gunboat metagame favors many early attacks on Russia:
England will contest Scandinavia and can easily seize control of St. Petersburg if England succeeds. Unless France or Germany attack England, England will prevail against Russia in the North. If Russia is shut out of the North by England, Russia might be able to linger around for a draw... but probably will be unable to win.
Germany will often, or even typically, block Russia from entering Sweden in 1901. Without press, Russia lacks the capability of negotiating a way into Sweden in 1901. (In high level matches, German players are more likely to allow Russia into Sweden so that England cannot immediately attack Germany.)
Germany typically gets walled off by France at Burgundy and by England at North Sea. Meanwhile, Germany can easily and suddenly attack Warsaw over land, which is a tempting target because Moscow usually soon follows. Russia's starting fleets are useless in defending the landlocked Warsaw and Moscow.
Because Austria and Russia are mutually weak on the defense, this creates a prisoner's dilemma where each power has a huge incentive to go to war with the other. If one power fails to attack while the other initiates war, the power that did not fight will end up quickly destroyed (such is the nature of a prisoner's dilemma). This problem exists immediately (both Austria and Russia should open by moving their armies to Galicia to prevent the other from controlling it) and continues every turn thereafter (whichever power currently controls Galicia has the upper hand in the war, so both must constantly contest Galicia). Because Austria and Russia cannot negotiate a truce with written messages (which can lead to the powerful Austria/Russia alliance in Press Diplomacy), the metagame typically dooms Austria and Russia to war against each other until one of them is destroyed or another power threatens to solo win.
My only serious point of disagreement with this assessment is the characterization of Russia's and Austria's situation as a "prisoner's dilemma," where the profitable move in one iteration is always attacking over cooperating. I think this significantly undersells the options available to Austria when Austria and Russia are not at war.
The most important one is that Italy becomes a viable target for Austrian attack. Aside from the risk of being annihilated in the first few turns of the game, Austria's big weakness that sharply inhibits its ceiling is its great difficulty in contesting the waters of the Mediterranean. Both Italy and Turkey need Austria's centers to win, and if Austria survives the early game, it is typically at the expense of Turkey, creating a strong position for Italy in the middle turns, which Austria may find very difficult to overcome. The one window where Turkey and Italy are both vulnerable is in the early turns, but because the metagame has stalled in a position where Austria and Russia constantly fight, and Turkey and Italy constantly fight, it's very rare for Austria to find a middle game where one of Turkey or Italy hasn't entrenched itself too deeply for Austria to root out. And because Austria's units are always pointed east, Italy is the one which usually gets too entrenched to be rooted out.
The other option, which goes hand-in-hand with the observations above, is that Turkey becomes a viable target for Russian attack. Russia doesn't have very many plausible unilateral attacks, but one of the attacks which is plausible but underutilized is the sequence where Russia takes Romania with a fleet, leaving Sevastopol open for a second fleet build. Most Turkish players will be forced to choose between covering against a threatened Lepanto attack (in most games) or the possibility that Russia will build a second fleet and take control of the Black Sea. Once Russia has the Black Sea, if Austria is pressuring from Bulgaria and Aegean Sea, the Turkish position quickly becomes untenable. This sequence is by far the most reliable sequence for killing Turkey, but it never gets used because Austria and Russia "always" fight, so Russia can't spare a second fleet.
If cooperation between Austria and Russia is plausible, Russia gets access to another option whose strength has rapidly increased as a result of other metagame shifts: the "northern" opening, sending Moscow to St. Petersburg. This opening checks the recent shift of English players opening to the English Channel by threatening them with a zero-build 1901. Since Germany is much more likely to bounce Russia if England opens to the Channel, this also permits Russia to earn some goodwill with England by not moving to Norway, and instead going to Finland in anticipation of a bounce in Sweden. Strategically, the second unit in Scandinavia early makes Russia a real player in that theater, and gives Russia a better chance of fighting back against the tendency of that theater to fall by default to the strongest Atlantic power.
For these reasons I'm thinking that Russia and Austria should look to cooperate more often in the early game, and I might even advocate that Russian players start opening Moscow to St. Petersburg instead of Ukraine. You're risking Romania this way, but the Austrian alliance is very underexplored and seems like a natural fix to both countries' woes.