The "onore delle armi" is an ancient Roman practice, in which the defeated army (or at least his higher officers) are left with their weapons and flag. It's a form of tribute to the value of the defeated power. I am not sure about the English translation, it might be "honours of war", but I am far from sure.
So, thinking to that in a "Diplomacy perspective" I came up with the idea of this variant, and I was wondering if anybody would like to discuss it further and try it out with me.
Basically the idea is that it is forbidden to eliminate any player on the board, more specifically, that any player must remain with at least one unit (not territory) for all the duration of the game.
I though that this could be achieved in various way. Here the proposals coming to my mind:
1) All players declare a "sanctuary" at the beginning of the game, i.e. a homeland SC that nobody will ever attack for the duration of the game. While the functioning of this is pretty straightforward, I think it also the less practical option, as declaring a "no entry zone" areas like Con or Muc or Ven can really make the game stall.
2) The last occupied centre of a power automatically becomes his/her "sanctuary". This option seems more balanced, but it requires a mechanism to prevent the last two centres of a players to be taken in the same turn.
3) Each player in the position of losing all his centres at once declares which of the centres is a "sanctuary" and can't be taken out (this solution is prone to metagaming, though)
The game should be a WTA, and the interesting bit of the variant should be that the complexity of the diplomatic relationships never falls under a certain levels (6 people to interact with for the rest of the game), but also that the second best option to win is a 7-way-draw, which should quite impact the way people set goals and take risks.
So... is there anybody interested in refining this idea and trying it out? Regardless to the availability to try it out, if you have ideas / criticism that you would like to share, you are most welcome to share them here. I would very much welcome suggestions on how to avoid that 1-unit-left players can stalemate the game by placing their last unit in a way that is impossible for the other players to advance past a given point.