Oooh, I've only voted two out of 3, can I put the other one against FA?

Is F vs A a two player game? If so I agree that it shouldn't be in the running, that does seem like a bit of an un-Diplomacy-like map

I'd vote for 1900, Crowded and 1897 if I could - I'm too lazy to learn more maps (some would say i'm too lazy to learn this one..)

but france austria is such an interesting time =(

Isn't it true that Webdip can't legally use the railroad in colonial? If so that should probably be mentioned. I feel that that completely unbalances the whole map.

France V Austria is no worse than gunboat, is it? I see tons of that here, and that doesnt require "diplomacy" does it? maybe I don't understand the nuances of 7 player gunboat.

If we're going to split hairs, Deacon, the whole site is technically illegal. I doubt Avalon Hill is going to have a cow because of the railroad compared to everything else

Deacon: The railroad will be added before colonial is added here. It is merely that it hasn't been finished off yet, and the versions of Colonial around don't have it no. However, it won't be added here before railroad is sorted out.

Oh and as it's name suggests Kestas, FA is between France and Austria, and on the standard diplomacy map.

Why a limit on the number of variants?

I believe KEstas doesn't want the site to get saturated with them.
There are quite a lot available on olidip

Good question, MG.

3 is good.

@ stratagos - Avalon Hill is dead, any games that come out now labeled with Avalon Hill logos or names are made by other companies but they've gotten the right to use the famous Avalon Hill name.

I say Ancient Med, Fleet Rome and South America (5-player not 4-Player)

It's the web, what is wrong with saturating the site with 100 variants like the old Unix email servers?

Technically, AH is not dead. AH is owned by WoTC who is in turned owned by Hasbro. They also "lease" the rights to certain titles to smaller companies under mysterious circumstances.

@LJTD - yes, AH is dead, but Hasbro isn't exactly a company afraid to pull out the lawyers

@Paulksalomon27 - you do miss the subtleties of gunboat. The diplomacy is in the moves and using them to indicate your intent to a potential ally. Diplomacy doesn't have to be written or spoken, it can be convoyed through actions.

Grrrr @Paulsalomon27 - sorry for the typo'd 'k'.

If only we could vote against maps... I would vote against Colonial. Too crowded, too unbalanced... and if I want to play it I can already do so elsewhere. I would rather see something new... I suspect that some of these, such as Colonial, are getting votes simply due to name recognition. I had to go searching more most of these to figure out what they were... I imagine many voters would not bother doing that.

Nah, I played Colonial, had a blast. I was about to win with Japan.

Fall of the American Empire was my favorite. Played it many times, and even with the "weaker" nations I did well. And even their weaker nations aren't as weak as Clumbia in South-America or, hell, Italy in standard, imho.

will any of the mentioned variants not on the list get a look in? The likes of 1900 map, modern warfare, crowded etc?
I'd like a choice of all variants..

What is meant by the OP's reference to "forum.webdiplomacy.net" ?

This is webdiplomacy.net, and it has a forum already.

In any case I vote for:

Austria/France
Fleet Rome

and standard.

I'm surprised that variants aren't just 'plugin modules' to add to the main source. If not, I'd suggest thinking about reworking the architecture to allow for it...

Jamie, forum.webdiplomacy.net is the developer forum. You can find it mentioned in the help under the developer section. Interesting stuff in there.

fortknox, I believe that is indeed how Kestas designed it. But he wants the default setup to have a limitted set of variants turned on and wants webdiplomacy.net to be using the default settings.

In the forum description:

"webdiplomacy.net runs the standard webdip package from sourceforge, and once you include a variant it's hard to remove it or change it"

That means the plugin modifies the base code. Module/plugin means the 'base' code doesn't do anything. The 'pure' game, itself, would be a separate module that plugs in to the game. So adding in alternatives means just a new modules...

This is probably more of an issue with how the database is currently set up (tightly coupled with the pure version of the game) and kestas doesn't want to create a new and/or migrate the data to a new table.

@fortknox; variants don't modify the base code, that was what many significant changes over the last 3-4 months have been about, however adding a variant, having games which run that variant, then deleting the variant, is obviously going to cause problems as there are games in the database which require variant code which isn't there.

If I include a variant by default and people run it on various servers, then I decide to remove it, that would mean every developer either needs to reinclude the removed variant or remove the games which used the variant. Not the end of the world, but a big hassle that can be avoided by only including decent variants we intend to keep indefinitely (which is a common sense thing to do anyway)

Deciding to change one is different, because if only the code changes it would be fairly seamless, and there is a mechanism for wiping a variant's cache and map data and reinstalling, however if a change did something especially odd like remove an existing territory that would require lots of database data to be altered in a tricky way.

It's just common sense to only include variants that are complete&tested, and aren't going to get removed at a later date

Correction: You wouldn't actually need to delete the games, it would just find the variant code missing and give an error.

Also regarding the pure game being a separate module etc, that is how it currently works. :-)
Since you seem like a code guy you can consider the way variants work to be a "layer" which all game objects are requested from, so that any game classes to be modified by a variant are extended and when an object for this or that class is requested from the variant layer it can be intercepted and the extended object is returned instead of the standard one.
The only class which is abstract and so must be extended by all variants is the map drawing class.

If you're feeling technical: Any variant class can also extend an existing variant class, inheriting all its properties. There are a few variants like Autumn 1900 which are included as examples but not enabled by default which work by extending the "Classic variant" (the "variant" which defines the normal map) and then just extend the game-processing class to start in a Builds phase, other than that it follows the classic variant behavior. Other example variants extend a variant which extends the classic variant, and things like dependency checks/includes, map data caching for efficiency, CSS, and map installation are handled by the abstract variant parent class which all "variants" extend.

So it's all fairly well thought out (or at least it seems like it is right now ;-) )

Sounds like a sensible model to me. (To those wondering, yes I have read through it).

Only other thing I'm thinking is perhaps have another folder which contains a little screenshot from each variant. These would not be removed when the variant is uninstalled, then when a site tries to load a variant it doesn't load it instead loads a ghostVariant which, rather than being a game in itself, instead outputs this screenshot and the information on the game in question (I assume only through history/profile would you find an old game from a removed Variant).