Worst starting country

[Pengwinja]

Thinking about this more, it makes sense that press can't totally overwhelm the strategic reality of the board.

If players are rational they can't just be talked into anything.

Moreover, press is itself competitive. If I'm in a ranked game with players who are just as good as me at press, then the board disadvantage really does matter.

If we made some extremely weak new playable nation on the Classic map (say, a one-unit Switzerland), I wouldn't expect that nation to have an equal chance of getting into the final draw in a genuinely competitive game.

This is true, but doesn’t go against balancing because it deals with two things that don’t determine starting country strength: The players and the hypothetical.

The players determine starting country strength, and in that case, it is balanced/

Yes, if you made a 1 unit Switzerland, it would be weak (unless, of course, you are counting terrain) but, there isn’t a country that is THAT unbalanced. Russia has another unit, but it has been shown to not always help them.

All different arguments for country balancing go something like this:
“This country is weak because this CAN happen.”
It could even look like:
“This country is weak because this is LIKELY to happen because it’s a good idea for the other countries”
When someone says countries, they mean players, because the country, in this case, is a thing, so it doesn’t have any set intelligence. It may be a good idea, but there is no telling that they know what that idea is. Country balancing depends on the players.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

I’m mainly asking because almost all the arguments for the worst country in diplomacy are opinionated, and i prefer to stand by the facts.

Here are the data from WebDip's sister site, VDip: https://www.vdiplomacy.com/stats.php?variantID=106&variantID=1

Here's an article that has play-by-email WebDip data:
https://brotherbored.com/guest-post-is-the-diplomacy-map-unbalanced/

Here's an article based on game data from 5,000 games:
https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?cid=3199CD9857175D9F&resid=3199CD9857175D9F%21176

Here's yet more data based on an old repository of game outcomes that no longer seems to be available:
https://diplom.org/Zine/F2007R/Burton/statistician3.htm

There are other statistical treatments of Diplomacy games, some of which may come to different conclusions. But the ones I've linked here all agree that Austria suffers a persisting disadvantage, for example.

[Pengwinja]

But that is not ALWAYS the case. There is never a clear disadvantage until the first moves are made. It could always go either way.

[Diplomacy&Warfare]

There are other statistical treatments of Diplomacy games, some of which may come to different conclusions. But the ones I've linked here all agree that Austria suffers a persisting disadvantage, for example.

I agree on that one. Austria is very weak in both gunboat and press. Their only hopes are Russia and Italy both working with them to fight Turkey, or Germany going Anchluss.

In general, though, most statistics are inaccurate between the shown statistics being shown for solos (Turkey, in my experience, draws 2 or 3 way more than France, but France gets more solos), low data samples(Someone quoted statistics where Austria moving to Bohemia, a very anti-Germany and also very bad strategy, has higher win chance than literally anything else, but I'm too lazy to dig the quote out of the 4-page thread), and inaccurate data sampling (ie, only from one site, only from gunboat or press but does not indicate such, etc), those statistics are very unreliable. The best judge of the most powerful country is the players, while players, deciding that a particular country has the potential to easily grow too powerful and solo, may not align with that country, reducing that country's chance of winning. Diplomacy games and the power of perception shape the perception of power and the game Diplomacy. Yay, mostly symmetric sentence.

[CaptainFritz28]

I don't really pay much attention to statistics, but I think that in order of my personal subjective enjoyability, this is my ranking:

1. Germany
2. France
3. Russia
4. England
5. Turkey
6. Austria
7. Italy

That said, I enjoy them all.

[DougJoe]

Nice nickname, I am now "Dip & War".
Turkey is hard to kill, but they start the game stuck in a corner and must either kill Austria or Russia to get out of said corner. This requires allies because there are literally not enough provinces to attack from because you are cramped in a corner, while allies are functionally nonexistent in gunboat. The crusher is somewhat strong, but if Italy Lepantos you are dead, while if Russia maintains basic precautions such as not letting you into the Black Sea (which you can't negotiate yourself into because it's gunboat and having a unit in Ukr, you will gain nothing and have already made an enemy of Russia.
Finally, even when Turkey kills Russia and Austria, getting units out far enough to fight Germany and Italy takes multiple years due to Turkey being in a corner. Generally, the best Turkey can do in most games is draw with Italy and a western power, or two western powers. But, wait, draws can't be requested because THERE'S NO CHAT IN GUNBOAT.

I just finished this game (https://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=869772) as Turkey that ended in a E/G/I/T draw (Italy with two western powers). Italy did a really good job of surrendering his homeland to get a place on the stalemate line (rather than trying to defend his home centers) and I probably made a mistake at one point in going for Russia instead of trying to help Russia against Germany so I could at least try to get Munich. I had a couple of years where I could make no progress but A/I were fighting and then Italy supported me into Greece and that changed the board calculus quite a bit.