Good luck everyone.

Good luck everyone. Thanks to all who organised this!

Good luck to the students.

I have messaged my TA and am eager to begin. Thanks to 2ndWhiteLine(4967) for helping to set this up, and good luck to my fellow students.

ready to begin too

Reporting for duty!

Here!

Toodles.

Game is all set and players should be assigned to the correct countries. Once everyone has checked in and made contact with their TAs we'll be ready to go.

have fun y'all!

My student has contacted me.

Ready to go!

I'll unpause tomorrow and we can get going so players don't get shortchanged on discussion time.

My apoligze wrong thread lol. Im ready

Mine has contacted me.

Kallen and me are talking.

TC and I are having fun.

Good luck everyone, hope everyone learns something

TMOW missed our discussion yesterday about what to call A_Tin_Can. TC is already claimed by the late Tettleton's Chew. We settled on Can.

And we're off!

Good luck everyone. Professors, if you'd like to post an opening statement or pregame writeup or something to that extent, the game is afoot.

I did miss it, but I did consciously choose this abbrev. I think it's silly we reserve TC for a notorious cheater while disallowing it for somebody who gave us space between ready and save!

TC is dead! Long live TC!

Just a quick statement, though given the members we have in this game, I'd say that everyone knows this already:

When things go south, which they inevitably do at some point for every nation (no victory is ever perfectly smooth), don't quit. That's the point where you have to look and think a little bit harder, and get more creative, so as to survive, or, if you're already on top, to knock the walls down. Even a one-center power can have a significant effect on the game, so find a place to camp out and wait for your opportunity to make yourself valuable.

Or use the opportunity to kamikaze i to the asshole who made you lose.

I mean, hang in there champ!

*into

Yes, don't quit, even when things look bleak. Even 1 or 2 center powers can be an integral part of a stalemate line or the chaotic force that prevents creation of said line. Also you owe it to your fellow competitors to not ruin the game for everyone else just because things went poorly for you. Helping the soloist to spite those cutting you out of the draw is fine, refusing to submit forced disbands and drawing out retreat phases indefinitely for no reason is lame.

Bump

bo_sox and Yale are completely right. We've all had games where we've gotten into a draw by virtue of occupying a crucial center on the stalemate line.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. You can't make it to the final turn without doing *something* in the first turn. No power has ever won by holding and refusing to make anybody mad in gunboat. Actually, I don't know that for sure. It may be a better strategy than what some of your TAs are advising, but lets save that for the next edition of Gunboat for Idiots.

First turn isn't going to make or break you, but it will set the stage for events to come further down the line. Being that this is gunboat, your opening moves say much more than your opening moves in full press. It is much harder to make a successful feint or use a tricky, coordinated opening. Therefore, the board (and especially your neighbors) are going to draw a lot of conclusions from your opening moves. Some players will advocate a neutral opening, while some will advocate for grabbing the offensive right away, while others will go out of their way to make the worst opening possible. Its very much like a game a rock/paper/scissors. Will you take a risk and make a bold opening? Will you go neutral and make friends after seeing what everyone else does? Will you be proactive or reactive? All big decisions that must be made.

The great part is that no one strategy is going to work every time. Yes, England will probably move Lon-NTH 7/10 times, so if you're France you can always play the odds, but what if England is thinking the opposite? If you're Turkey, you probably want to bounce in the Black, but what if you don't? What if you move your fleet out to counter a possible Lepanto? Can you trust Russia to read your opening correctly? If you're Russia, do you squid or octopus? If you're Italy, do you play it safe and hold Venice, or do you take the chance that Turkey attacks Russia and go after Austria in 1901?

Gunboat is all about reading the board and communicating through moves and intent. But what do you do when there are no moves to read?

I look forward to seeing everyone's openings. S1901 is always my favorite phase of any gunboat.

I'd even argue that the first turn *could* make or break you. I'm not suggesting any moves, but there are a few nations on the board that are significantly more powerful than others, especially early on in the game. If everything goes normally, England will have a build, France will have two or three, Germany will have two or three, Italy will have one, Austria two, Turkey one, and Russia one or two. However, fun games don't go normally. England could be held without a build - hell, I've seen a game where England disbands in 1901. Russia could be held without a build, as could Austria. Italy could shoot for two, or even three. Russia could even end up with four declared enemies going into 1902, or he could end up with one, or even none, and have the freedom to choose his first target.

The point I'm making is that your opening moves declare how you're planning to play the early portion of the game, and if other players happen to have it out against you, they could break you. Sometimes that's beyond your control. What's in your control is whether you play neutrally, declaring yourself neither an enemy nor a friend. You could play aggressively, declaring an enemy and hoping that your other neighbor(s) take that as a sign that you're a friend. Or, you could play passively, declaring friendship to as many players as possible and seeing who reciprocates. That's what's in your control, and those are the options that would be running through my mind if I were setting my opening moves in gunboat.

If anybody ever feels the desire to quit, watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgmVOuLgFB0