Russia is the wild card, not Italy.

As the France in the game ATC is talking about... Yeah, Italy missing was pretty imbalanced. All I had to do was not fight with England and I slowly just ate Italy and buts of Germany.

I don't really think you can viably leave any power on the board in CD without unbalancing the game significantly.

Even a "basic self supporting orders AI" would be still pretty imbalanced, that's not practically an awful lot better play than all holds.

Russia in CD would mean a big free ride for England, Turkey, and maybe even Germany and Austria. Not great, really.

Better to go looking for a more balanced six player board. And then you abandon all the benefits of the standard board...

(And bear in mind that was with *very* conservative play as France - at no point did I actually have to really play hard guessing games or make risky moves, which in most games is unavoidable for all powers.)

One option is to just start France out with 8 centers.

Have each of the 6 players enter orders for Italy and randomly choose one to be executed. If Italy wins the game, the player who last submitted orders for them wins. ;)

ha Austria would be in tears

If russia was gone, turkey would be basically immortal.

So leave Turkey out then. That might be interesting.

Austria would be basically immortal then...

The suggestion of Italy comes from the official rules I believe. It would be interesting to see what it would be like to make Turkey, East Med & Black Sea inpassible.

Yup, the suggestion of Italy comes from the official rules. And it's a terrible suggestion. :-)

Leaving Turkey out (whether you delete it from the board or not) takes a *lot* of pressure off Russia, and to a lesser extent Austria and Italy.

I'm not sure that leaving Turkey out is a good idea (as tvrocks said, Austria would become a lot more dangerous - an Austria who can legitimately run across to kill Germany in 1901? No thanks).

If you were going to try it, this:

http://www.diplom.org/Online/maps/stdmap.gif

Suggests that removing Sev/Bla/Con/Aeg might be interesting. I think you'd need to remove supply centres from Bul and possibly Serbia, though.

^ Still problematic - if you stare at that chart, the EFG locations have a lot more geographic difficulties (more complicated sea connectivity), whereas the ITAR locations have simpler connectivity, but that's made up for by having 4 countries squashed into that geography.

Pulling any country out, even if you rebalance the SCs and simply delete geography, doesn't actually rebalance the geography.


As for Chromatic, now I've taken a look at it, I found this handy article which I agree with:

https://isabout.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/chromatic-diplomacy/

TL:DR; No dynamic challenges = boring game for everyone.

^ Exactly. There's an interview somewhere with Edi Birsan where he says that he reckon's Alan Calhamer (the inventor of Diplomacy)'s real genius is in the map - the borders, the connectivity, the placement of the centres. Edi makes the claim that you can't make a single change the map to improve the play, and it needs 7 players for this map to work.

I believe that the existing map is very well balanced, and was constructed based on a deep understanding of how to balance the board (and in particular relevance to my suggestion above, an understanding of the balance that I don't personally have - so I'm not confident that my suggestion above would even BE balanced).

That said, I'm certainly interested in good options for 5/6 players, as emergencies for FTF games.

http://diplomacycast.com/page.cfm?link=podcast&aid=26

^ This is the interview with Edi Birsan that I mentioned.

I very much think that there is a big difference in game design terms between "balanced" and "symmetric".

Classic Dip *is* balanced with no symmetry anywhere to be found. That's one of the things that makes it exciting and unpredictable.

Symmetry is "trivially" balanced (especially for simultaneous games), but that can make for a damn boring game, because everyone has the same set of options, and often there is a defineable best choice... and if that's the same for everyone, then, well, let's just play tic-tac-toe, it's about as fun. ;-)

Ancient Med for 5 players is actually not bad - I think it's a popular variant here for a reason. Not as good as Classic, IMO, but then, what is?

I haven't run across any good six player variants yet though.

Anyone else think that if turkey's home and natural scs became normal non-scs, that it would still have a lot of potential as a map?

Which SCs are Turkey's "natural" ones?</trolling>

(And nope. The straight up lack of Turkish pressure on Russia, Austria, and Italy unbalances the game.)