but then Germany would have to work against France land advances AND a Russian flank, would he not?

The Russians in Sweden will ultimately move on Denmark, anything to slow or halt that is important.

Statistically, bouncing or not bouncing in swe does little for Germany's long-term success, but bouncing in swe drastically increases England's chances of long-term success. I usually offer swe as a carrot to Russia, but unless there's an obvious S01 Juggernaut or Russia is in sil/pru, I let him have it.

Can you provide those statistics? I would love to see them.

makes sense....

@mongoose998, yes Germany would have to fend off a French land advance, but not a Russian flank. Russia would be tied up with England in the north and either Austria or Turkey in the south, so can't come after Germany right away. Either France or northern Russia should be taken care of before Russia could get to that point.

That's my experience anyway.

Some articles:
http://www.diplom.org/Zine/F2000M/Goff/swedensituation.html
This one is most definitely against the bounce.
I can't find the one with my statistic at the moment . . .

The bounce is far too grey an area to make any sort of overarching judgment, good or bad. I should like to note that Austria will probably need to capture the German centers to win, whereas Russia has some degree of flexibility concerning how it would go about a victory, so the notion that Austria doing well = Germany doing well isn't necessarily backed by a geographical scan of the board. And I would certainly not try to make any kind of specific rule: after all, how on Earth can you, in a game built entirely around its freeform alliance nature?

^^ agreed.

That said, it should be noted that whilst Russia may well be angry with a 1901 bounce, he's often unable to do anything about it

@President Eden: It's quite clear that Germany and Austria's fate is intertwined, and especially if one falls early the other is usually screwed. [http://www.diplomacy-archive.com/resources/god/five.htm] Check out the section on Germany's Anschluss opening, about 2/5 down the page: "...in games where Austria fails, Germany has the worst record of any country; where Austria lasts until 1904 or later, Germany has the best record."

You're right that it's hard to make sweeping statements in this game, but it seems to me Germany should bounce Russia in 1901 unless it is clear that Turkey and Austria are allied against him. It should be easy to patch things up if he lets him in in 1902, or take it with English support if the situation presents itself. Without the bounce there is no flexibility and certainly no leverage.

Ah, Sharp. Love his work. I read that a while ago and based a lot of my strategies in my early days on the site on his style of play. I'm very familiar with his Anschluss concept.

I'll counter by citing Paul Windsor's "Geography is Destiny" article [http://devel.diplom.org/DipPouch/Zine/F1999R/Windsor/dipmap.html]. In it, Windsor analyzes the layout of the map itself, and observes that Austria's most efficient victory requires the capture of all of Germany (see the list in Table 1), whereas Russia is perfectly capable of getting an equally-efficient victory without a single German center (see Table 4, where it's noted that Russia has six 'extra' centers for the most efficient win; that is, 24 centers lie within 3 spaces of Russia's starting SCs, which means to get 18 Russia can omit any six of those 24 it wants, including all three German centers).

There's another piece of information that I think bears noticing. Sharp's data comes from play-by-mail statistics from the 60s and 70s. When his book came out, a lot of people took notice and imitated some of his better suggestions, the Anschluss and tendency toward Sweden bounce among them. Windsor's article is from late 1999, and in Table 3 we see a list of win/overall/survival rankings. In Sharp's era, Germany was consistently top-2 with Russia in all three areas; since the adoption of his strategies, Germany's dropped to SIXTH in all three categories, while Russia has held steady at 2nd in wins and overall place while dropping to fifth in survival. Austria has gone up to 4th in survival, 3rd in wins and 5th in overall place, suggesting that the bounce only helps Austria and hurts Germany as well as Russia.

Looking beyond the stats, though, there's one other thing. Bouncing doesn't grant leverage or flexibility. In fact, automatically bouncing grants LESS flexibility and does nothing for leverage. It's the THREAT of bouncing - the move to Denmark - that creates the leverage on Russia. If you're automatically going to bounce Russia, then suddenly it is Russia who is free to do what he wants: he has no reason to listen to you and can act on his desires, without any care for yours.