Win, Draw, or Lose. Survivors are just the morons who didn't recognize the solo threat in time to stop it.

You have quite a rigid view of survives, Draug. A lot of survives are fine examples of holding your section of the line whilst a fool of an ally miss-orders his way to the other guy's solo. You also have the survives where you took a beating at the start but managed to find a corner to hide in and there wasn't much you could do.

There is plenty of honour to be found in a lot of survives.

@Octavious

Agree totally, further more I bet there were games where the survivor could have won by slowly pressing back, taking SCs.

In history, we have known to have battles where a much smaller army defeated a much larger army.

@mapu: Fucking hilarious! Your cosistency of mannerisms is to be envied. Brilliant!

@roadrunner: I also finished a game at vdip and came in second. It was an England v Turkey variant. I'm very proud of that second place finish!

Ok, you can be proud of your game, as I am proud of my game. In my game there were 7 players, not two.

If you look at the human history over the last 6,000 years, China might not be number one, and heck there was time China was totally taken over. But China was always there, and now they are poising to be number one again.

Now that something to be proud of, I would not mind to be a permanent second place. I don't want to be so up then went down so hard. It's very stressful and depressing.

I've often felt a survive to be more enviable than a draw. To me, a draw is a game that doesn't have enough of a body count.

Personally, I prefer to have one of my candidates sit on the throne of victory while I hold back two paces, quietly pulling the string. I love second place.

^ Someone's pretty good at rationalizing failure.

Second place is first loser. It means you couldn't pull together to.force the stalemate. I can see it in gunboat but with press it will never happen to me.

@ Al Swearengen

I agree, survive is better than a draw. Survive means you might have won if you are allowed to fight on and to win a huge come-back victory. Draw clearly states your intention not to fight on.

That's just stupid. A survive means you failed and let someone win, a draw means that, while you didn't win yourself, at least you stopped everyone else from winning in your place.

"Draw clearly states your intention not to fight on. "

Most games that end in a draw end that way because the game cannot progress. The most typical situation is that one player is on the verge of winning and all the other powers have played "stop the leader". The other version you see where two sets of alliances (often two versus two) reach an impasse. The only way to break the deadlock would be for one player to betray their alliance. But the reason they won't is that they then risk being taken out by their opponent if they renege on the deal they made (such as a three-way) and shoot for a two-way.

The key term with regards to draws "stalemate line".

http://www.diplomacy-archive.com/resources/strategy/stalemate.htm

There are are mechanical dead-locks where there is only one narrow passage for units to go through. There are logical dead-locks where you described in your previous post. But both of those kinds can be overcome with the power of the mind.

You stubbornly refuse to draw, once side ill give up. In the East, I have heard of a story, some family stubbornly carried out the grudge for 3 generations. The grandson would carry on the fight and vengeance in the honor of his grandfather.

In the West, you know about Hannibal story right? His father made him to swear an oath to revenge on Rome.

"But both of those kinds can be overcome with the power of the mind."

If you are Jedi Knight and you are particularly strong with the force this might be true ;)

But if you a regular person and a competent diplomacy player playing against other competent diplomacy players you will reach deadlocked situations. Play a few more games and you will realize this is true.

... simply holding on with a deadlock situation for years and years until other players give up is not considered an acceptable way to play this game. Mods can intervene and declare a draw if one player seems to be unreasonable in accepting that a game has run its course.

Have you heard of two Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender. They continued to wage war in the Philippine jungles for more than 40 years until Japan found their commanding officers then flew those officers (now in their 70 year old) to give the last, direct command to stop fighting, to surrender?

Those two soldiers still maintained their riffles in operational readiness!!!

I read a couple thousand books so I do know a lot of fantastic, epic tales. But you guys hate me here, so I am going to migrate to Vdip and share my stories there. Once I wrap up my games here, I will be gone for good.

They would get a warning from the mods if they played on webdiplomacy. Holding out until the other players die of old age is against the site rules.

I don't have a problem with you MeepMeep. I find you quite entertaining.

In my mind a survive is an embarrassing outcome, by far the worst possible.