lol

this is seriously like going to the UK and saying "Hey, guys! I found this beautiful tropical island called Bermuda and it's sooooo much better than here! We should all go there right now, it's awesome!"

Except in the case of Bermuda they would be absolutely right.

didn't we just have this conversation last week?

Don't know, I was in Bermuda.

Yes. Yes we did. But some n00bs like to think they have discovered the best thing since sliced bread when they find sliced bagels, not realizing the rest of the world knew about it long before and that sliced bagels are close relatives and friends of both fresh, unsliced bagels and sliced bread.

manganese pretty much won this thread. No point in any more discussions.

I love Bermuda and bagels, but neither could be as sweet or dear as this place

lol manganese +1

As a serious reply to the OP:

Many people, like myself, hate variants. They are, generally speaking, massively unbalanced, and since it is impossible to learn things like stalemates, common openings and their meanings, etc. for all the new maps. They make statistics difficult and are just generally a pain.

Not to mention, we have all of our games already recorded here, this site has a much larger user base and is much more stable.

Has anyone ever played Left Shift? Everyone starts on country to the left and has to survive long enough to take his/her home centers before losing the ones he starts on. Example: Austria starts in France.

I play Left Shift occasionally against an AI program I have on my computer. It's a really interesting variant... I pity England though, starting as Russia ._.

What Diplomacy AI do you play?

"...hate variants. They are, generally speaking, massively unbalanced, and since it is impossible to learn things like stalemates, common openings and their meanings, etc. for all the new maps. They make statistics difficult and are just generally a pain.
"

even the classic map is unbalanced, though you can counteract this lack of balance with diplomacy - i do recognise that knowing what the balance is (like knowing italy is weak and should work with austria) makes a massive difference to this diplomacy... i consider this the meta-environment - ie the information which is available to the 'average' player.

working out most of these things for a few select maps is fun in and of itself.

also vdip does a lot for stats: http://vdiplomacy.net/stats.php?variantID=0&variantID=1
:)

@Dejan: http://sites.google.com/site/diplomacyai/QuickStart

I like the variants because playing classic non-stop gets a bit repetitive. I think a lot of the variants there are fairly balanced, although possibly playing the world diplomacy IX variant here will have put some people off, as that's definitely not balanced.

@orathaic: While true that the classic map is imbalanced, it's not unplayable by any means, whereas some variants certainly are. And the information helps players conduct the diplomacy that I feel is necessary to balance the game; although I admit this thought is unfalsifiable, I do think that if hypothetically every player were equally diplomatically talented and had the same information, the game played would be perfectly balanced. And that is what really matters when it comes to balance; any imbalances in the game result not from imperfect position but from imperfect play, which is how any competition is supposed to be.

my point was not that the meta-environment is a problem, but that it is different for new variants, and that learning what the balance/stalemates lines of a new variant is/are can be an interesting task which you only really get to do once when you're learning the classic map...

if every player is new to a given variant then they all start on equal footing, and their learning speed or imagination becomes more important and there diplomacy and ability to explain/convince others of anything they figure out also challenges them in a different way.

i'm not saying it is better or worse, some people clearly don't like it, but it is different.

... i also now want to create a variable variant which is different everytime you play!

The Modern Diplomacy II map is pretty balanced, with only France and Russia being the Austria and Italy of it. And I agree with Eden. Part of the fun is learning the map and how to play it. While some of them are horribly imbalanced, none are really *impossible*

*agree with Orathaic. I need to read who posts better

you know - I'd love to see a stats page over here...

There have been a few posts like this lately. It's like about a year ago when people from playdiplomacy would come over and post threads like this to try and poach players from here. Only it makes less sense because playdip has a membership fee, so recruiting people means making money. VDip does not. Odd.

Poach? I don't see why it would be impossible to play at multiple sites. Or is there some rule that you only get to like one?

Personally I don't enjoy Playdip, since the order system is too easy to foul up. And the pay thing of course.

Webdip has a very nice interface and extemely good notification and shoutbox system. Very nice.

Dipbounced has a superior replacement system for players that risk going NMR and better maps than Webdip, but a godawful interface.

So they all have their strenghts and weaknesses, I guess. I don't see why one would have to abandon one for another.

@ora, Fischer random variant? Take the Classic Map, assign SCs "neighbors", i.e., Munich is a neighbor to Kiel, Berlin, Paris, Belgium, Holland, Trieste, Venice, and Vienna, i.e., any SC two moves away that doesn't pass through another SC, and then everyone gets three SCs that are neighbors to at least one of their other SCs? I think it'd be fun, if someone could do it. Anyone have a better idea of how VDip's programs work? Would that be possible? You could definitely do it on a board, but it'd be nice to have it computer randomized...

Damnit ora, now I really want this variant, too!

http://www.vdiplomacy.com/forum.php?threadID=8957 According to Oli, it's doable.

@Stukus - the neighbourhood graph is already stored in the database, you'd just need to rewrite the creation script. This shouldn't be too hard to do, although you'd have to do some experimenting to work out what was the most reasonable way to choose the nucleation points for these home clusters - I'd think randomly might work, as long as you checked for 'collision' each time you pick a new cluster, but this might lead to a very inefficient algorithm making the first assignments.

Interesting computational problem: How many nations would you have to fix (and where) to make an impossible map. Eg if you'd placed the first 7 nations as they currently sit on the standard map you could add a Scandanavia & Balkan nation before you'd be 'full'. However, moving "italy" to Rome-Venice-Trieste and Turkey to Bul-con-Ank you would reduce the number of possible nations by 1.

randomly with a weighting.

if you look at the classic map you can work out the average number of centers each territory is beside, and the average number of territories connecting to each territory.

then you can work out the normal variation from those averages and use this to generate a random map, one where this statistical information is the same...

i'm not sure about stale-mate lines, or how easy it is to see the... and also how to generate a map image for each possible territory combination, though i think i can handle this without too much trouble, the problem is how do you get vdip to cache the image file when each game has it's own map.

Sorry, should have clarified. I was thinking about Stukus' implied game, where the nations are placed randomly. Many choices of initial centres would be fine, since the others would fit in around them, but not all. (I can see a setup that'll only allow for 6)

@figles: I imagine that it you assigned all the "doubles" first and all the "singles" second, you would only have to do the whole process one time. Is that not true?

Ah, I'd misread the suggestion.
Well, I'd suggest an even 'nicer' option. I had assumed the nations must be 3 nations that are all neighbouring by land only moves. If you do this then it is not always possible if the first few are completely randomly placed.

However, more fun is requiring all 3 to be neighbours, but allowing fleet moves (so London&Belgium border) - in which case I don't think you will always be able to 'fit in' 7 nations.

Or use the 1897 start with 1 random starting territory for everybody...

@figle, that's how I pictured it. You won't always be able to fit in 7, but I believe you'll be able to do it most of the time.

ora, I'm going to pull the discussion out into a new thread, but I do like the idea of throwing around a 'variable variant' idea, and think there's a lot that can be said about it.

@Stukus - What, by land alone?
As I say, allowing the two moves to include a sea passage I wasn't able to construct a counter example, and its pretty rare even just on land.