Those 2 SCs won't be in any way equal, one will be strategically more important so you can always take the safer route and cover that one (in classic Diplomacy that is, symmetric variants can induce moments when it's really mostly based on luck). Also, you can use the information you gathered during the game (move patterns, passive×aggressive) to outguess your opponent. Plus, there are times when I am exactly in this position and still know there's no need to cover either SC since my opponent has bigger issue to handle than gaining one more SC.

Diplomacy is full of luck. When it comes down to it your fate might as well be decided by the throw of a die. A die you can tamper with before hand, maybe, but you still need the Fates on your side.

It's not luck, it's ability to read your opponents' intentions. If you fail, it wasn't poor luck, you were simply outguessed.

Poker has more luck than diplomacy and even poker is a strategic game when played against other players and not as a house odds table game.

@ SacredDigits

An interesting idea. I would be fascinated to see you outguess my lucky coin if we end up in a 50/50 situation in a game some time. No doubt you will claim that luck played no part if you win the contest, but should you lose will you admit to defeat in a battle of wits against an inanimate metal object?

Out of interest, does anyone else use a coin toss every now and then to keep their moves unpredictable?

If I decide what my moves are going to be by smashing my head against my keyboard, does that introduce an element of luck into Diplomacy?

The only part luck plays in diplomacy is in determining which country you start as, and whether your opponents are better or worse than you at the game.

I'm with Octavious on this. I occasionally use random activities like a coin toss to make decisions and keep myself a little less predictable.

That only introduces randomness into your decision-making process, not the game itself.

At what point does gullibility and irrationality finally just become randomness, is what I think we're getting at here.

It actually does add an element of luck. Let us consider the gunboat case because it's less complicated. If a group of 7 players were to play an entire game and only make their decisions by random mechanisms, then I hope you agree that the entire game would be given to chance. Then, a decision-making process based solely on rational thought can be called the most purely non-chance based decision-making process and hence, most rational game. So, it follows that a method between those two, as Octavious and I suggest, is not fully random or completely rational. Hence, it is more random then a purely rational decision-making process and actually does introduce some randomness into the game.

Basically, since the actual game and its result is based on peoples' actions and decision-making process, an element of chance in the decision-making process does indeed introduce chance into the entire game.

Sorry D33, troll fail, people aren't that pissed that there actually is something resembling luck in diplomacy.

Some of the many examples of luck in Diplomacy, not including the example already mentioned by Imp Dux

1) Your opponent's had a really bad day at work and enters his moves in a state of extreme pissed offness leading to an unfortunate stabbing incident.

2) Your ally accidently (genuine accidents DO happen) posts a private message to you in global with hilarious consequences.

3) Your two nearest neighbours just happen to live in the same time zone on the opposite side of the world to you, making it far easier to communicate with each other than to you.

4) Your glorious ally goes on holiday and his sitter turns out to be a complete arsehead from the planet nob.

5) You catch a cold/flu and enter most of a week's moves under the influence of medicinal whisky.

6) It's St Andrew's Day, your ally is Scottish, and his only appearence in the current phase is 5 minutes before the deadline when he orders all of his units to take part in a celebration drunken dance manouver.

Luck plays a huge part, as in Diplomacy, as in life.

Time zones are a huge issue, especially if your phase is less than 36 hours. I am much more likely to ally with someone if they are the first to talk to me, or if we're both on right at the start. It just tells me who is easiest to talk with.

I think the most obvious effect of luck is simply whether or not our opponents go after us or not. We like to think that it is our "diplomacy" that determines who goes where but, if we were honest, we would admit that in our own decision-making it is less often our opponents' "diplomacy" that leads to strategic decisions and more often our whims of the moment.

or maybe that's just me... 'cause I'm a donk.

Well at least SuperSteve admits he's a donk. :-)

But seriously, I find that the opening moves (who antagonizes who) of Spring and even Foll 01 play a huge roll in the game. In gunboat, that is almost pure luck unless it is non-anon, then it is luck plus experience. In regular, well, the quicker/better diplomat might get a better opening, but there is still an aspect of luck.

Once, howver, things are in motion, they tend to stay that way. As goes physics, so goes diplomacy.

I know I haven't played any games here yet, but to qualify my opinion, I have played a fair amount of diplomacy face to face and some on other sites. Please don't mark off my point as completely irrelevant because of it.

I find that in most of the "coin flip" scenarios, there is at least some difference between the two modes of attack. An obvious case that shows up a fair amount is that Germany has an army in Berlin and wants to attack Russia. Russia has an army in Warsaw and would like to stop Germany from making any advances. Does Germany go for Prussia or Silesia? What about Russia, how should he or she defend? Is one choice better than the other?

The thing is, there IS a difference between Prussia and Silesia. An army in Silesia is better placed, more central, and has access to more regions. An army in Prussia can then move to Livonia, if Germany wants to do that. Prussia can be affected by fleets in the Baltic Sea, etc. Many of these "coin flip" scenarios are like this. While both spaces would be equally nice for attacking Warsaw, the choice Germany makes is either going to be the better, stronger, Silesia route or the more "reverse-psychology" Prussia route, and if you know your opponent, you know which move they are more likely to make. So even in this case, luck does not play a role. There is guessing, but that’s not the same as luck.

If you choose to flip a coin, or even if someone else does, you or he is introducing luck into the game. The luck there is exogenous, and is not inherent in the actual game..

@ Rascal

Yes, if you're good, have been playing well and feel you have begun to understand your opponent (which is damned near impossible in the first few turns, but certainly doable as the game progresses) you can indeed get an idea of what move he is more likely to make. But unless you're playing a complete idiot your educated guess is still far from certain. At best you a rolling loaded dice and you will be right more often than you're wrong, but you're still rolling dice and you still need luck on your side.

In rock-paper-scissors, the only evolutionarily stable strategy (which is to say, the only one that can't be beaten by an experienced opponent) is to throw each throw with equal probability. Whether this element of chance is "in the game" or not is up to you, and I don't know how similar RPS is to Diplomacy.

actually, in rock, paper, scissors the correct move is to start with rock. Most people choose scissors. Irrelevant to the topic, but interesting.

People in this thread are implying that a coin toss relies on chance. This is wrong. It relies on the force exerted on the coin, where it was exerted, how far the coin has to fall, what surface texture it is falling on, the density of the air, the mass of the coin, the shape of the coin, the size of the coin, the width of the coin, etc. There's lot of variables, and most will change every time you flip that coin, and no person on earth is capable of measuring and calculating the exact result. But that doesn't mean that it's up to chance because you can't possibly hope to work it out.

Same goes for diplomacy. If you knew everything about a person down to what they ate, the composition of their brain, the number of brain cells they have and their individual function, all of their nervous impulses, etc. Essentially absolutely everything about a person, including things they don't even know, you could predict everything they did up until the point they interact with something outside of your prediction.

If you had all the data of every single sub-atomic particle and light ray, and were capable of processing it faster than the universe can, you could predict everything that happens in the universe with 100% certainty, and that includes what moves your opponent will make in a game of diplomacy.

Nothing relies on chance, ever. That said, probability is a good thing to know when you're not capable of knowing everything.

Oh, and "luck" is simply a person's ability to get things right when they don't have any knowledge as to why or how they got it right.

Deterministic universe much, Shocker? Quantum Mechanics disagrees. There is inherent uncertainty in the universe.

Yup, even if you knew everything about past and present of everything, you couldn't predict a whole bunch of stuff at 100%.

And to the topic of real-life coin toss... it's not that difficult to master this skill and get all heads. That's why I preffer a D20 roll when a coin toss decision is necessary ;)

I used to come here to play games.

Yeah shocktrooper.... everything you said, especially about light and atoms, contradicts QM.
There are of course those who hold that QM is deterministic on some lower level, but there is no evidence for that, and indeed, the most obviously appealing of such theories have been disproven over the years.