Want to try a great online web game...

[Skandranon]

Hello, after reading this thread I became somewhat interested in Diplomacy. I started looking up a few things on google until low and behold, I came across the instruction manual. So before I take a big jump into the land of Diplomacy I was wondering what do you suggest for the (extremely) new player? Soak up as much as possible, reading topics like this and then play - or perhaps the play as much as possible approach?

Absolutely get into some games and start playing. Nothing teaches like experience. My advice is to get into some games and start losing. Not on purpose, but you probably will :) Everyone loses a lot starting out. I had an appalling record for my first thirty or so games. I lost them all (that's not uncommon, wins are rare) but eighteen or nineteen were eliminations, which aren't that common either.

One of the best things to do is to keep your diplomatic correspondence, in e-mail games. You can learn a lot by reading what you said and what they said. Hindsight is 20/20, and keeping correspondence can help you learn what to say and learn when people are probably lying to you.

There's a fairly small list of newbie mistakes that everyone can describe, but no one notices the flaws in their own game until they've suffered from their mistakes. Two of the most important are not stabbing enough, and stabbing too much, and you really don't know what's too much until you've done too much, and you can't really describe what's not enough until it's happened to you. It's all experience. The more and the sooner, the better :)

A good place to check for an e-mail game is www.diplom.org - click e-mail Diplomacy and it'll get you started right away.

The (nc) and (sc) notations refer to the north and south coasts. Three provinces have coasts: St. Petersburg, Spain, and Bulgaria (Bulgaria has east and south coasts). They're to prevent illogical fleet moves. For example, St.Petersburg borders the Barents Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia, but you can't order F BAR-StP, then F StP-GoB, since that would imply that the ships somehow made it over land from the north to the south. Likewise, a fleet in Norway can only go to the north coast of St.Petersburg; even though Norway borders StP, to be able to order it to the south coast would involve having the fleet sail through all of Scandinavia.

So whenever ordering a fleet to any one of those three provinces, the order specifies the coast with the notation (nc) (sc) or (ec) depending. Since most of the time you can only reach one coast at a time - only two moves offer a choice of coast: MAO-Spa, and Con-Bul - many judges accept orders like F Nwy-StP since they reason that the player wouldn't be ordering to the south coast. Don't count on it, though. Electronic judges are particularly finicky about coast specification.