Messages - vDiplomacy

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19 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1901: hey, took me a while, but i found the game.. i see that i am germany, very fitting.. so, what in the world am i supposed to do now??
19 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1901: Sorry, hope it wasn't too difficult. You should have just been able to click the link I sent. Anywho, glad you found it! I'll spout off a bunch of stuff here so feel free to skim, ignore, read thoroughly, and/or ask as many questions as you need. So first thing to note when you join a game is victory conditions. For every game variant on this site the victory conditions vary. You'll want to check these till you become familiar with a variant. More on this in a bit. I'll cover a couple things first to orient you to where information is located. Just below the menu and above the game name and phase information is the list of games you have messages from and or need to submit orders for. Right now you should have just this one game, and when you are at this page, you'll see nothing. You'll see the tab for this game at the home page however. And if you click the 'mark as unread/reply later' button below on the right and go back to the home page, you'll see both the message indicator (little envelope to the right of the game name on the tab) and the double exclamation mark that means you have moves to issue. A grey check indicates you have saved orders but haven't marked them final, and a green check box (only displayed if you also have a message waiting in that game) indicates you have marked your orders final and ready for the next phase. Immediately under the game name above (the lock next to the game name indicates it's a private, password protected game) it tells you how many D-points are available to win on this game, basically the total amount that everyone bet (don't worry, till you have more than 100, your D-points always reset back to 100 if you lose a game, unless of course you abandon the game -- more about that later, so you'll always be able to play/join new games, just not high stakes games, but there are very few high stakes games on this site). Next to that it tells you the phase of the game we are in. The classic game and all it's variants start in the Spring of 1901. Nearly every variant has a two season year with spring moves and fall moves followed by an build phase. If any units need to retreat, extra phases are added immediately after spring and fall move phases as appropriate. The face to face version of the game separates the diplomacy phase from the moves phase, but online, with a 2 day phase, the diplomacy and issuing orders for moves phases can occur simultaneously. This game you'll have little diplomacy to write to your neighbors (1v1, not much to coordinate with potential allies against potential enemies there). Diplomacy gets done in these chat boxes at the top with all the tabs at the top indicating which country you are talking to. We are in the global tab on this, but if the other five nations on this map were present, you'd want to make sure you were in the chat box for Italy before talking to me, rather than everyone see what you are saying on global chat. Next, to the right it tells you how much time is left in the phase (and approximately when the phase will progress), as well as how long the phases are. For this game (and the one we hope to start soon with everyone) there are 2 days for spring moves phase, 2 days for any retreats, 2 days for autumn moves phase, 2 more days for any retreats, and then 2 days for builds, so potentially as many as 8 days for a year. The game can move faster than that if all players get their orders in ahead of time. (more on that later). Pay attention to how much time is left on the phase, and I recommend saving preliminary orders (even if you have diplomacy that you need to conduct still) just to make sure you don't accidentally miss a phase deadline (known as an NMR, meaning the sever had no moves received from that player). Two NMR's in a row results in your country going into CD (civil disorder, no government!), and allows any player on the site who wishes (if it's not a password protected game) to fill your place and take over your country. If either happens your RR (reliability rating) takes a hit and you lose any points you had bet on the game if it was a CD. People often narrow games to only allow reliable players to join, and the server limits the number of games you can join if your RR is too low, but you can work to restore your RR by joining games already in progress that have had other players CD. Better just not to NMR or CD. So back to those victory conditions I started talking about! The variant we are playing is listed immediately below the amount you bet. There is a link there that will take you to the variant description page. The important thing here is the item that says: "SCs required for solo win: 18 (of 34)" SCs stands for supply centers, and these are the territories with the little city dots on them. Other things to note may be spelled out by the variant designer/implementer in a special notes section. For instance http://vdiplomacy.com/variants.php?variantID=57 has three other changes, neutral armies, transform options (fleet to army and army to fleet), and build anywhere (as opposed to building in home centers only like this one, which I'll cover later). K, so now that you know you need 18 centers to win and that there are 34 centers, you would start looking at how to get the centers you want to win (stalemate lines play a role here, but again that is something you'll pick up along the way.. way too hard to teach now), and which players you need to have as friends and which as enemies to make this happen. This takes some time to get a feel for, so for now, just plan which centers you want to control by year's end, and who you want to ally with or fight as an enemy. Many players do this by either asking other players about common neighbor and finding out if they want to join them in a double team assault or something, or just expanding peaceably until they encounter someone who attacks them or lies to them and then make that player there enemy and find allies to attack them as well. This is where all the fun lies as you get to try your own strategies. Anyways, I digress from teaching mechanics of the site. Note the two other things next to the variant link where you found the victory conditions. WTA means this is a winner take all game (vs PPSC, points per supply center). You either win all the points or get nothing for surviving. PPSC is a less cuthroat option that allows someone who survived but did really well otherwise to still win some points. It's a variant on the original F2F game which only allowed a win if someone got to 18 centers (called a solo). There were no joint wins, only draws which could consist of anywhere from 2 to all players in the game, and were considered failures to win. Many players play for draws instead of solos and that bugs some people on this site, but I won't drag you into those politics. It also says public press, this is a game variant type (that all 1v1's default to). Public press means there is no private chat between players (Full press) only global chat that everyone can read. Since it's just the two of us, it's basically the same thing. Gunboat is the third type, which is no press (diplomacy/chat) whatsoever. Next comes a blue bar showing your progress towards the VC's, it currently shows that you have a ways to go to win. There may be a green or red bar on the end of the blue bar at various times indicating you have builds available or disbands that you must make. More on this later. Below that it shows which country you are, a double !! that shows you have no orders submitted, and something about whether you have read or unread messages. On the right it shows how much you bet on the game, how much your current nation is worth in a draw (or if the game ended right now and the leader in SC's got the win). It also shows how many supply centers you have, and how many units you have. Next comes a bar that indicates the relative power balance between the countries, (you are brown, I am green, and right now we are evenly balanced). Below that is the tabs for communicating to various nations, there is a global tab, and notes tab for you to write yourself notes that no one else can see. It also lists the players so that you know who is driving which country (only in non-anonymous games like this one, anonymous games won't show you who is driving the country until the game ends). Below that is the chat history, and the message box which you've already found. Again make sure in other games you are chatting to the right country and not global! Then comes the map!!
19 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1901: You have 2 unit types: grey fleets and green armies Armies can move only on land (tan territories) while fleets can only move on ocean (blue) and coastal territories. One exception to armies moving on land is the convoy (armies traveling across ocean spaces with the help of a fleet), and I'll make sure to have you practice one. Some territories are unnamed (iceland) or black (switzerland) and aren't playable territories. Only named territories are playable and the ones you want to control most are the SC's. The names on the map are given in a mix of full and partial names, and I'll be listing them hopefully by full name and the accepted standard abbreviations from the classic game each time I refer to a territory. For instance Norway (NWY), Norwegian Sea (NWG), North Sea (NTH), and North Atlantic Ocean (NAO) are territories where just taking the first 3 letters of the names would cause some major confusion and the abbreviation you choose makes a difference. You can always type the full name out, but I've gotten to the point where I use the standard abbreviations on the classic map. Other variants don't have standard abbreviations so you'll end up making them up as you go (like the rest of us do!). Two last notes, several territories have have both a north coat and a south coast (this only affects fleets) and two territories have canals, Kiel (KIE) and Constantinople (CON). The coasts work as follows. A fleet in Mid-Atlantic Ocean (MAO) can move to either Spain south coast, SPA (sc) or Spain north coast, SPA (nc) once on SPA (nc) the fleet's move options would be to Portugal (POR), Gascony (GAS) or MAO. It couldn't move to Western Mediterranean (WMd) or Gulf of Lyon (GoL) unless it was in SPA (sc). Canals are the opposite. KIE and CON function for fleets as if they were ocean territories. A fleet in KIE can move to either Heligoland Bight (HEL) or Baltic Sea (BAL) because of the canal. There is no east coast or west coast for KIE. There are several map functions listed below the map. The arrows allow you to move back and forth between various turns to see the history, one button toggles the movement lines, another brings up the full size map that you can zoom in on, and the last one in the row will show you your saved orders as the server will process them (Learn to use this one! it will keep you from making accidental tactical mistakes!) Ignore the next two buttons about dropdown orderinterface and interactivemap orderinterface. You can play with this if you want but I'd make sure you know how to do drop down order interface stuff first as all variants use that. The other is a new feature not available on every map.
19 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1901: So on to issuing orders: You can only issue one order per unit per phase. The drop down boxes indicate the 4 different types of orders: Move, Support hold, support move, and convoy. For now you only care about moves (as you want to expand quickly and gain centers). You only gain centers in a fall turn, so just passing over them in a spring turn does nothing for you. If you are there in the fall, they become yours and you'll be able to use them for builds (if your home centers, of Kiel (KIE), Berlin (BER), and Munich (MUN) are free). So for instance, your Army (A) MUN can move to Bohemia (BOH) in the spring, and then to Vienna (VIE) in the Fall. If I don't bounce you out with my own moves of A VEN - TRI (trieste) in the spring and then TRI -VIE in the fall, then VIE would be yours. So you can probably see now that there are a number of centers you have an ability to reach by the fall from MUN. If you want to try things out on your own, I'll let you come up with moves and then help you analyze them afterwards. One last thing, you can see that this spring, we both would have the ability to move to Tyrolia (TYL), but who would get it? Well it depends. Since we both would be moving just the one unit (with no other units adjacent to TYL to provide support, and no units adjacent to each other's units to cut support both of which I will make sure we practice in future turns), then it will result in a 'bounce' (if we both move there), meaning our units remain in MUN and VEN at the end of spring, but we both managed to keep the other out of TYL. So you should now be able to pick your moves based on all this. You can pull drop down boxes to see order options and territory options (you'll only need moves this first phase, ignore, convoy, and supports for now). And then hit save when you are done. Remember that preview button? (just below the map, farthest on the right). Click that one and that will show you your intended moves. If it shows two red arrows moving to the same space, you will end up with a self bounce (same as the bounce you and I might have in TYL if we both moved there). If you haven't seen this in the rules yet or I haven't mentioned it, only one unit can occupy a space at a time (barring a dislodge, and you can't self dislodge), so keep that in mind as well. One last tip. Units advancing in pairs side by side can support each other, where as units that aren't adjacent to territories can't easily help each other out without additional movement. Also bounces can chain. If we both moved to TYL and you moved BER to MUN following that unit and I moved ROM to VEN following that unit, then all 4 units would bounce (BER can't enter MUN because of 2 rules, no self disldoging, and both units are a strength of one, and the same goes for ROM and VEN). So keep that in mind when moving units as well. If you moved KIE-DEN and BER- KIE the move would succeed because no one can bounce F KIE in DEN. Hope all this helps some! Feel free to ask any questions you want, this is a tutorial so I will give any advice and answer any question. I'll talk about some of the features below the order interface later, this was probably more than enough! (p.s) Scroll the box above all the way to the top to see everything I wrote!! If the anything disappears off the chat box (for instance you can't see your original message to me or something, you can click the "messages" link near the very bottom of the page and that will take you to the message archive to show all the messages in a game.
19 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1901: scratch the extra 'the' before 'anything' in that last paragraph.
19 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1901: Thanks for all the help. I do have one fundamental question: say I wanted to move from Kiel to Denmark, would I still control Kiel between the move and the build phase?
20 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1901: Yes once you hold an SC for the fall (and it is in your color) it is yours. Unless I take it from you of course!
20 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1901: I will ready up in case you want to move things along faster.
20 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1901: ok, i pushed ready this morning. so my plan is to move into new supply centers by the fall with each of my units. tell me, how did i do?
21 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1901: ok, i pushed ready this morning. so my plan is to move into new supply centers by the fall with each of my units. tell me, how did i do?
21 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1901: So, here's the anaylsis. If you can manage to gain 3 centers you are doing well. If you can do it without upsetting your neighbors or getting people worried that you are too large (on classic map a 6 SC germany sometimes suffers from early leader syndrome), you have done better. If you can gain SC's farther from home, then your later built units can fill in the gaps on the way. There are only two things I would have maybe done slightly differently. The first is put Berlin (BER) in Silesia (SIL) instead of Prussia (PRU) so that you would have had a choice of which of Burgandy (BUR) or SIL you could use to defend MUN if I moved to TYL. Since I didn't move to TYL, no issue there. Just keep in mind that you can use forward positioning of your units to change how someone else moves (I could have given up getting 3 builds to put pressure on MUN making you choose between losing it and gaining a center). The other move I would have made is KIE to Holland (HOL). Come fall, your fleet would have been able to take Belgium (BEL) and be only 2 turns from the Mid-Atlantic Ocean (MAO), and better able to keep any of my fleets from getting through into the northern seas. Again, not a big deal, just thinking about forward positioning of units to change what the other player intends to use his forces for.
21 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1901: those are good pointers, thanks.. i thought about moving Kiel to Holland, but i want Holland as a SC, and i thought that the build phase was after or during the fall turn (i'm still not clear on this by the way). since i still have no idea what i'm doing, i can't possibly know what you're doing, so i definitely was not thinking about the northern seas as a threat. but, Aaron did mention to me that Belgium is one of those strategic territories between France/Germany/England, but it was after i already put in the orders. so help me understand, for example, you are in Trieste right now with one of your armies, does that become your SC or no? that part of the game is definitely eluding me at the moment... and, do i want to move toward you or expand away? i am just trying to get a feel for what the goal for the first couple of years should be...
22 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1901: Build phase is after the fall turn. (and holland can be picked up by a later build in KIE or MUN btw, which six SC's you have at the end of 1901 in the build phase, sometimes called winter phase, though not on this site, doesn't really matter. Contiguous control is of no importance in this game). Trieste (my being there at the end of the spring turn) means nothing right now. You'll see what I'm up to in regards to Trieste after this fall turn and it should become clear. Unit location after the fall turn determines whether you gain control of the center. You do not have to be there for spring turn. As for strategy, you want to prevent me from getting to 18 centers before you, and make sure you get to 18 centers before I do. Expanding some towards me and some away from me is a good strategy. Basically if you can tie down multiple units of mine with one two of yours or make me keep one of my units sitting on a home center so I can't build, that helps you out. TYL/PIE will be one of those places, MAO/SPA will be another, and whoever gets to Sevastopol (SEV) will be yet a third location. If you have to guard both Berlin and Munich by keeping units on them, then you can only build in KIE. If you have to use a unit in KIE to support hold MUN or BER while the other is occupied as well then it is impossible (sorta, I'll explain more on that later) for you to build, thus BOH/SIL/WAR are highly important for you to keep me out of. Just some pointers on initial strategy. The point of this tutorial is to understand the game mechanics mostly, and enough of the strategy to be able to plan appropriately. I'm not moving in an overly aggressive manner this game to give us time for you to learn the mechanics first. Keep the questions coming!
22 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1901: ok, i think i'm starting to understand this.. so, now it is the build phase, and i definitely want to build all three of my options, right? in future years, do i also get options to build in whatever SC's i have at that time, or do i still only get the option to build within the Germany borders? in other words, do i always just get 3 builds, or would it grow to 6, 9, 12 (or whatever) and so on?
23 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1901: Yes you want to build all three (there are times when you might want to defer a build, such as when building might make an ally uneasy or something, but they are rare). This variant of the classic game is based on the original rules where you can only build in home centers (KIE, BER, MUN for you, VEN, ROM, NAP for me). There are variants that allow you to build anywhere, but they take some of the tactics out of the game imo. So 3 builds is the most you can have at a time on this map.
23 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1901: Thus gaining 5 new centers in a turn doesn't always benefit you if you could use 2 of those units to cause me hardship.
23 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1901: (unless of course you are at 13 centers and gaining 5 gives you the win!!)
24 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1902: ok, so now that we've been through one year, what do we need to practice now? i think you said we should practice a convoy, which i'm thinking about doing to get an army over to England or somewhere (maybe Spain?). it will probably have to be in a few turns.. what do you suggest?
24 Jan 14 UTC	Spring, 1902: Combat, and what happens with supports and support holds and how to tell what you need where to set up a defensive line or break a line yourself. I mentioned territories that you don't want me in, and I'm going to be focusing on two efforts in the next few turns. 1. getting to territories like Tyrolia (TYL), Bohemia (BOH), Silesia (SIL), and Galicia (GAL) that mentioned that you wouldn't want me in. 2. expanding with other units to keep building at the same time. You should work on similar goals such as either keeping me out of TYL/BOH/GAL and on getting to places that would make me uncomfortable like Marseilles (MAR) and Piedmont (PIE), in addition to TYL/BOH/GAL, (and MAO/SPA are another pair), as well as being able to build at least 2 if not 3 units per year. As for the convoy, don't worry about that much yet. Support moves and support holds are much more important concepts.
26 Jan 14 UTC	Autumn, 1902: Ok, so, a explanation is in order now. I moved VEN - TYL and ordered VIE s VEN - TYL (the yellow line that shows up indicating the support move order for Vienna to assist Venice to Tyrolia). That means that had you move MUN - TYL, you would have failed to move to TYL, but instead of VEN also failing to move to TYL (creating the bounce I've described before) I would still have taken TYL. This is the value of support move orders as they make your moving unit stronger. In this case I had a strength of 2 for the move to TYL while you would have had a strength of only 1. Does that make sense? Moving on to some strategy stuff now. We each have several choices as far as what to do with our 3 units on the front between us, and we also both need to think about how many SC's we are getting elsewhere. I could use TYL to try for MUN or I could use VIE or TYL to support the other to BOH. I could also support VIE - GAL (Galicia) using BUD (Budapest), but it probably wouldn't make sense for me to move BUD to GAL since that means I wouldn't gain BUD in the fall for builds. There are other moves I can make too, but we'll start with this for now. You can move one (or both) of SIL/BOH to MUN to try to keep me out. Note that if you move one to MUN and I don't move to MUN myself then you wind up with that unit in MUN covering one of your build centers and you'd only be able to build 2 units (not always a bad thing, but you can see how my being in TYL makes that difficult for you to both grow and defend your centers right?) Turns out there is a move that can ensure you keep MUN and keep it open for a build (if I don't get sneaky, but more on that later). If you move both BOH and SIL to MUN, you will bounce yourself and I would be unable to move to MUN because all the units moving there would have a strength of 1. Problem solved, you defend MUN and keep it open for a build. There is one catch, and that is that if I think you might self bounce in MUN, I can issue a support order for TYL to have MY unit help one of YOUR units to MUN despite your wish to self bounce. Sneaky huh? That covers your options for defending MUN pretty much. The other option you have is whether to try for VIE. If I move TYL to MUN, that means I'm not using it to help defend VIE, and BOH/GAL could set up a supported attack on VIE. Problem is I do have BUD still which can support my hold in VIE to give VIE a strength of 2 holding in place (which would cancel out your strength of 2 attacking VIE, and VIE would remain mine). However, with your move to GAL, I might not want to use BUD to hold VIE if I think you might move GAL to RUM (Rumania) to try to flank my advance in the Balkans and cut me off. So I might try to use BUD to bounce your unit there (note you could get sneaky and move GAL - BUD and slip into that center if you thought I would try to bounce you in RUM). This doesn't come close to covering all the combinations and possible moves that can be made in the region, but I hope it helps give you an idea of what to think about when planning your move. Feel free of course to ask any questions you want, and good luck!